“Why does Birmingham exist?” asks historian Richard Vinen of Britain’s perennially overlooked second city. It’s not near a significant river or estuary. It doesn’t sit on a hill, atop bountiful natural resources. Not only is Birmingham 105 miles from the nearest beach, but, writes Vinen, it is also “one of the least walkable cities in Britain”. Its districts are segregated by class, race and income as much as by its notorious road system.
But it is in the middle. From the 18th century onwards, people were drawn to Birmingham by its centripetal position, as a site where useful things were made, traded and dispatched around the globe. Birmingham wasn’t just an engine of modern Britain: it built the very engines that helped make Britain rich. People kept coming to Birmingham for work even as work disappeared: from full employment in the mid-20th century it now has some of the highest unemployment in the country. It’s a city founded on work that lost most of its jobs.
This may explain why Birmingham lacks a sense of place in the minds of all but those who were raised there, and even then – and I say this from experience, coming from the city’s eastern outskirts – not particularly well known. In Jonathan Meades’s words, Brum is “an ignored void at the heart of the country”, an area rarely dwelt upon except as the butt of weak jokes about our accents and getting lost on Spaghetti Junction.
Vinen’s biography of the city tries to put this right, and is a spirited attempt at uncovering the mystery of how Birmingham, in his view, has managed for so long to stand at the centre of Britain’s modern industrial, economic, political and cultural history without anyone noticing.
It has had quietly revolutionary fingers in all these pies: developing precision engineering in the 18th and 19th centuries, defining and greatly extending the scope of local government at the turn of the 20th century, and, in the past 60 years, forging a distinctive multicultural identity, against all odds, where at its best no one is “less” or “more” Brummie than the next.
This book arrives on the wave of excitement in the city created by the recent Commonwealth Games, but is timely for other reasons. In an age when privatised water companies can’t guarantee our supply and fuel suppliers try to treble our bills, all politicians would do well to remind themselves of how Joseph Chamberlain – “the most extraordinary British politician of the 19th century” in Vinen’s estimation – brought utilities under municipal control and became the Liberal who invented “gas-and-water socialism”.
Chamberlain’s period as mayor of Birmingham, between 1873 and 1876, turned a messy town – literally, given how “excrement piled up in the streets and in the courts” of its slum housing – into a proudly equitable city. The Birmingham Post’s editor recorded how “the gas, cheapened to the lowest point, is (now) in the hands of the corporation and the water supply… is constant and unrestricted, alike to the poorest and the wealthiest in the town”.
Chamberlain meant business. He “threatened that he would buy the gas company with his own money if the council failed to act”, also regarding “sanitary engineering (as) a hobby” of his. “Sometimes it seemed that sewage had become a weapon in a class war between the bourgeoisie on Birmingham council and the aristocratic landowners in the countryside around the town,” writes Vinen. Influenced by Ruskin, Chamberlain bought up and demolished swathes of city centre housing to create the grand Corporation Street, looking to “the possibility, made increasingly likely by new means of transport, that working-class people could be moved away from the centre of town altogether”.
A combination of Chamberlain’s early drive, which rapidly took him into national politics, and waves of inward migration – roughly in order, from the rural Midlands, south-west England, Wales, Ireland, India, Pakistan and the Caribbean, and now from around the world – set Birmingham on a hard-to-reverse path to expansion far beyond its original boundaries. A ring of massive, largely white council estates was created on its outskirts, while a legacy of poor quality housing and vicious spatial racism persisted around its centre.
In 1976, the National Front managed to mobilise a campaign in support of Robert Relf, jailed in Winson Green prison for advertising his house for sale “to an English family only”. “War service” was a criteria for the offer of a council house until the same year. A Barbadian bus driver commented to an interviewer how “only white people had houses, black people lived in maisonettes and tower blocks”, of which the city built more than 430 between the 1950s and 70s.
After the war, Chamberlain’s municipal legacy mutated into the hubristic “motor city” with which its mid-20th-century chief engineer, Herbert Manzoni, was associated. The act of building cars and having roads to drive them on became central to Birmingham’s identity – somewhat inconveniently for those who neither built nor drove them.
The city, notes Vinen, “became chained to the car industry”, causing its dramatic fall from prosperity into mass poverty when car production moved largely overseas. Brummies were more aware than anyone that they “lived in a man-made city… as though cars, motorways and high-rise buildings had become ends in themselves rather than means of providing for needs”.
Birmingham can be a maddening city to come from. Growing up there, you’re only vaguely aware of the sorts of events and processes that are foremost in the collective memories of, say, Mancunians or Liverpudlians. It’s in the DNA of Brummies to minimise our role in changing things, to our detriment. Arguably, the best way to think of Birmingham’s spirit is through its music, which Vinen, rightly, also foregrounds. The Beatles and the Stone Roses? I raise you Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the Move, Stevie Winwood, Dexys Midnight Runners, Duran Duran, Steel Pulse, the Beat, UB40, Mike Skinner, Broadcast and Stefflon Don.
The great majority of these acts, in their own ways, have sought to elevate the ordinary into the sublime: to escape, to take flight, but also to celebrate how ordinariness, in Vinen’s words, “confers its own importance… Birmingham reminds us that most people’s lives do not revolve around such things” as political centres and grand buildings, but around work, love and snatching luxury when and where you can. This absorbing book shows us how we did it.
Lynsey Hanley is the author of Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide (Penguin)
• Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain by Richard Vinen is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
