And as this venue prepares to stage another grand entertainment in its alternate sporting mode - the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Indoor Championships, due to run from this Thursday (March 1) until Sunday (March 4), it is possible to reflect on a different but equally impressive list of past performers.

Since this multi-purpose facility was opened on October 4 in 1991, with soon to be Olympic and world 100 metres champion Linford Christie doing the honours, a succession of stellar athletes have raised the decibel levels with their exploits inside and around the blue-liveried track.

Ethiopia’s world and Olympic champion Kenenisa Bekele set world records at 5,000m, 2,000m and two miles between 2004 and 2008, with the latter mark - officially a world best - being revised again in 2015 when Britain’s own world and Olympic champion, Mo Farah, ran 8min 03.40sec.

The millennium had begun with a 1,000m world record by another sublime distance running talent, Denmark’s naturalised Kenyan Wilson Kipketer.

Two years before that, legend of the sport Haile Gebrselassie had annexed the world 2,000m record that had been owned for more than a decade by Ireland’s Eamonn Coghlan.

In 2003, the Second City became the first city in the United Kingdom to host the IAAF World Indoor Championships, where Gebrselassie took gold in the 3,000m and Britain gloried in golds for triple jumper Ashia Hansen - based just down the road at Birchfield Harriers - and 200m runner Marlon Devonish.

Four years later the same Arena hosted the European Indoor Championships, where Britain’s Jason Gardener won his fourth 60m title and Belgium’s high jumper Tia Hellebaut - Olympic champion the following year - earned gold with 2.05 metres.

This week home fans will be looking to European indoor champions Laura Muir and Andy Pozzi for more medal success, and the wider world will await the latest flourish from the United States sprinter who has reduced the world 60m best to 6.37sec and then 6.34 already this season, Christian Coleman.

All the athletes treading the boards at this latest gathering of talent will build on what is already a rich legacy of achievement within this looming architectural presence alongside the Birmingham canal.

In the days before the NIA, England’s main indoor athletics events took place in a huge, converted hangar at RAF Cosford in the wilds of Shropshire, north of Wolverhampton.

The first indoor meeting at Cosford was held in 1955 on a flat, 160-yard track. Ten years later a banked oval track of wooden boards on rubber was constructed – which would be replaced with a concrete base in 1980.

From 1965 until 1991, Cosford was the venue for the annual Amateur Athletic Association (AAA) Indoor Championships, which attracted numerous international talents and was often televised.

The Indoor Athletics Stadium was housed in what had originally been No 4 Workshop, and which has since reverted to being a working area for RAF engineering trainees. The bends of the track in the non-purpose-built venue ere unusually tight, and the relatively low roof meant that Sergey Bubka, who pole-vaulted there in his earlier years, might have felt constrained in later years.

Crowds of more than 3,000 would make their way to Cosford, either by winding roads or the small branch railway line that served the RAF outpost. And there were some mighty performances laid down there over the years, not least two world indoor 800m records by wonderboy Sebastian Coe, who clocked 1:46.00 in 1981 and lowered the mark to 1:44.91 two years later.

The AAA Indoor championships were first held at the Empire Pool at Wembley, between 1935 and 1939. The event was revived at the same venue from 1962 to 1964 before moving north.

Similar shifts in venue have taken place in Scotland, where the first indoor championships were held between 1972 and 1976 on a 154-metre track at the Bell's Sports Centre in Perth.

Indoor athletics in Scotland fell into abeyance for around a decade until a portable track was erected at Ingliston Exhibition Centre, which hosted the Scottish Championships in 1987.

Later that year an international standard 200 metres track was opened at the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow.

The arena changed indoor athletics in Scotland, attracting the first British international match - versus France in February 1988 - and staging the European Indoor Championships in 1990. The Kelvin Hall's life as an athletics venue came to an end in 2012 when it was replaced by the Emirates Arena in the Dalmarnock area of Glasgow, a 5,000-seater capacity arena with a hydraulically-lifted 200 metres running track.

The innate appeal of indoor athletics is its relative intimacy. You can hear feet thundering on the banked boards, you can see straining faces close up, you can hear athletes celebrating at the line. For spectators, and indeed the media, it feels almost as if you are part of the action.

In some of the older venues, particularly, that sense of connection was reinforced by the relative proximity of performers before and after they were competing, and the informality of the proceedings.

For example, I recall interviewing Birmingham’s 1988 Olympic 200m finalist Michael Rosswess in between 60m rounds at Cosford. The process involved recognising him, strolling across and then asking a few questions. I can recall, too, being startled in a corridor next to the Kelvin Hall track by the sudden jubilant bellowing of an athlete who turned out to be West Germany’s Norbert Dobeleit, whose 1990 European Indoor 400m victory over East Germany’s Jens Carlowitz had just been confirmed by a margin of a hundredth of a second.

The line of venues in England can be traced back all the way to the 1860s, when what is believed to have been the first modern-style indoor athletics meetings were held in the salubrious West London area of Chelsea.

