By Jack Walton
One time, while working on a story about the Britannia-owned Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, a colleague of mine was propositioned for a threesome in the hotel lobby. It was just after midday on a Tuesday. According to Tripadvisor, Birmingham’s own Britannia iteration — the simply named Britannia Hotel Birmingham — is 0.6 stars worse than the Adelphi. Make of that what you will.
I’d travelled to the Britannia Hotel for a spot of Birmingham-bashing. I’d heard it was all the rage. On the train I’d been sprawled out across two seats, pretending I was on a chaise longue, and leafing through my copy of The Times when I chanced upon an article about how Birmingham has become a “punchbag for those who hold it up as a microcosm of an England in freefall”. Birmingham, I read aghast, is now the “crossroads where Britain’s most ominous trends meet”: sectarian politics, a lack of civic identity, council incompetence, knife crime, bad education outcomes and the rest.
It didn’t sound great. The street lights are dimming, there’s no money in the public purse, the shadow justice minister is marauding around Handsworth pointing at soiled underpants by the roadside. The residents of Small Heath are contending with rats as big as feet. The residents of Sparkhill are contending with pigeons that are even bigger than feet-sized rats. Britain’s so-called second city had become a basher’s paradise — a land of oversized rodents and undersized dreams. My only fear was being late to the party.
The focus of most of this unwanted attention appears to be on a particular patch to the city’s north: Handsworth, Lozells, Soho. It was on Soho Road, in fact, with a visit from one Benjamin Rich, aka Bald and Bankrupt, that it apparently all began. Rich, the pied piper of new age poverty pornographers, racked up some three million views on YouTube with his video about Soho Road last year. After that, scores of camera-clutching acolytes flooded in. We’ve covered this trend before, but there’s a new addition to the canon: Robert Jenrick appeared last week in Handsworth, leading a team of GB News cameras on pant patrol (he was pointing out the area’s litter problem, including discarded tyres and “dirty underwear”).
Why Handsworth? Why Soho Road? The answer is obvious — these areas are a useful shorthand. Onto them, you can project many different stories about Birmingham and its supposed ills. You might even say that Robert Jenrick’s soiled pants are a powerful and potent metaphor. If you, like Jenrick or the scores of vloggers who walked these roads before him, believe immigration is the root of all the country’s ills, then the fact that these pants can be found at the roadside of one of England’s most diverse communities speaks for itself. If you believe that the Labour Party’s fiscal incompetence is the problem, then the fact Birmingham’s Labour-run council oversees the scene of the crime tells a story that fits that glove. If you believe years of Tory austerity hollowed out many of Britain’s already struggling communities, then you might suggest Jenrick take a look in the mirror. In fact, you might even posit — metaphorically, for legal reasons — that Robert Jenrick is the Handsworth pant soiler.
What confuses me about this trend, is that Soho Road is doing fine. It has issues — where doesn’t? — but it also has an identity. For one thing, its 150-odd wedding shops have made it a place people visit from far and wide. It has a story to tell. Whereas if I’m going to be forced to jump on the Birmingham-bashing bandwagon, I’d be looking somewhere else entirely. The street that makes me most depressed about the state of the city is the one smack bang in the city centre: New Street.
Why? Because the problem of New Street feels entirely self-inflicted. To my mind, there’s only one story you can tell about it: a city that doesn’t know how to sell itself.
Having arrived, I folded up my copy of The Times and headed straight to the New Street Britannia. The Britannia seems a good place to start. Once upon a time, this was the Marshall & Snelgrove department store, a great, proud cliff face of Portland stone. On the city’s history forums, people share memories of the place: having to pluck up the courage to walk through the doors to buy materials for a wedding dress because it was so overwhelmingly posh, or heading to the Charles of the Ritz counter and watching the assistants sift face powder with their long ivory spatulas.
These days: the worst hotel in the city (fine, it’s actually the third worst — 119th out of 121 — if we’re going off TripAdvisor stats) smack bang on the busiest street, in a building that was once fit for a department store. Birmingham isn’t the only city in the country that has to contend with Britannia squatting in a grand old building, but it’s hardly a mutant cell. In fact, it feels symbolic of the whole street’s trajectory. Many decades ago, New Street was the city’s epicentre. It was home to the Kardomah (which, as Dispatch readers will know, was the ultimate place to “plot a night out on the town”), had shops worth visiting and hosted the Rolling Stones at the Odeon in the 1970s. Currently, it’s a cultural desert.
Walk with me down New Street now. Step over the street bumps with the words ‘Be Bold. Be Birmingham’, a piece of irritating Commonwealth Games branding, inscribed. Survey the phone shops, the betting shops, the vape shops. Nod politely at the man reading bible passages about “smiting” and “hellfire” through a loud hailer, dodge a Deliveroo rider or two, quickly put your earphones in as you approach the folk wearing purple cagoules selling phone contracts.
The street, at least in the evening, is hostile. Not actively dangerous, sure, but radiating a low-level, ambient hostility. The friendliest face on the street is a man who offers me a hot drink and a prayer. I decline, partly because I don’t believe my prayers (to find somewhere I can sit after 6pm that isn’t a Starbucks or a chicken shop) will be answered; partly because I can see the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God logo on his shirt, which is frequently accused of being a cult. Is it possible to regulate against cults setting up shop in the centre? Can you at least charge them for the privilege? UCKG should be able to afford it, after all, given their penchant for rinsing church-goers dry.
