The citizens of Birmingham are currently being asked to comment and contribute to The Big City Plan, a project led by the city council that aims to steer the development and direction of our city centre over the next 20 years. There is also a plain English version of the plan online, created by a group of Birmingham bloggers, which might be useful to some.
It’s possible that asking for public input is merely the council paying lip service, and that plans will continue along a predetermined course regardless of opinion. It’s also entirely possible that some ideas emerging from the dialogue will be taken on board, with some perhaps even being implemented in one form or another. Time will tell which way things turn out, but for what it’s worth I’ve decided to give this process the benefit of the doubt.
I started out with a few ideas, some stupid and some serious, and my plan was to write something reasonably short, floating a few of the more absurd nuggets that bounce around the inside of my head. I ended up writing over 2000 words and the surprising thing for me, reading back at the end, was how much I genuinely cared. I may have an inability to take things seriously, and my default setting is to be taking the piss out of anything that moves, but deep-down I do really, really love this town.
Here goes…
Save The Super Prix Daffodils.
You may not even know they are there, but they are there. They are always there. Let them serve as a lesson from the past to those planning the future.
In the 1980s Birmingham went through two of the grandest civic follies of my lifetime. The biggest and dumbest was the doomed bid for the 1992 Olympics, but the strangest by some considerable distance was The Birmingham Super Prix.
In defence of the organisers the idea wasn’t entirely without logic. The gigantic Rover factory in Northfield meant that we had a reasonable claim to being “Motor City” and the 1960s had blessed us with a road system so laughably complex that it kept a dullard like Jeremy Clarkson in material for years. In reality, of course, the stark fact remained that Monaco and Monte Carlo we were not and it all ended, predictably enough, in tears and expensive failure.
Back when the idea of Motor Sport on the streets of Brum was optimistically new, daffodils were planted along the grass verge adjacent to Bristol Street spelling out “Birmingham SuperPrix” in 20 foot floral letters. Over the years this has fallen into disrepair and may now have been covered forever by the hideous etap hotel building. The long and the short of it is that the flowers no longer bloom, and this is a damn shame.
I believe the daffodils should be resurrected and forever maintained so that each and every spring time we are all served a natural reminder of our Monorail moment.
Immediate Embargo On ‘Luxury 1 Bedroom Flats’
Aside from the fact that they all look the same, seem cheaply built and are sometimes inhabited by the sort of people I’d rather have moved to another city entirely (especially those with sensitive ears), there is a wider and much more serious issue at hand here.
If the only places to live in and around the city are one-bedroom flats then where do the families live? Where do the groups of friends sharing a space live, the nurses and bus drivers, the musicians and artists on their noble and tortured breadline? What about the Creatives that have come to save our economy (…bear with me), or the students that the city is so keen to retain?
Where will the sense community and neighbourhood identity come from as a consequence of a planning policy that excludes all but a few? Fast forward 20 years and we may just get the kind of city centre we deserve.
Make The Science Museum Free, Make it Bigger..
We were once The City of a 1000 Trades and many 20th century iconic products were made right here. If you took all the guns and motorcycles out of the movie The Great Escape then all you’d be left with is footage of Charles Bronson in a tunnel, moaning about claustrophobia. One thing is certain, there’s no way it would be the ultimate Christmas telly movie that it is, and it owes that enduring popularity to the industry of our city.
When I was a kid my granddad used to take me to the science museum on Newhall Street. I can’t remember how many times we went, but it seemed like a lot, and I never, ever got bored. The museum was full of motorbikes, cars and even a World War Two Spitfire. The centrepiece of the place was an old steam locomotive that moved a few feet forward and then back again, on the hour, every hour. It was a cool place and it was free.
Sometime during the last 10 of 15 years the museum was shut and knocked down. In the place where it once stood there is now a Community Centre and….no, I’m kidding…in the place where it stood there are now luxury one bedroom flats. Meanwhile some of the contents of the museum have been transferred over to Millennium Point, where they can now only be seen in exchange for an admission fee.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Don’t Be Ashamed Of Duran Duran
A friend of mine went to Memphis, Tennessee a few years ago. He was sat in a downtown diner, enjoying a coffee and soaking up the atmosphere of a city that to many people is the de facto Ground Zero of Pop music.
A waitress approached and asked him if needed a refill, he politely declined and the waitresses clocked his English accent. She then asked him where he was from. When he told her that he was from Birmingham the waitresses almost dropped the pot of hot coffee into his groin and excitedly screamed,
“Oh my God…..that’s Robert Plant country!”
Now, of course, Percy is not technically a Brummie, but the point I’m making here is that our city is synonymous with a particular brand of heavy rock that totally conquered the mutherfuggin’ globe, and the crying shame of it is we make very little of it. Granted, Capsule’s Home of Metal project is a great start but imagine what could be done for tourism with the establishment of a proper city centre museum, and all the bars and souvenirs traps that would go with it.
Metal apart, Birmingham also has a curious musical legacy (or litany, depending on your tastes) of artists that have started here and gone on to genuine mega-stardom, particularly in the US. Then there are the places where venues once stood and played host to legends like Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley and so many more….
So, if there is to be a muso-historical vision for Birmingham in the future, then please let go far beyond a museum and Metal. Let it have everything, warts and all, and make sure it includes an open-top bus, full of Americans and Japanese, cruising through Great Barr on a wet Tuesday in October, gawping at the house where Stevie Winwood grew up, before it swings down through Aston to the place where Ozzy met Toni.
