The area around Birmingham New Street on Saturday night gave me a taste of how weekend nightlife in Britain used to be, before the heart fell out of so many of our towns and cities. Once upon a time, almost everywhere looked like this from about 7pm on Saturdays; sort of Hogarthian, but with a flavour of an episode of The Last of Us in which a full-scale riot, peppered by zombies, is crashed into by a flaming 747. Anyway, it’s safe to say that, on this particular evening, Birmingham’s revellers had started their sessions early. The queues outside The Botanist and Revolución de Cuba were already buoyant with hens in sashes and stags planning strategic chunders, while outside McDonald’s, one young woman wearily asked her friends: “Can’t we just, like, stop drinking, get a Maccy’s and go home?” A peal of cackles was their reply.
The Oyster Club, on the other hand, which sits at the top of Temple Street, is altogether classier. It’s a posh seafood restaurant with a marble counter where you can eat Loch Ryan native oysters at £28 for six and omelette Arnold Bennett at £21.50. It’s a special-occasion place, with some lovely birthdays and anniversaries taking place on the night we went, but even they couldn’t drown out the noise from the “considerably richer than yous” sitting to both my right and left, and who were forensically detailing their properties, post-tax profits and jetsetting adventures at a volume so loud, it blew the sorrel off my rhubarb-dressed oysters.