In the early 1800s there was an area of Chelsea known as The Stadium, which formed the grounds of nearby Cremone House. According to an informative Spikes article, in the 1820s the baron who owned Cremorne House led the "tuition and practice of skilful and manly exercises" at The Stadium - that is shooting, fencing and boxing.

As well as bandstands, pavilions and theatres, Cremorne Gardens contained Ashburnham Hall, and it was here that the first indoor athletics meeting was held.

In November 1863 the West London Rowing Club organised a night of athletics in the Hall, illuminated by gaslight.

It involved four running events and a triple jump competition; it did not become a regular fixture.

Ashburnham Hall is no more. A small grass square retains the name Cremorne Gardens and contains the original iron gates. Stadium Street has no stadium.

In an article written for The Herald shortly before the last IAAF World Indoor Championships in Portland in Oregon in 2016, Doug Gillon expertly collated examples of 19th century races and challenges that can be seen as the forebears of indoor athletics.

In 1877, Edward Weston engaged in a 24-hour walking race against Daniel O'Leary for £500 a-side in Islington Agricultural Hall.

"In those days, endurance, rather than speed, was what gripped public imagination," Gillon wrote. "The average weekly wage of a farm labourer was then 70 pence per 60-hour week. Dozens of events were staged in the likes of Edinburgh's Royal Gymnasium, Newsome's Circuses in Glasgow and Edinburgh, Dennistoun ice rink, Perth Drill Hall, even tents and public houses. More spectators watched indoor athletics than outdoors…

"Ultra-distance walking and running challenges, already popular outdoors, were moving indoors in Europe and the USA. Six-day races avoided offending Sabbatarian sensitivities, and several would be done in a year…"

Indoor athletics as we know it today may have been launched in England, but it became most enthusiastically endorsed on the other side of the Atlantic. Five years after the Rowing Club’s Chelsea lark, New York City held the first American indoor athletics meeting, and this did become a regular fixture.

In the late 1800s the renowned athlete, entrepreneur and former American Civil War secret serviceman John C Babcock built an ice rink for the people of New York City. In September 1868, before the rink was ready, Babcock met with fellow athletes William Buckingham Curtis and Harry Buermeyer - with whom he had run a gym since 1866 - and formed the New York Athletic Club (NYAC).

According to Spikes: "This was a time when an increasing number of clubs were being formed as track and field became a more coherent sport (running, jumping and throwing competitions had been popular amongst American frontiersmen for generations, partly a relic of Scottish emigrants recreating traditional Highland games). It was decided that Babcock’s soon-to-be finished Empire City Skating Rink would host a night of indoor amateur athletic games, their first public display.

"The programme took place on 11th November 1868 under a tarpaulin-patched roof. Events included the running high jump, the standing three jumps, shot put and a half mile race."

There were reported to be around 2,000 spectators for the match between the NYAC and their Scottish opponents, the Caledonian Club, which was easily won by the latter.

The event was a success, and the New York Times reported: "The New York Athlete Club is thus finely established, and gives promise of a long and useful career."

By 1872 the NYAC had a club track located at Skating Rink site, where they hosted a one mile race. The Skating Rink did not last. The running club did.

In 1878 the NYAC began a regular series of two-day indoor competition, the first of which took place at Gilmore’s Gardens  - which was soon renamed Madison Square Gardens and, in November1888, hosted the first Amateur Athletic Union Indoor Track and Field Championships.

Meanwhile other athletics clubs were forming in the United States, including west-coast San Francisco.

The Spikes report continues: "The most popular of the regular meetings was organised by the Millrose Track Club, which was formed by employees of New York’s Wanamaker’s department store in 1908. Their annual meeting was considered the highlight of New York’s winter sporting calendar.

"In 1914 the meeting moved to Madison Square Gardens where - regularly featuring the Wanamaker Mile - it enjoyed a 98-year run until 2012, when it moved to the Armory in Washington Heights.

"The Intercollegiate Association of Amateur Athletes organised a varsity championships in 1918 and held them annually from 1923 through to 1965, when the NCAA took over. Women’s events were added to the AAU Championships schedule in 1927."

Though Europe had a lack of suitable venues, there were regular meetings in the early part of the century. But it was not until 1966 that the modern era of international indoor athletics began. In that year the European Indoor Games were launched, running for the next three years before being reshaped as the European Athletics Indoor Championships, which first took place in Vienna in 1970, becoming biennial after 1990.

The IAAF followed suit, at the bidding of its then President, Primo Nebiolo, establishing the World Indoor Games at the Paris Palais Omnisports in 1985 - two years after the first IAAF World Championships in Helsinki.

The next time the event occurred, at Indianapolis in 1987, it had been re-named as the IAAF World Indoor Championships and has run biennially ever since, save for an adjustment made after the 2003 version in Birmingham, when the next Championships were held in Budapest the following year in order to move it away from the years in which the outdoor World Championships were held.

The IAAF World Indoor Championships is an event fully deserving of its own space, and the forthcoming action in Arena Birmingham will doubtless add further tales of the extraordinary, and of the unexpected, to the annals of the indoor sport.