Tourists are set to flock to Birmingham for the Commonwealth Games - but how much of the 'real' city will they see after its industrial-scale cover-up?

Get the latest news from the Commonwealth Games straight to your inbox

Oliver Cromwell is said to have inspired the phrase 'love me warts and all' when he instructed artist Sir Peter Lely to paint a true likeness of him. Today, when couples get married, the traditional wedding vows include the words 'For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health...'.

So should our brilliant city be going to such great lengths to present a whole new face to the world just for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games? Some of the changes to the cityscape are as inventive as they are dramatic,

But whichever way you see a simple glass of water - when it's either half full or, of course, half empty - here's our half-serious, half-light-hearted guide to how Birmingham is suddenly looking a great deal different to how we could have imagined it even just a year ago.

Read more:Artists complete work on epic Commonwealth Games murals in Birmingham's Victoria Square

The centre of town is currently becoming a riot of colour. Everywhere you look there are banners, bunting, flags and more advertising for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games - all this in the land of dull concrete and year-round grey skies until our recent record-breaking heatwave.

Even the planters in the central areas are being given a makeover in the year when the city's brilliant parks' team won the Gold Medal at the Chelsea Flower Show for an incredible ten years in a row. Just like the old days, the central barriers along roads including Bristol Road and the Middle Ring Road now seem to have more flowers in boxes on top of the reservation railings than there surely must be petals in all of Holland. You can see many more pictures related to this report in the photo story here:

Birmingham has been covered with giant banners for the Commonwealth Games

Community historian Professor Carl Chinn said: "I understand the need to promote the city and it's one thing to put up giant banners, but what has been done to showcase the contribution of the working classes to our great city?

"And why would we want to cover up Smallbrook Queensway when that is such a key part of Birmingham's post-war history?"

A similar fate has befallen the Victorian Macdonald Burlington Hotel on New Street, originally known as The Midland Hotel. Work to restore the frontage began last year before the Birmingham German Christmas Market was launched on November 4 and the scaffolding should have come down in May.

Alas, just like The Grand Hotel. which also took far longer to restore than originally envisaged, site owners Hortons' Estate Ltd has been met with unforeseen problems. And that means anyone staying in the hotel with a New Street facing bedroom during the Commonwealth Games will not be able to see out

The scaffolding is not now due to come down until September. Hortons told BirminghamLive: "To remove the scaffolding at this stage would be to expose a part restored façade which will not only create a poor impression but poses a continued health and safety risk."

Birmingham's flagship public space on Broad Street was opened in 1991 with block paving in a stunning Italianate design. Once the Library of Birmingham was opened in September, 2013, it was decided to remodel Centenary Square.

The cost ballooned by half to £16 million and work took a year longer than planned before it was officially opened in July, 2019. But just when you think it's our showpiece square, for the Commonwealth Games it has become home to a merchandising 'Megastore' which takes up half the width of the reflective pool designed to provide sensational photo opportunities for tourists.

Only four of the dancing water fountains have been switched off and council leader Cllr Ian Ward promises 'no heavy handed security' to stop children from enjoying themselves in them, but the reflective view has been more than halved. It's also harder to see the new foyer for Symphony Hall which recently cost some £13 million to build."

One effect of its presence is that the newly-returned 'Golden Boys' statue of Matthew Boulton, James Watt and William Murdoch has been marginalised at the back end of the store when the three of them surely should be heard singing in unison: 'We built this city...'.

During a tour of the site, council leader Cllr Ian Ward said: "The site over there (Arena Central, still waiting to be fully developed) was far more expensive to put the store and BBC studios on so there is a compromise here. The BBC were very keen about camera angles and what would be shown. so that's had to be factored in.

"Hopefully we can encourage visitors to come back for a second or third time."

