On Shrove Tuesday in Atherstone: ‘bollocks is all that matters’
While the rest of the country enjoys its pancakes, one small Midlands town goes to war over a ball
Samuel McIlhagga
Samuel is a features writer and reporter whose work has appeared in the Financial Times, UnHerd, Jacobin and the LA Review of Books. In 2024, he won The Independent’s Rupert Cornwall Prize
The loveliest part of England? How Jonathan Meades chronicled the West Midlands
The Dispatch catches up with the creator of Birmingham: Heart By-pass, Severn Heaven and Worcestershire: Travels with Pevsner.
Investigation: Raja Khan’s empire of dirt
How a negligent housing provider courted Birmingham’s bigwigs
After 859 years, the future of the Bullring’s markets is hanging in the balance
'The market is a working-class infrastructure. People rely on these markets'
How David Lodge invented Rummidge to explain Birmingham
The late author was the city’s quiet chronicler
Arrested Development? The West Midlands Growth Company was supposed to make us rich: now it’s getting downsized
Facing restructuring, redundancies, and the potential loss of a key partner: is the organisation a vital economic engine or a waste of taxpayers' money?
No justice, no peace? Why hasn’t there been a public inquiry into the 1974 Birmingham bombings?
50 years after the Birmingham bombings, and no one is any closer to getting to the truth. The story of why, and how, a public inquiry hasn’t happened
Playing Truant? The strange case of Birmingham’s ‘HS2 Academy’
Financial woes, harassment, spiralling senior pay packets - the story of how Birmingham lost its high-speed rail college
Is Deritend still Birmingham’s Irish Quarter?
With several Irish institutions having left the area, how is the community coping with accelerated development, botched infrastructure projects and rising rents?
The Smethwick gurdwara at the heart of a geopolitical storm
Guru Nanak Gurdwara has become a focal point of pro-Khalistan activism in the West Midlands. Now its political ties are coming under closer scrutiny