Читать книгу Mark Steel’s In Town - Mark Steel, Mark Steel - Страница 9

I’m not sure why Birmingham is so disliked, but it is. People try to change its image by renovating the Bullring Centre every couple of years, and its citizens often tell you the city has more miles of canals than Venice, but it makes no difference. It’s like the last year of a discredited government, when ministers are changed, and policies relaunched, but no one notices, because by now the Chancellor could give everyone a bar of gold and people would say, ‘Typical of the thieving bastards.’

Maybe it’s the train station that does it. It’s surely the gloomiest, dingiest station for any major city in Britain. On the way there, you clatter past the airport and fields and light and the football ground, but this openness doesn’t make you feel at all free and airy, because you know it means you’re hurtling towards the damp darkness of New Street station, just as you wouldn’t think, ‘Ah, what a delightful breeze to set me up for the day,’ if you were a prisoner sailing across San Francisco Bay to start your time in Alcatraz.

The layout has been carefully designed so that on the platforms no sunlight can enter, even on midsummer day, like Stonehenge in reverse. The first time you go there you think, this can’t possibly be the station for Britain’s second city, and assume the train took a wrong turning and went down a disused mine-shaft. Then hundreds of people struggle with their cases along the unlit narrow platforms, like refugees from the Russian pogroms, though at least those lucky bastards had a crying family to greet them and put their luggage on a donkey. At New Street there’s a search for the stairs to the Bullring, where, even if you’ve been there fifty times before, you stand and look around for several minutes thinking, ‘Now where am I supposed to go?’

Because you’re in a traffic roundabout you can only escape from by navigating subways and uncrossable intersections that no map can help with. So you submerge yourself into the concrete, deciding to follow a path and seeing where it takes you, becoming so confused you wouldn’t be surprised if you came out opposite the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Even in the middle of the city you’re surrounded by flyovers and vast traffic islands that make you feel you’re really not meant to be there, as if you’ve accidentally wandered into a military zone, and you expect an official to come running towards you screaming at you to get down, and launching an investigation into how you got in without anyone noticing.

Even in a car you get hopelessly, flailingly lost amidst the motorways and flyovers that govern the centre of the town. Surely motorways are supposed to link cities, not circulate around the middle of them. If you’re going from Leeds to London a motorway is handy, but if you’re popping out for a packet of biscuits you shouldn’t need to take the M6 to junction 5 and find the seventh exit off the Aston interchange that leads to the Spar.

What you mustn’t do is miss your turning. You see the bit of Birmingham you want to go to, maybe even passing right by the exact building. And you look up at the road sign that tells you to get in this lane for Birmingham east and keep straight on for Birmingham south-east and straight on then back in a loop and sort of diagonally across and round again for Birmingham east by south-east, and you scream, ‘What? Which?’ to yourself, and try to hedge your bets by straddling three lanes at once until you feel the whole motorway is hooting in a Birmingham accent, and you follow the lane that you decide is logical but now you’re going back past the building you’re supposed to be at, unable to exit the motorway. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem, you assure yourself, as you can easily take the next exit and find your way back, but you go a mile and then another mile and past the city centre and there’s no way off, then fields start appearing and it begins to get dark and you can only look forward to running out of petrol so you can get taken home by the RAC.

When I first had to negotiate the matrix that is Birmingham city centre it explained a scene I’d often experienced in my youth. My mum’s side of the family lived in Erdington, and whenever we visited them my dad would spend the first forty minutes of our stay stood on the doorstep with my granddad discussing the route.

Bottlenecks at Bearwood and cut-throughs at Stetchford were traded with new roundabouts in Digbeth and roadworks up the Bristol Road until it seemed they must have exhausted every possible route from anywhere to anywhere without working out how to get through Birmingham, and would soon decide, ‘So next time I’ll go back through Longbridge, across to Edgbaston, drive across the cricket ground to deep square leg, up to New Street station onto the gloomy chilly track and get the train, ’cos I’m buggered if I know how to get here by car.’

