By Kate Knowles
In the summer of 2017, I stood in a very dark, cave-like room in Digbeth, watching an alien. One of my favourite artists at the time, the Norwegian singer Jenny Hval, was performing her distinctive, eerie pop music dressed in a black cape, her face partially covered by a mask. A slip of silvery fabric billowed into the void at stage right.
Hval doesn’t usually do big tours with lots of dates. When she comes to Europe, her performances are often limited to one-off dates in capital cities. This time, though, she was in my city. Hval was on the bill for Supersonic Festival, an underground music and art festival that has taken place here almost every year since 2003.
Supersonic was founded by Lisa Meyer and Jenny Moore. Meyer continues to run it through her live events company Capsule. Not only is Supersonic recognised as a knockout event in the arts calendar, it has also achieved mainstream recognition, with the past three editions each having received five-star reviews in the Guardian. This year’s upcoming festival, scheduled to take place across multiple Digbeth venues from 30 August to 1 September, will be its 18th edition — but getting here hasn’t been smooth sailing. The festival’s future was recently thrown into jeopardy when the directors revealed that the company that owns the warehouse where they planned to stage most of its shows had pulled out.
“Despite months of regular meetings and reassurances from them that all was OK, they recently told us that they won’t now be able to let us have the space this year,” Supersonic’s organisers wrote in a statement on 31 May. They suggested that the abrupt move by the owner was an example of the “increasing gentrification of the area and property developers moving in,” which has intensified as plans for HS2 have progressed.
Although a back-up venue was found — the O2 Institute — and the festival is set to go ahead with a bigger capacity, Meyer says that organising Supersonic has always been an uphill battle. Despite 80% of the festival’s audience coming from outside of the region, benefiting the local economy in the process, she claims the event isn’t seen as important within Birmingham. “We've made it happen against all odds, really, in this city; it's such a difficult place,” she says.
Meyer points out that for many touring musicians, Birmingham is often the last place for tickets to sell out. “There is a real issue around valuing independent culture in this city,” she says. The struggle has gotten to such a point that Meyer is considering a drastic step. “We are seriously looking now at moving the festival outside of the region,” Meyer tells me.
Supersonic isn’t alone in this pessimism. Several months ago, I spoke with past and present occupiers of units in the Custard Factory, who were vexed that Digbeth’s once easy-going and creative atmosphere has ebbed away as monied corporate property owners have moved in. A lot of frustration stems from the fact that it was the indies who first moved into the rough-and-ready factory buildings in the 1990s and early 2000s. It was then these same indies which turned them into the artistic spaces that gave the area its reputation as the city’s “creative quarter” in the first place. Yet now they are being squeezed out by rising rents, a familiar tale in cities across the country.
Developers aren’t the only problem — bigger, shinier arts companies are joining the throng too. Since the early 00s, the City Council has had Digbeth earmarked as a prime location for the so-called ‘screen industries’. These plans are starting to germinate with the arrival of major organisations like the BBC, which will move its new regional headquarters at the old Typhoo Tea Factory in 2026, and Digbeth Loc, the new film studio of Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight.
Knight’s plans have been met with great enthusiasm by the city’s senior figures: Birmingham City Council has invested in the business, as has the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) and government housing provider Homes England (which owns a swathe of land in Digbeth). The studios will “usher in a golden era for our burgeoning creative sector”, former West Midlands Mayor Andy Street said last year.
Digbeth Loc is the lynchpin of a strategy to make Birmingham and the wider West Midlands a flagship location for TV and film production. It’s an ambitious project that aims to create 760 new jobs and the resources to retain and attract aspirational talent to work in these industries. We are already seeing the benefit. Last year the British Film Institute awarded the West Midlands £1m to bolster such training opportunities and this was topped up with £1.6m from the WMCA.
Yet there are people in Digbeth’s arts community who are sceptical of these developments. Last year, Knight expressed his hope of planting “a thriving industry in Birmingham — we don’t want to be a kind of spaceship that lands. We want local people working on projects and to really engage with the city.” Some of the existing local arts organisations see a gap between Knight’s rhetoric and the reality on the ground. Gavin Wade, director of Eastside Projects art gallery, goes as far as to suggest Digbeth Loc and the incoming, big-budget operations are working to eradicate smaller local indies.
“I think that is their strategy — to be a spaceship and get rid of all the other independent arts organisations,” Wade tells me. That might sound a bit much, but Wade says his gallery hasn’t been approached by Digbeth Loc, nor did anyone else I spoke to for this article. By contrast, the BBC has been in touch with Wade and others – nearby arts organisation Grand Union has even been involved in developing the new Tea Factory site, for example. “Their actions are small, but they're involving people,” Wade says of the BBC. “I guess Steven Knight’s [company] is much less cooperative.” (I reached out to Digbeth Loc to get their side of things but didn’t hear back.)
Wade says Digbeth Loc is “a great inward investment opportunity” that should be welcomed and he expects more studios to arrive. But just because they are creative businesses doesn’t mean they will benefit everyone in the creative industries, he says. Reflecting on the array of businesses that have popped up in Digbeth in recent years he is wary that many are simply trying to cash in on the area’s ‘cool culture’. “Although some of these companies are technically independent, they're nothing like independent arts organisations, and they are nothing like visual arts organisations. The way they operate is just corporate strategy.”
Digbeth’s character has certainly changed since it became a cultural hotspot. Once known for warehouse raves and art, it could just as easily be called Birmingham’s ‘drinking district’ these days. Theme bars with ball pits and laser quest dot the intertwining backstreets. Yasmeen Baig-Clifford has a fatalistic attitude towards this shift. When her non-profit media arts company launched in Minerva Works on Fazeley Street in 2013 (an earlier version called Vivid has existed since 2005) she understood that development of the area was on the horizon. “We didn’t go in thinking we’d be here forever,” she says. At that time, the land was owned by the Canal and Rivers Trust, which Baig-Clifford describes as having a “progressive” attitude towards the artists. When it was bought by Homes England, the new owners were noticeably less engaging.
“It’s been a little frustrating because it’s difficult to plan ahead when you don’t really know what’s happening with the site overall,” she says. Due to this uncertainty, Vivid Projects has decided to move to a new home, the Friends of the Earth Centre on nearby Allison Street. For now, the old guard is hanging on, but all of them share Baig-Clifford’s predicament about long-term planning. Richard Short, director of the gallery and events space Centrala, thinks they can plan to be in Digbeth for another five to ten years. He chalks their successes up to the result of organisations like his, Vivid Projects, Eastside Projects, Capsule and others working together. “The support of the different organisations, the ecosystem, has been what has made Digbeth what it is,” he says.
Short’s worry is that if one has to move out, the collective will be weakened. From there, it’s an exponential decline. And if that happens, Birmingham runs the risk of losing not one, but several cultural gems. Can the new arrivals coexist in a way that benefits everyone? Or is Digbeth set to become an entirely new planet?
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