Who would have thought that the entire, sweeping length of Smallbrook Queensway's Ringway Centre from Debenhams to Pagoda Island would disappear behind a giant, colourful banner suggesting that we all learn to 'B Bold'

Having let the building become run down, even though experts say it's one of finest examples of post-war architecture in the country, the city has now been bold enough to hide it away from view as if it's some kind of embarrassment. The banners had to be given special permission because ones of that size are not normally permitted.

They have a year of planning permission. But, with a new application going in to replace it with three new tower blocks, will the Ringway ever be seen again?

Whilst the views over New Street from the Burlington Macdonald hotel have been lost, the Copthorne Hotel has all-but disappeared. The giant black box was a late 1980s' addition to the old Paradise.

It included a twin called Chamberlain House, a building which turned out to be all girders and glass and so flimsy in the grand scheme of things that it was flattened in little more than a weekend - unlike the 'concrete bunker' Central Library which took a year of solid graft to remove.

The Copthorne finally closed in July, 2021 after limping out of Covid 19. Now, the sides facing Centenary Square and Centenary Way have been covered in giant Commonwealth Games banners, just like the Ringway Centre on Smallbrook Queensway.

This means the view the 'BBC wanted' from its Megastore perch in Centenary Square will partly include a banner covering up the embarrassment of one of the worst examples of 1980s architecture in a city whose appetite for reinvention is constantly fed by the 1830s' motto of 'Forward'.

Queen Victoria's statue was spruced up and restored to its former glory in May, 2018 with help from the Birmingham Civic Society. Thomas Brock's original marble statue was installed just 12 days before the death of the long-reigning monarch and was recast in bronze in 1951 by William Bloye.

On June 11, specialist contractors began to install a boat on top of the plinth, with Queen Victoria - joined by more, smaller lookalikes - as "an object of veneration, leading a battalion of other statues to represent the home nation throughout the Empire.”

The Birmingham Civic Society, which said it did not know about the plan, called the installation 'woke rubbish'. Backed by Ikon Gallery, Guyanese artist Hew Locke said after its official unveiling on June 14, "It looked how I imagined it.

"This thing is a good piece of work. I hope people find it interesting, if nothing else. I’d like to just thank the city of Birmingham for allowing me to do this. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time.

“As a concept (the Commonwealth), it’s an interesting club. A useful club of people who had a similar historical experience and it’s a democratic, commercial, economic thing.

"Sometimes interchangeable, sometimes important. It’s really quite important."

The installation on Queen Victoria's plinth isn't the only change in this area. In the build-up to the hottest UK ever recorded on Tuesday, July 19 artists painted the block paving either side of the Floozie in the Jacuzzi.

The pattern is called 'Connections' and has been designed by city artist Anjuli Mckenna, with the actual work being done by a team led by David Brown from graffitiartist.com in the Custard Factory. The paint has come from Lakeland Paints in Heysham close to Morecambe in Lancashire.

David said: "It dries rock hard but contains no chemicals so it can literally be jet-washed off after The Games and cause no environmental damage."

Also new this week in Victoria Square is a giant large screen that is being erected to the right of the Floozie when you stand outside of the Council House looking towards New Street. Visitors to the square will be able to watch the Commonwealth Games on it, but for visitors it now blocks the view towards the magnificent Victoria Square House.

Anyone hoping to come to Birmingham to see the city in picture postcard state could be disappointed. Posters of Perry, the Commonwealth Games mascot named after Perry Barr, have been strung up outside of Baskerville House in Centenary Square and the Council House in Victoria Square.

The pillars of the 1834 Birmingham Town Hall now serve to suspend more banners between them all, almost offering a reminder of the days when the hall was covered up with glamour model banners prior to its £35 million renovation and reopening in October 4, 2007.

Around the corner, the new pillars of Two Chamberlain Square have been colour coded with the colours used in the Commonwealth Games posters. It's all very colourful, but is it Birmingham?

Stand outside Vinoteca, the giant new wine bar, and you get a view of the side of Birmingham Town Hall and some fabulous listed buildings on Paradise Street. But the end block, Beneficial House, has been covered by scaffolding again after ten years undercover. And, guess what, the Beneficials cover-up has been covered up by a giant poster of Perry, the Games' mascot.

