It hasn’t been a good year for Birmingham — England’s second city. In April some kids burned down a statue in Centenary Square. The resin sculpture was called Forward and depicted the men and women of the city marching from its smoke-stack past into some delightful multicultural future. Now, there’s a gap where it should be. Maybe Birmingham wasn’t going forward at all. Then, in June, Birmingham lost its bid to become the European Capital Of Culture for 2008, despite the ill-founded hopes of its citizens for some recognition from an outside world that treats the city as a national, and sometimes international, joke.
Any other city might have been knocked down and out by these twin reverses. Not Birmingham. True, the outside world’s rejection hurts, but that won’t stop the city from trying to be loved. So I went to Birmingham for a weekend, to find out how it is proposing to go forward once more.
It turns out that the latest makeover is Birmingham as a sophisticated city, the least plausible and yet most ambitious of all its many reincarnations. The outside world could just about deal with a post-industrial canal redevelopment that made the city’s claim to be the Venice of the North slightly less than preposterous; or as the place where Ozzy Osbourne was conceived. But Birmingham as sophisticated? You’ve got to be kidding.
This unlikely ambition became clear to me over dinner at the Hotel du Vin in the converted Birmingham Eye Hospital. ”They have really seared this sea bass wonderfully,” said my partner. In the olden days it is inconceivable that anyone in Birmingham would utter such a sentence. Hitherto, Birmingham’s best contribution to international cuisine was based on the Urdu word for bucket, namely balti, and most of that had originated in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Cheap and sometimes cheerful Balti houses still thrive along Stoney Lane, Sparkbrook. But otherwise, central Birmingham has gone all posh with more than a dash of continental savoir vivre.
As Cyril, the sommelier, poured out a sophisticated Limoux 1999 Grand Cru Chardonnay, I listened to the sounds of jackhammers pounding and sandblasters blasting a new image for Birmingham. From the freshly repointed Victorian redbrick of the streets that descend towards the Jewellery Quarter from Colmore Row, to the new district called Eastside that is home to Future Systems’s looming Selfridges department store and Richard Rogers’s new Central Library, the city centre is a building site that promises a posher Birmingham than ever before.
When I was a boy, the Bull Ring was the place to buy cheap pants, broken biscuits and second-hand Doc Martens. Now that it has been demolished, along with the St Martin’s market, a little part of my past gone forever. Instead, there’s a new 40-acre shopping centre, the largest retail development project in Europe, where you will be able to borrow books and buy designer underwear. When you buy biscuits, they’re called biscotti and they don’t come broken in unmarked plastic bags. That’s posh.
None of this is to say that Birmingham hasn’t always had its genteel oases. From the soothing Botanical Gardens in Edgbaston to the Edwardian tea rooms in the City Art Gallery and Museum where, after you’ve studied the delightful exhibition of Holy Grail tapestries designed by Burne-Jones and woven by William Morris’s firm in the Gas Hall, you can doze off over tea in a world of potted ferns and elegant cake stands. And Symphony Hall remains as genteel a haven for serious music as was the Town Hall when George Eliot cried there in the 1840s.
Reggae band Steel Pulse once predicted a Handsworth revolution bursting from the city’s ghetto. For all these things, much thanks. And for all these things, too, Birmingham should be proud. A weekend is hardly enough time to get to grips with its many and varied charms. — Â