It can’t just be the inaccessible, terrifying centre that makes it so hard to sell Birmingham as an attractive city. Even people who don’t have to suffer the rigmarole of getting there because they already live there find it hard to be cheerful about their town. I wanted to be positive myself, so I had to ignore websites called – and I’m afraid these are all real – ‘Erdington is a Shithole’, ‘Bearwood is a Shithole’ and ‘Smethwick is a Shithole’. I think they’re all independent and not part of the shithole franchise, but eventually I found one that actually promotes the city, called ‘Birmingham is not Shit’. (I showed it to my son and he said, ‘The sad thing is that’s the official council website.’)

The blurb explaining itself goes: ‘“Birmingham is not Shit” loves Birmingham’s people, arts, animals, buildings and grass verges.’ I’m not sure this is encouraging, when you’re trying to promote the positive side of the second biggest city in Britain, and after four things you’re down to the grass verges. ‘Birmingham is not Shit’ launched a competition for Brummie of the Year, and I thought, ‘Ah, that’s quite sweet’, so I looked up who were the finalists, and it said, ‘Due to foul and abusive comments this year there will be no Brummie of the Year.’

In the search for a positive view I saw a film about the city, featuring Telly Savalas, the iconic actor who played Kojak. For some reason he presented this tribute to the beauty of Birmingham, and at one point he says: ‘There are so many beautiful sights, such as the inner ring road, a majestic network, miles of concrete and flyovers that link with the Aston Express.’

I really, honestly don’t want to be cynical, but without question when Telly Savalas saw the script he must have been straight on the phone to his agent screaming, ‘Is that the best they can do, the motherfucking ring road? Hasn’t the place got a beach, a mountain range, something that links up with somewhere better than the Aston fucking Express?’

It does make the place marvellously earthy, though. Whenever I hear people talk about the wit of football fans, the poetry of the terraces, I always think of Birmingham City, whose anthem goes: ‘Shit on the Villa, shit on the Villa tonight, shit on the Villa, because the Villa are shite.’ You can only imagine the excitement as the author paced around his kitchen for inspiration at three in the morning, yearning for a rhyme that went with tonight, and suddenly yelling, ‘I’ve got it – SHITE – it’s PERFECT!’

Something else the town can boast is that there are apparently more lap-dancing clubs per head of the population in Birmingham than in any other city in Europe. Strange that, isn’t it? You’d think that blokes in Birmingham should be able to attract women without paying for it. ‘Shit on the Villa, shit on the Villa tonight’ – don’t tell me the women don’t go for that.

And yet historically Birmingham should be as proud of its intellect as anywhere. For example, any account of the period from around 1790, when science and rational thought had to battle to win their place in European culture, gives a huge mention, alongside Darwin, Franklin and the pioneers of medicine and electricity, to the Birmingham Lunar Society.

Pathetic though it may seem, I can’t help but wonder at the wisdom of calling their groundbreaking group the Birmingham Lunar Society, because I imagine them standing outside each night going, ‘Yep, it’s still there, that moon. It’s a bit smaller than last noit, I hope it don’t disappear altogether, or we’ll have to close our society down.’

Another possibility is that it made sense for Birmingham to emerge as a centre for science at the time, as it was a city driven by engineering. This was a period when viewing the world with a scientific mind was still a challenge to the religious order, so Birmingham became a home for radical groups who saw the new discoveries as a political statement. To view the moon as a satellite that could be studied and analysed was an affront to those who saw it as a heavenly body driven by God’s will.

Keeping with the lunar theme, the doctors, inventors and industrialists of the Society met once a month, on the night of a full moon, and set about promoting the latest scientific debates. They probably saw no distinction between their academic work and their role in establishing Britain’s first anti-slavery campaign, in 1788, long before even most radicals suggested the trade should be abolished. Partly this was in response to the fact that much of the wealth of the city at the time came from the manufacture of guns, which were used to capture slaves. The anti-slavery society also organised a boycott of sugar picked by slave labourers.