As an aside, I’ve actually been to Memphis myself and if you took away the musical legacy stuff there really isn’t a fat lot to see, which is…erm… something of a coincidence.
Hands Off The Ziggurat!
It’s often been said that town planners in the 1950s and ‘60s caused more damage to Birmingham’s architecture than the Luftwaffe. An example of this is the decision to replace New Streets Station’s glorious Victorian roof with a thunderously ugly shopping centre, and the damage didn’t begin and end there. It looks like we’re going to ignore the lessons of the past and continue this sorry tradition by knocking down the Central Library building.
A monstrous carbuncle according to the likes of Prince Chuck (”..more like a place for burning books, than keeping them”) and a classic example of a Ziggurat to the trained architectural eye, it’s a building that nevertheless provokes a reaction in people and as such it deserves to stay. It will be missed when it’s gone.
Top of the World, Ma…
Public Transport in Birmingham has long been a subject of debate. We used to have an extensive tram network before we ripped it out, and sometimes we talk about bringing it back. We used to have a lot more local train stations and services than we currently do, and occasionally there is talk of long dormant routes coming back to life. And whilst we do have an extensive bus network, we don’t appear to have much love for it (except for the blessed 11 Route).
Successive council administrations have ‘looked into’ the various possibilities for improvement and there always seems to be some sort of feasibility study ongoing, but nothing in my lifetime has ever come close to freeing the city centre from ‘the tyranny of the motor car’. The answer to our problems has been staring us in the face all along: A network of Cable Cars.
Not only would they look amazing they would also provide a practical solution to moving folk around the city. We could even use the Ziggurat as the City Centre Terminus, with four initial routes emerging like spokes on a wheel:
ROUTE 1: Five Ways (via Brindley Place)
ROUTE 2: Jewellery Quarter (via St Pauls)
ROUTE 3: Millennium Point (via Bull Ring)
ROUTE 4: Digbeth (via Chinatown)
At the moment, going from one of the above points to any of the others is an absolute schlep that would be at least 20 minutes on foot, very expensive (relative to distance) in a cab or else involve a long ride on at least a couple of buses. If we were to do these journeys above the traffic and chaos below we’d do it in a quarter of the time and emerge at the other end much happier.
This Time Next Year…..
This one is a stone-cold, 100% multi-million pound business idea that I’m giving to my fellow Brummies in a superbly generous demonstration of my civic pride. Ready? Ok….
Ask an American to say something that reminds them of Birmingham and those that know it’s not in France will either say “Cadburys” or “Ozzy Osbourne”. Ask a UK-resident the same thing and they’ll more than likely say HP Sauce (after they’ve said “Alright” in a Dudley accent). However, the stark realities of commerce in the 21st Century mean that production of our iconic condiment has, unfortunately, been moved to the Netherlands and the lovely HP Tower no longer forms part of our skyline. My idea could return such a landmark…and here’s how it breaks down.
We, the people, are going to start making sauce again….and not just ‘a’ sauce, folks, but lots of sauces, lots and lots of different sauces. In fact, we’re going to have a different sauce for each postcode. There will be a B14 sauce, a B44 sauce, a B6 sauce….and all the others, all under the one banner of “The Birmingham Sauce Company”
Residents in each postcode will be given a time limit (say, 6 months) and asked to concoct a sauce. They can use old, family recipes or they can engage in a sort of let’s-see-what-happens culinary alchemy. There are no rules. Sauces can be hot, fruity, tangy, good with chips / bad with chips…it’ll be a total free-for-all. Once the time is up the different sauces of a given postcode will be judged (by the people) and the winner will become that postcode’s sauce.
What we do then is start production, on a small-scale at first, at Sauce House (which will have a tower, naturally), and then slowing start ramping it up to meet demand. We have the entire globe represented here and so market research will be extensive and exhaustive. The most popular sauces could be sold nationwide and then globally, whilst the more ‘specialist’ sauces could be limited to smaller runs and sold in quaint, numbered bottles (I confidently predict that Americans and fancy London types in particular would love this aspect of our collective civic business). The whole thing will be the cornerstone of the local economy in the same way that whisky is for Scotland and, frankly, I do not see how it can possibly fail.
NOTE TO THE COUNCIL: If you chose to run with this idea and need someone to head up the project, I’m your man! You’ll need to be willing to overlook certain financial irregularities and I’ll be wanting a few afternoons off a week to play golf, but other than that I reckon we can go dancing together. Have your people call my people.
..and finally, a rant.
Stopping Thinking Up Stupid Names For Stuff
In the north of the city the area of Erdington borders the slightly posher area of Boldmere. During the 1990s Estate Agents started referring to the small area around Chester Road and the end of Boldmere Road as “Boldmere East” in an effort to make that corner of Erdington more desirable to idiots.
I realise that I’m probably wasting my time on this one, and that “Eastside” in particular is a done deal, but it’s not going to stop me getting a few things off my chest.
Other than the fact that pointless (and doubtless expensive) re-branding gets my goat, calling an area of central Birmingham “Eastside” is especially stupid because it presupposes a shared understanding of at least one of the 3 other main directional points on the compass. Since we don’t have a large river running through our city – and let’s be honest, folks, the River Rea doesn’t count – there is nothing to aid collective geographical understanding of which way is North, South or West, and as such East on it’s own makes absolutely no sense.
It’s also been pointed out to me by someone that “Eastside” is more than just a new name for an area of town that didn’t really need one, it’s also apparently a “state of mind”, which just about summed it all up for me.
So, please, I’m asking as nicely as I can - no more new names.
