Beautiful Birmingham, The Jewel of The Midlands

England isn't about the sound of cricket on the green, district nurses riding bicicycles through the countryside and pints of mild.
If John Major really thought that, no wonder they laughed him out of office.

It's not the England we live in. Maybe it does exist somewhere, but not round here.
And I really wouldn't want to live in that England.

They say the Midlands has no soul. It hasn't the distinctive identity of the north, it is the south, but without the ostentatious wealth.
It is the true England.

London is still, in many ways, not just the capital of the UK, it is one of the capitals of the world; New York, London, Paris, Tokyo. The cities that matter.
Manchester basks in its new cool, Liverpool is- well, Liverpool. The northern towns thrive in their regeneration.

But Birmingham never needed to regenerate, it quickly changed from the workshop of the world into a commercial centre for the future.
Those outside the Midlands deride it as a soulless city of glass and concrete, they shun the Midlands as a wasteland of business parks, industrial estates, out of town shopping centres, executive housing estates and dreary motorway service stations.

I actually live in a satellite town, just outside the city. Well, it calls itself a town, about thirty thousand people live here, but it's a village to me. The town centre is little more than a glorified shopping mall.

Those of the population who don't commute, either work on the industrial estate- which only exists primarily because of its motorway connection to the city, or they work in the handful of shops. Or they don't work. The 'town' has a couple of quite large council estates, which earn the town the sobriquet 'Browntown', an allusion to the high rate of heroin addiction in the town.

It's a satellite village, a dormitory. It orbits Brum, as the Earth orbits the Sun, and would die without it. I work in the city centre, I shop in the city centre, I go out on Friday night in the city centre. In fact, I always have done. I've not always lived here, but I have always worked, shopped, and gone clubbing in the city.

I have always lived in, or outside the city, and my life has always focussed on it.

I guess this affects my perspective. The West Midlands is a huge urban structure, and in my view, a highly successful one. It WORKS.

Everything really orbits Birmingham, but some of the places within its orbit are large enough in their own right, if you're not used to populated regions.
Wolverhampton and Coventry both exceed 200,000 people, though I don't really think of them as cities in the proper sense of the word.

It's to do with amenities- they don't have them, because they don't need them.

The Black Country is an amazing phenomenon in some ways, completely incomprehensible to those outside the region. Look at a map, and unless you can see the local authority boundaries, it seems like a vast urban sprawl tacked on to the western edge of the city. That's deceptive.
The Black Country accent bears no ressemblance to the Brummie accent, an accent that actually penetrates out to satellite towns like this, identifying them as firmly within the Birmingham orbit. Brummies sound like Jasper Carrot (watch this clip, he's bang on!), Yam Yams (The Black Country locals), sound like Noddy Holder.

I sound a TINY bit like Jasper Carrot (it's much more hidden, in my case). I sound NOTHING like Noddy Holder.

And the Black Country, for all its urban appearance, is country. Just because there is no country between the towns, doesn't mean that it isn't a conglommeration of small, former industrial towns, with small town mentality.
A million people live in Birmingham.
Another million live in the Black Country. They live in Walsall, Wolverhampton, Dudley, West Bromwich, Smethwick, Oldbury, Wednesbury, Rowley Regis, Tipton, Bilston, Brierley Hill, Coseley, Sedgeley, Tettenhall, Wednesfield, Darlaston, Willenhall, Cannock.

It's like the valleys of South Wales, you can't really tell where one town ends and another begins, but the locals know.



Commuter land stretches out further, to Telford, to Stafford, to Warwick, to Worcester, the road and rail links create a vast spider on the map, Birmingham really is the beating heart of this vast human megastructure, the life's blood of maybe three million people, all told.

Commuter land is the land I grew up in, a land where fresh business parks, fresh retail parks, new housing estates appear annually, with the inevitability of the change in seasons.

Somewhere beyond, lies the real countryside, but it is not home to me.
For so many of my generation it isn't.
The countryside is a place with no pavements which stinks of manure.

There's nothing wrong with the countryside, I don't mind visiting it, a day in Broadway (Cotswold flagship village par excellence), a toasted tea cake in Ye Olde English Tea Shoppe, a pint in a pub full of other day tripping suburbanites, a wander through antique map shops, but I wouldn't fancy lingering after dark. God knows what they get up to in these places.

I look at the people who live there and their lives and attitudes are alien to me. The fact is, they live lives that are as relevant to the life I know, as the lives of Icelandic fishermen. They live outside the metropolitan infrastructure. They live in a Microcosm, a sheltered world.

In their world, it is normal to see a ruminant Artiodactyl.
In mine, it's normal to see people from ethnic groups other than your own.

I wouldn't go near the first, they wouldn't go near the second.
In my world, it's normal to sleep with the second, in theirs...
Enough said.

Urban life is often played down, but really, it's the most amazing triumph of human living.
Systemised living, is urban living. Making cities work, is working towards progress.

I guess many people, like me, try to have the best of all worlds. We're put off inner city living, because of the gang warfare, the poverty, the drive by shootings, the prospects of our children in inner city schools. But it's defeatist, because those problems will only fester and follow us out to the suburbs.



We choose to work in cities like Birmingham, because that's where the real opportunities are, Birmingham is alive and kicking. And I think that's true everywhere. If you're working in a city with a population of less than half a million, there's a limit to how far you'll go.

We choose to shop in cities like Birmingham, because that's where the choice is. Why would you want to go to an HMV, with only one floor? If you're like me, you want to spend an hour browsing.

We choose to socialise in cities like Birmingham, because it's more cosmopolitan. In many ways it's more tolerant. Who wants to go out in a place without choice? Birmingham has Broad Street, Digbeth, Chinatown, it has comedy clubs, dance clubs (of all types), straight clubs, gay clubs, black-oriented clubs, theatres, multi-screen cinemas- everything. Whoever you are, there's a place for you in Brum.
You need to live in, or live near a reasonably sized city to get that.

City life really is BETTER life.
We know it, which is we try to bask in their glory, but stick our homes at safe distance. Outside the city boundaries in the 'green' belt.

We need to sort this out really.

Inner city living, is of two kinds, live in a ghetto, or live in ridiculously priced city centre apartments.

Quite how we reclaim our cities, is a major twenty first century social problem.

But I think we'll do it.
We need to.

Because our cities are our cultural hubs, our centres of innovation, of forward thinking, it is in our cities that the best our species has to offer is to be found.
How sad, it currently also shares that with the worst.

But I have faith in a glittering future of glass and concrete, and I believe that here, in the Heart of England, here, in the former workshop of the world, we are doing what we can to show the way.