The Lunar Society helped establish a tradition of radical movements in the city, though some failed in magnificent fashion. For example a women’s movement was set up in 1825. According to Birmingham: A History of the City and its People: ‘In the mid-nineteenth century a group of young females formed the Birmingham Maidens’ Club, where the members agreed to remain unmarried. But the club had to close down after most of them got married.’

And there’s the Bullring, so named because bulls were once tied there and taunted for the amusement of passers-by, though now despite its name it must be the most impossible place in the world to get a bull, as the finest matador of all time couldn’t coax it through the underpass, round all the angles, up the steps and across the ring roads to the diesel-filled concourse where its ancestors were prodded for fun.

There were riots at the Bullring in 1839, led by campaigners for an extension of the vote. And as Birmingham became the centre of the motor industry the city became central to the trade union movement. The engineers who joined miners to shut down Saltley coke depot in 1972, in support of miners’ pay claims, were responsible for one of the most celebrated union victories of the century.

Birmingham’s response to calamities, such as the pub bombings of 1974 or the decline of the car factories, suggests that they’re seen as traumas that have rocked the whole city, in a way that might also happen in Liverpool or Newcastle.

Perhaps more importantly in shaping a city-wide sense of community, there’s a shared sense of unease over what happened to Birmingham’s statue of King Kong. It used to stand by the Rotunda building in the middle of the Bullring, possibly because someone in the planning department was misinformed, and believed King Kong ended up on top of the Bullring holding a girl from Selly Oak. At one point someone set fire to his rear, which led to a disputed insurance claim, then at the end of the 1970s he suddenly disappeared.

Thirty years later you still hear theories about where he went, as if he’s the city’s Lord Lucan. A typical letter in the Birmingham Post in 2011 said, ‘I remember being absolutely terrified of King Kong as the number 50 bus came around the corner of the outdoor markets and HE came into view. I also remember that it ended up on the Stratford Rd at a coach firm’s depot/office.’

Another story is that he turned up outside a car dealers in Digbeth, and it’s said that in 1976 he was sold for £12,700 to a Scottish company called Spook Erections, which put him in the markets it ran around the country. A recent article in the Birmingham Post informed its readers that the statue ‘has been found lying in a car park in Penrith’.

Unlike those of Lord Lucan, you’d think these sightings would be easy to verify, what with him being twenty feet tall and incapable of moving, and I can’t imagine Penrith is the sort of town where a King Kong can be dumped in a car park without being spotted, the way you might just get away with it in New York. Or maybe he’ll continue to create these wispy visions, and there’ll be unconfirmed reports of him living in Bolivia disguised as Godzilla, being employed by the CIA to intimidate anti-government forces in Angola, or being melted down by the Mafia after a row about gambling debts.

Another unifying fact about the city is the one about it enjoying more miles of canal than Venice, although this seems to miss the point, as you might as well boast that there’s more paint in a warehouse in Luton than there is on the Sistine Chapel. The important fact is that it’s quality rather than quantity that attracts tourists when it comes to a canal system. The Birmingham Tourist Board seems to think otherwise, and must assume that visitors to Venice find the place disappointing because there’s only one canal visible from St Mark’s Square, and might say, ‘I hear there are a whopping four round the back of the Stetchford gasworks passing under the M5 interchange where the junkies leave their needles. We’ll go there next year.’

Birmingham’s canals are another sign of its influence at the start of the industrial age. They were the earliest in Britain, created to transport iron from the Black Country to the centres of engineering. Now, for all the canal miles that gives the city, not everyone is confident of their value as a tourist attraction. For example, when a friend arranged a canal boat weekend in Worcestershire, she was told by the agency that made the booking, ‘We don’t recommend you take the boat into Birmingham. You just don’t know WHAT might happen.’

