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It’s Thursday afternoon at the Square Peg pub in Birmingham city centre and the pints are flowing. The pub occupies the ground floor of the Lewis Building, a grand Victorian structure made of Portland stone, on the corner of Corporation Street and Bull Street. Despite its resplendent exterior, The Squeg – as this Wetherspoons is affectionately known – has a bit of a reputation for attracting oddballs and troublemakers. Earlier, when I put a call out on my Instagram for friends to come and join me here, several alluded to the potential for me to “get stabbed”. Now I’m here, there’s an eclectic mix of lone drinkers, post-work punters and families making the most of discounted kids meals during half term. It seems alright to me – but then I have just won 34 quid on a slot machine.
At the bar to spend my winnings, I chat with an electrician who calls himself Tiger. He’s an animated guy in his 50s, with a broad grin, plenty of craggy lines on his face and a lot of opinions about Brum’s different neighbourhoods. Handsworth, where he’s from, has “gone downhill”. Harborne, where he worked recently, has “a lot of decent people”. But when I ask him about the place we are standing in right now, he’s at a loss for inspiration. “It’s just a pub really, I come here for a drink with my mate and leave,” he says.
I ask the bartender, a recent graduate called Marley Cooper, what he thinks of the area. He winces, then smiles. “It’s a bit rough around here and we get a lot of beggars,” he says. But his overriding impression of this part of town is that there’s not much to it. He mulls it over for a moment then suggests that “it’s a bit of an inbetween-y place”.
The reason for this lack of identity, thinks Marley, is that the Squeg sits at the junction of two distinct areas. In one direction lies a busy cluster of universities and the law courts. In the other, the hustle and bustle of New Street Station. With a shrug, he concludes: “This is just the bit in the middle.”
It’s this “inbetween-y” atmosphere that has brought me to Old Square because, try as I might, I can’t understand why it’s like this. This area should be prime real estate: it’s bang in the centre of a major city with plenty of beautiful buildings and a lot of footfall. Instead, when I make my way from the bus stop at Colmore Row, trudging along Bull Street I pass an uninspiring mix of betting shops, nail salons and an insurance broker. Turning left onto Corporation Street, I’m confronted with a wall of boarded-up windows belonging to the recently closed Priory Square Shopping Centre. The two bus stops in front ensure a steady presence of double deckers, passengers getting on and off, people waiting impatiently for their turn to leave.
