The Dean Birmingham

The Dean Birmingham is a planned 150-room boutique hotel inside the city's derelict Grade II*-listed Methodist Central Hall, brought forward by the Irish hospitality group behind The Dean hotels in Dublin, Cork and Galway. It would be a genuinely new hotel use for a century-old building that has stood empty since its nightclub days ended in 2002 — but years after planning permission was granted, construction has yet to visibly start and no opening date has been confirmed.

The place

The Dean Birmingham is planned inside the Grade II*-listed Methodist Central Hall on Corporation Street, right in Birmingham's city centre — a red-brick and terracotta Gothic Revival landmark built in 1904 that later spent the 1990s as the Que Club nightclub before standing vacant since 2002.

The concept

Press Up Hospitality, the Irish group behind The Dean hotels in Dublin, Cork and Galway and a newer property in Berlin, secured planning permission in 2022 to turn the derelict hall into the brand's first UK hotel outside Ireland. TODD Architects' scheme keeps the building's original terracotta detailing and cavernous scale intact while inserting roughly 150 rooms, eight separate bars and restaurants, a members'-club-style cocktail lounge, two outdoor terraces and a rooftop restaurant, with the hall's 1,500-seat former auditorium reimagined as an event and performance space. On paper it's one of the more ambitious adaptive-reuse hotel projects in the Midlands. In practice, progress has been slow: more than three years after planning permission was granted, the building's own architects still list the project as being at the 'planning submitted' stage, and both the Victorian Society and Historic England were still flagging the hall as an at-risk heritage building as recently as 2025. No construction start or opening date has been confirmed.

Dining & wellness

The scheme calls for eight bars and dining spaces across the ground and basement floors, a members'-style cocktail lounge, and a flagship rooftop restaurant with city views, plus a 1,500-seat former auditorium converted into an event venue — but with construction not yet visibly under way, none of this can be confirmed as delivered. Details to be confirmed.