The UK's first TGI Fridays, on Hagley Road, falls into decay

The building on Hagley Road that housed the UK's very first TGI Fridays has been left to decay, two years after the restaurant closed.

Birmingham made restaurant history in 1986 when the American chain opened its first UK branch on the Hagley Road in Edgbaston. In its heyday, getting a table on a weekend was an achievement, and people travelled from miles around for the towering burgers, the American-style diner atmosphere and the famous flair bartending.

Graffiti, broken glass and boards

Today the building is covered in graffiti, with broken glass and boarded-up windows. Hints of its past are still visible. The sign reading "In here, it's always Friday" is still in place, and record sleeves and retro memorabilia remain on the wood panelling inside, including the restaurant's famous fake shark taking a bite out of a surfboard.

How it closed

The Hagley Road restaurant closed for good in October 2024. The UK business had gone into administration that September, and dozens of branches around the country shut as a result, while others were sold to new owners and kept trading.

Photographs taken inside after it closed showed a scene frozen in time, as though staff and diners had simply walked out in the middle of service.

A place for celebrations

For many people in Birmingham, the restaurant was the setting for birthday parties, first dates and long-awaited catch-ups. It helped bring a new style of casual American dining to Britain, and the chain went on to open dozens of restaurants across the country.

A changing high street

Casual dining chains have had a difficult few years. Rising costs for energy, food and staff, together with changes in how people eat out, have led to closures across the sector, and several well-known names have gone into administration or shrunk their estates.

Large standalone restaurant buildings like the one on Hagley Road can be hard to re-let, because they need a lot of work to adapt for a new use and are often in places that depend on car-borne customers. Empty buildings can quickly attract vandalism, which adds to the cost of bringing them back into use.

What next

No plans for the building's future have been made public. Hagley Road is one of the main routes into the city centre from the west, and several of the older office blocks along it have been converted to flats in recent years.

Any new use for the site would need planning permission from the council, and local people would be able to comment on any application. For now, the birthplace of the UK's "Friday feeling" sits empty, a reminder of how much the way the city eats out has changed in four decades.