“The curation really dictates footfall,” Alex Claridge, owner of The Wilderness and the Albatross Death Cult restaurants tells me. “It’s a classic Birmingham thing — you just sort of go, when people arrive into the gateway that is the short answer to who we are as a city. There’s such a lack of any curation — who is this for?”
Until recently, Claridge was a Night Time Economy advisor for the city, though this role ended recently after what he describes as months of uncertainty as to whether it would be continued. He tells me that while he was working alongside Andy Street, there had been discussions about improving the city’s data-gathering capacities to analyse how many people are visiting specific areas and at what times. Those discussions never made it beyond the early stages, unfortunately, but however usual that data would have been, you wouldn’t need AI to tell you what your eyes can about New Street — as evening falls, it’s dead.
Claridge’s point is that New Street’s problems are baked-in: a lack of “place-making” has led to a street full of shops that are closed after dark and units that are too large for independents that inevitably get priced out. “The more you get into it, the more it becomes apparent that there really isn’t a strategy at work for the city centre at all,” he says.
But what should that strategy be? Of course, it can be reasonably pointed out that these aren’t Birmingham-specific problems. It’s not like every other major city centre is a buzzing hub of independents. New Street’s cluster of JD Sports’ and Sports Directs’ may be dreary and dull, but it’s not hugely unique.
Claridge’s argument is that as one of Birmingham’s key gateways, it acts as a shorthand for what the city wants to say about itself. What city do we want to be today?
As for practical steps, Claridge would like to see independents excused from paying business rates to encourage a more interesting variety of venues, including the “weird and creative”. “This is a city with such diverse culture and a legacy of breath-taking entrepreneurship and innovation,” he says. “But if you want something to happen it takes intentionality.”
I think this speaks to a broader issue Birmingham suffers with. It’s a city that struggles to tell its own story. After that piece in The Times set everyone off, I could barely open Twitter without being confronted with some daft claim that Birmingham’s ills are downstream of the fact it has “no culture”, “no identity” and so on. None of that is true, obviously, but we have crafted a space — the space that greets people as they arrive in the city — that completely fails to speak to the city’s identity.
Soho Road, consistently framed as the great symbol of the city’s woes, does actually have this. Its community of dressmakers and other migrant businesses tell a story of resilience: an area that wrote a new story after the dark days of 1980s deindustrialisation, when British Leyland and many of the area's other factories shut down and unemployment rose to 80%. Today, the street is lively. What story is New Street telling at the moment? Birmingham: a great place to go on a chicken shop crawl or buy a phone case.
It’s not just New Street either — it’s this whole section of the city. Nearby Station Street is a place with a story that writes itself — the country’s oldest cinema, the birthplace of the most famous metal band in history. Few streets in the country can match its cultural heft. But so far we’ve left the page blank. The notion that Birmingham somehow “lacks” a civic identity is obvious nonsense. What could much more easily be argued is that the city desperately needs to learn how to sell it.
Darren John, who spearheads the long-running Save Station Street campaign, is hoping that the recent Black Sabbath news will bring the street’s plight back up the agenda. “That part of the city was the centre of the music universe,” he says, pointing out Henry’s Blueshouse, the Golden Eagle and of course The Crown. “It’ll be a huge embarrassment if everyone’s coming to Birmingham over the next few months. The spiritual home of Brum music is gonna look like a dump.”
John is keen to point out what is working — John Bright Street remains lively, he tells me — but a spirited defence of New Street is beyond him. “I could not tell you the last time I went to New Street,” he says. “It’s a bit of a failed street… you can look at the national-level stuff but there’s a lack of joined-up thinking on the Night Time Economy.”
At the far end of New Street, you reach what might be described as the street’s closest attempt at a night-time economy: the Chicken Quarter. Here, clustered tightly together, you’ll find Nandos, Popeyes, KFC and Wingstop. The lights are on, people mill about by the digital ordering screens; a little beacon of life, a lighthouse in a storm. If you were to be cynical, you might suggest that it’s a shame that four multinational chicken shop chains (three American, one South African) is the closest Birmingham’s busiest street gets to having a culture of its own. But to be honest, it’s better than nothing.
What’s more, the raw materials exist. Look in between all the O2s and Popeyes and you’ll see beautiful architecture: the old Midland Bank building, the Burlington Hotel or the seven-storey King Edward House, near the Britannia. These are buildings with real potential, but they need somebody to love them.
Of course, you can tell a more positive version of Birmingham’s story: Steven Knight building film studios in Digbeth, the BBC relocation, the eventual arrival of HS2, forever touted as the game-changer. Sometimes though, it feels the focus is too much on the future. It’s easier to always say great things are coming tomorrow, but what if that shifts the responsibility away from fixing anything today? New Street, and its surrounding streets, could be so much better. If only we could find the impetus to make them.
I return to the hotel and head to my room. While my stay was mercifully threesome free, what I experienced instead was almost as loveless as a midweek orgy hosted by a hotel chain routinely voted Britain’s worst by the consumer group ‘Which?’. It doesn’t need to be that way. Birmingham is a great city, no matter what you read in The Times. But let’s be honest, New Street is in desperate need of renewal.
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