Birmingham Hippodrome Square looks more like a Who album cover today thanks to giant circles of paint stretching from the corner of Inge Street and all the way down Ladywell Walk around the Arcadian.

Why so? Well, the construction company that was supposed to be building a new £9.5 million square and 'front door' gateway towards New Street station went bust last autumn, leaving the area without trees and full of holes.

The area was then resurfaced, but being wholly black didn't look good. The rainbow colours now offer a temporary replacement unto the square is built properly in the future. Fair play re the imaginative thinking to come up with an alternative to black asphalt.

So you want to get away from the Commonwealth Games by going shopping in the Bullring. Oh no you can't, even though this site is the beating heart of the city which grew from an acorn into a mighty oak after Peter de Birmingham secured a Royal Charter from Henry II in 1166. Preserved horns were found nearby during an archaeological dig from 2022-21

As you walk down the main path from New Street towards the historic St Martin in the Bull Ring church where working class market workers would have worshipped, there are giant banners at either side above the main doors into each wing. In front of you, you could easily miss the city's oldest publicly-funded statue - of Lord Nelson from 1809, no less - by the presence of a bar called the 'Sporting Social'.

At this level, the bar manages the impressive feat of blocking out the view of both St Martin in the Bull Ring church as well as the revamped exterior of Selfridges' silver discs.

From November 2020 until recently, this famous bulbous exterior was covered in scaffolding and a canvas artwork by Osman Yousefzada called Infinity Pattern 1. Now that has been taken down, the bar stops you from fully appreciating the discs.

At lower ground level, outside of Pizza Hut, a large screen TV has been erected complete with Blackpool-style deckchairs. The screen stops you from appreciating a full view of Selfridges next to the church in one sense. Once the area gets busy it will doubtless work well in photographs in a Commonwealth Games' sense, even if you can only see half of the discs from this angle.

Across the road, the demolition of the former London Museum Tavern and Music Hall (1863) turned 1907s' celebrity restaurant Lorenzo's has simply left a gaping hotel. Work to build the long announced Beorma Tower was due to have begun more than a year ago.

But now the area has been hit by taggers who took advantage of previously broken fencing in order to deface the side of the Bull Ring Moor Street multi-storey car park. Just when you might need a banner to cover that up, there isn't one.

Birmingham is known as the birthplace of heavy metal. And the place where traditional blues went into a furnace ready to be hammered into metal on the anvil was in the upstairs function room of The Crown. This is the pub where the world's most famous Brummie Ozzy Osbourne first stepped on to a stage with Earth during a Henry's Blueshouse night in 1968. As their music took a dramatic turn, Earth became Black Sabbath who released two ground-breaking, ear-shattering albums in 1970.

Today, Ozzy's sheer originality means that he has more Twitter followers than Paul McCartney (5.4 million versus 4.2 million). The city of Liverpool tore down the original Cavern and then rebuilt a 'fake' one to capitalise on Beatles' tourism.

If Birmingham really is the 'home of metal', why is Birmingham waiting to make the same mistake? Jez Collins, founder of the Birmingham Music Archive and mastermind of a new album of Birmingham music for the Commonwealth Games told BirminghamLive in 2018: "What stories are we going to tell the world when the Games are here?

Music is the most obvious one because it has always been used (elsewhere) as a cultural reference point. The Crown would be a brilliant focal point because of its cultural, architectural and archaeological significance.

"The music heritage here is second to none, with everything from Black and Asian music to reggae, African and white British. They can all lend themselves to a series of events, talks and exhibitions."

The Crown could have been the home of all of that. But at least the exterior, until recently increasingly heavily tagged by scribblers, has been repainted and, amazingly, hasn't been covered up by a banner instead. But the doors, sadly, remain firmly closed.

Let's show the world 'civic pride and swagger' says city council leader Ian Ward

Commonwealth Games cover-up is 'city own goal' says leading architect