As fearful overreactions go, I’d say that beats those people in the 1980s who would give the advice ‘Don’t drive through Brixton,’ as if the place had fallen to bandits and warlords who’d ambush random families heading for a day trip to Brighton. How dangerous can crossing the nautical border into Birmingham really be? Are these waterways notorious for pirates? Do hooded, eye-patched gangs of youths jump on board and demand at the point of a sword that you hand over your tea, coffee and potted plants? You can see how getting away from danger would be a problem, with a shout of ‘Step on it!’ and then a gentle ‘puff puff puff puff splosh’ as the barge crept towards its maximum permitted speed of four miles an hour. Maybe the whole system is like Apocalypse Now, with barges moodily rolling towards their destination while the captain sits on board wistfully chewing grass and keeping watch in case of ambush from the rebels of Tipton.

But Birmingham’s canals give it a myth of being an English Venice, which has become a part of its identity. It also has its university, its Test match cricket ground, Cannon Hill Park and its football clubs, all unique, and all possible to cross without the use of a flyover or underpass, though this probably infuriates the planners who designed the city’s layout in the 1960s, who must watch Aston Villa and think, ‘That player could nip up the wing much quicker if we’d been allowed to put a bypass on the halfway line, to cut out the bottleneck in midfield.’

And Birmingham has its accent, which people are so rude about you could probably arrest them for hate crimes. But more important than what outsiders think of it is the fact that the place has its own accent. Unlike Glasgow, which has an accent not all that different from other cities in southern Scotland, or London, whose accent stretches to Southend and Luton, Birmingham’s is its own. In this world of stultifying sameness where it’s so hard to be genuinely original and unique, Birmingham has a one-off.

So the city defends its dialect with pride, and if it should ever be in danger of getting diluted it ought to be preserved, the way Welsh is, by insisting that all children in the city are taught in Brummie and that the road signs should be in both English and Brummie.

On top of this, Birmingham can claim to be the place where the Balti curry was invented. There are areas such as Sparkbrook that are lined with Indian and Pakistani cafés, with plastic tablecloths and lopsided portraits on the wall that may be of the owner’s father or could be the President of the Punjab.

Birmingham’s image probably isn’t helped by its confused status as Britain’s second city. Whereas that title was accepted across most of Britain until recently, in a poll in 2011, 48 per cent said Manchester was the second city, and 40 per cent said Birmingham. This only matters because of expectations, otherwise people in Oswestry would be gutted every time a new survey emerges that says it’s missed out on second-city rank yet again, despite the new windows in the post office.

But something needs to be done about Birmingham’s centre, because the joys and quirks of the city are hidden behind the oppressively unwelcoming concrete algebra puzzle that is its unfathomable heart. It’s like writing a captivating novel but insisting that the cover smells of raw sewage.

The planners do make regular attempts to renovate the Bullring, but with delicate architectural genius they always manage to make it even uglier. It’s as if there’s a committee somewhere that thinks, ‘Just one more flyover and then it will all be sorted,’ so that by now an aerial view of the place makes it look like a Scalextric course after the dog’s sat on it. The latest attempt at renovation entailed the creation of a giant, mesmerising bubbly thing in the absolute centre, that looks as if each day it’s going to get bigger by eating the first twenty people who walk by.

So it should simply be abandoned. The Bullring, the station, the inner circle and the flyovers should be covered in barbed wire and left derelict, like bits of Chernobyl, and the centre should be moved two miles away, in whatever direction the locals prefer. Outsiders will then arrive in a city it’s possible to walk around, and where it’s possible to imagine that a park may be nearby. They’ll look around for the Asian cafés and the exuberance of Jamaican Handsworth, the abundance of canals and the symphony orchestra, and will hear the accent as a lilting melody, a symbol of the pastoral effervescent jolliness, with its strange cordoned-off area on the outskirts, that is Birmingham.