There is a flourishing micro-genre on YouTube of “man tuts at urban decay”, and its star subject is inner-city Birmingham. The coincidence of a bankrupt council, high immigration and six-month-old bin strikes creates a situation that a certain type of person likes to get very angry about: rubbish, boarded-up shops, foreign voices. While hardly revolutionary, these dispatches recycle the decades-old cliché of Birmingham as an acute example of post-industrial decline, albeit with the new ingredient of finger-pointing at liberal cowardice. It is all quite lurid. But Birmingham’s problems came from bad planning decisions, which could have been made differently. The great symbol of this is the Middleway ring road, a concrete collar that has strangled our second city for more than half a century and still inhibits development today.
Some visionaries reshape cities for the better – indeed, the self-confident mayor Joseph Chamberlain is a central hero in Birmingham’s civic myth. But imaginative radicals are just as likely to cause harm. Herbert Manzoni, city engineer from 1934 until the mid-1960s, had plans as grand as Chamberlain’s: he believed cars were the future and wanted to make Birmingham a motor city. He didn’t care what stood in his way. “As to Birmingham’s buildings,” he said, “there is little of real worth in our architecture. Its replacement should be an improvement.” The factories, workshops and warehouses on the fringes of central Birmingham needed to make way for the inner and middle ring roads, which would sling cars at high speeds into the city’s heart. Victorian terraces were also cleared, and with them the communities of Caribbean and South Asian migrants who lived there.
In the 1960s, when Manzoni was arranging his plans, Birmingham was still a “city of a thousand trades”. A young Ozzy Osbourne, not yet the city’s most famous son, worked in a slaughterhouse in Digbeth. His future guitarist Tony Iommi was an arc welder in Aston. On his last day of work, Iommi’s hand slipped and his fingertips were sliced off. The bits of leather and melted plastic he used to rebuild his fingers created Black Sabbath’s distinctively ominous, dark sound. Their music was almost literally the embodiment of this thriving industrial culture.
A decade or so later, in 1971, when Black Sabbath were playing arenas instead of welding and butchering, Manzoni’s Inner Ring Road was completed, seven years ahead of schedule. No golden age of productivity materialised for Birmingham. The inner ring road became known as the “concrete collar” for the way it choked off pedestrian life and made it difficult for the streets to sustain their native economies. Even decades later, sorting out the ring roads formed part of the in-tray of Andy Street, West Midlands mayor 2017-24. “They were categorically a problem,” he told me when reflecting on development in the city centre.
My grandfather worked in a law firm in central Birmingham in the early 1970s. At some time, around 1972, his phone rang. Down the line was an accountancy firm that had been asked to act as receiver to a local manufacturer which had gone bust. They had never done this before, said the accountants, so asked my grandfather to advise on what to do. He didn’t know either, so asked around the office. The only person in the firm who had done receivership was a senior partner, and it was so long ago that he’d forgotten it all. For a long time, there had been simply no demand for insolvency experience in Birmingham because its industry was so strong.
But as the 1970s progressed, my grandfather’s phone kept ringing. The insolvencies kept on coming. Contributing to the difficulty was a Whitehall policy designed to limit Birmingham’s growth. This was the Industrial Development Certificate regime, which the government admitted was aimed at redirecting industry from the apparently overly successful Midlands to the north-east. Of course, Birmingham wasn’t the only city that suffered during this period, but the combination of being throttled by both radical, car-centred planning and the long-standing deprioritisation from Westminster was unique. As a result, Birmingham’s unemployment rate in the 1980s shot up to 20 per cent.
When I was born, around the turn of the millennium, there was a renewed sense of hope. Various planning schemes were dreamed up to kick-start the centre. On the train into Digbeth, the industrial area most affected by the Middleway, you can see the old Bird’s custard factory, refurbished in the 2000s with primary colours, New Labour-style, with big, weird murals. From the 2010 Big City Plan came the pimpled Selfridges building, as well as the violently enmeshed Library of Birmingham. At that time, too, there were raves under bits of crumbling brickwork, and a B-town music scene developed towards the south of the ring, around the Institute venue and the Sunflower Lounge. At school, we were told repeatedly that Birmingham was “the youngest city in Europe”.
New sites are still developing. To the north, passing Typhoo Wharf, I see the tasteful new development that the BBC will be moving into soon, a sign of regeneration working well. “Look at the inward investment into the West Midlands across that period from HS2’s announcement,” Andy Street encouraged me, referencing the UK’s signature high-speed railway that will connect Birmingham with London. “They’re the very best set of stats that any city outside London ever had.” Places like Typhoo Wharf, as well as the housing that has been built on tricky brownfield sites, demonstrate how bold planning can improve cities.
The excitement for HS2 was tremendous. Planning applications since the line’s announcement increased by 66 per cent within 1.5 miles of the line’s new stations, compared with 15 per cent in the areas just beyond. Yet it remains unclear how many of these are being completed. Beyond the successes, I can see the huge expanse of the Curzon Street station site. Thanks to HS2’s delays, this area will remain boarded up until the 2030s, more than a decade longer than it was supposed to be. The iconic Eagle and Tun pub, where UB40’s video for “Red Red Wine” was filmed, was demolished to make way for HS2. It is difficult for a city to have expectations set so high, only for them to be frustrated by circumstances outside of its control. The challenge is not that parts of the urban fabric are being lost; Brummies are capable of making sacrifices for their city’s future. It’s that HS2 doesn’t even exist yet to make up for those losses.
Despair-mongers will continue to dismiss Birmingham. But from the view of the Middleway, the city is a complicated mix of stagnation and success. It may not be the youngest city, but there are fresh signs of life. Many of the lots around Bradford Street, near the centre, have been vacant for ten years. But on one I see a rare glimpse of the Rea, Birmingham’s usually concealed river. The neglected brownfield site has grown green, and is lined with butterfly bushes. This autumn, as new HS2 investment builds a viaduct to let trains vault over the remains of the ring road, Manzoni’s 60-year stranglehold will at last be broken. Who knows what else will flourish then?
[See also: Can the Church of England be saved?]
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