I was a well-traveled eight-year-old — or so I thought. Having family in Bearsden (a Glasgow suburb), Northumberland, the Wirral, South Yorkshire, Hertfordshire, Cambridge and Devon, I considered my grasp of Britain pretty well complete. Then a school friend moved to Staffordshire when his father got a new job there. That got me looking at maps. What happened in Staffordshire? And for that matter, in Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Herefordshire? Where was the Black Country, and why was it that colour; did the sun not shine? Even Birmingham, beyond the confines of Harborne, where family friends lived, was a mystery to me. What was in this empty zone at the centre of England?
My childhood knowledge of this region only reached to Worcestershire sauce and the nursery rhyme ‘Doctor Foster Went to Gloucester in a Shower of Rain.’ These West Midlands (I realise Gloucester is an edge case) names eluded me — they were imaginary zones of endless rain and excellent medical training, bitter-tasting liquids, eternal night, and towns that school friends disappeared to and never came back from. Who knew what went on in these places?
Long before I moved to Birmingham, I discovered the ‘architectural documentaries’ of Jonathan Meades as a teenager. Meades has always said that these films are not documentaries, but instead, “essays, inventions and performances.” He has made three films on the West Midlands for the BBC, specifically Severn Heaven (1990), Birmingham Heart By-Pass (1998) and Worcestershire: Travels with Pevsner (1998). Additionally, Meades has also collaborated on a photo series called Estate (2015) with the documentary photographer Robert Clayton, charting life on the Lion Farm project in Oldbury, the Black Country town where Meades’s grandfather was born. These films filed in the ‘empty zone’ in the heart of England for me — proving that it was my ignorance, rather than any real absence of culture, that had created a blank spot on the map. “I got to know Birmingham by wanting to know it — by exploring it,” Meades tells me over the phone. “I also explored its hinterland, its home counties — Henley-in-Arden, those sort of places.”
This month, Meades published a 1,008-page novel called Empty Wigs that ranges across Southern France, North Africa and Central Germany before returning to the West Midlands, along the Severn and Teme Valleys in the 19th century. Here, Meades invents the fictional Shropshire-based Malpasfang Lodge Model Farm, an apparent satire of 19th-century rural utopian projects like the French socialist Charles Fourier’s phalanstère. Only, this being Meades, at Malpasfang Lodge, utopian harmony is replaced with experimental eugenicist inter-species breeding. However, I’d like to think this is a comment on the failure of planned communal living rather than on the West Midlands.
Meades’s best-known work on the region, Heart By-Pass, has constituted a half-digested introduction to Birmingham for many journalists. Witness Heart By-Pass appearing in articles about the city in the national media, including UnHerd and Spiked. Indeed, Will Lloyd's recent article about Birmingham in The Times, which sparked a lot of online discourse about Birmingham’s “complete absence” from national cultural relevance, opens with a reference to Meades’s documentary on the city.
It is a constant surprise to a certain type of British journalist (including myself) that there are people, buildings, traditions, music, politics and cuisine in the Midlands, to rival the self-mythologising cultures of the South and North. Heart By-Pass is not a film that promotes the proposition that Birmingham is a blank slate — instead, it spends 29 minutes arguing the opposite: mentioning everything from heavy metal and balti to terracotta architecture, car culture and Brum’s ironic humour in affectionate detail.
Too many people seem to have only watched the film’s first couple of minutes and imbibed the central contention that Meades is trying to deconstruct — namely, that Birmingham has no culture, no identity, and no place in the British imagination. Few seem to have got its message: see, for example, one Twitter user’s recent comparison of Birmingham to the irradiated nuclear wasteland of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
Meades puts this misunderstanding down to Birmingham’s “self-deprecating humour,” a function of the city falling beneath what he calls the “irony curtain” which divides the UK at the middle. Above the irony curtain, according to Meades, “people mean what they say, say what they mean,” below the line you find individuals embracing a “vernacular quotidian irony…speaking against yourself.”
Meades extends his critique of the British elite’s lack of interest in the city in an essay called “Birmingham” contained in his collection Museum Without Walls (2012). Here, he details how: “When it comes to public buildings Birmingham showed Britain the way: it was a virtual city-state which invented the notion of civic pride and provided its people with schools and libraries and technical colleges — all of them in the loudest and reddest of red bricks.” For Meades, “this is where [Birmingham’s] problems start,” because “industrial red brick incited the loathing of several generations of bien pensant aesthetes.”
Meades tells me that it is Birmingham’s oddity that still grabs him: “The churches of Birmingham, especially those of the Catholic diocese, can be amazing. There are three remarkable modern churches, built by Richard Gilbert Scott, they would have looked perfectly at home in Las Vegas.” He adds that the city’s famous late-19th-century architecture still stands out to him: “Birmingham is probably the only major British city, with the exception of Glasgow, that has lots of Arts & Crafts work – most Arts & Crafts stuff is suburban. But Birmingham brings the style into the centre of the city. It’s an exception to the norm.”
To me, the things the West Midlands has helped produce, from the Pre-Raphaelites to two-tone and Ska, are sadly overshadowed in British culture by the dominant self-conceptions of the South and North: from the Bloomsbury Group to The Beatles. Meades’s films were, then, a corrective to my ignorance and a salve for my curiosity about places the British media often overlooks or calls ‘Middle England.’ But Meades’s work doesn’t just speak to recently arrived journalists like me.
Both Birmingham-based architect Joe Holyoak and Brummie writer Jon Neale have connected to his depictions of the city. Holyoak tells me that: “Meades is in some ways the nearest that we have to [mid-century architecture critic] Ian Nairn (he also wrote about Birmingham), who is sadly missed – the awkward outsider who refuses to conform to the convenient orthodoxies accepted by the profession, and who asks difficult questions.” He adds: “When I wrote my column on Smallbrook Queensway for the Birmingham Post in 2016, I contacted Meades to get his views on the Ringway Centre. He wrote that: ‘Birmingham's appetite for self-destruction is boundless. It is especially crass at a time when the singular merits of 1960s architecture are at last being widely acknowledged.”
Neale, meanwhile, says: “He's the one writer who I think has really ‘got’ Birmingham in the way that I'd experienced it growing up there, and how it then looked to me as I lived elsewhere in the country and moved back.” He tells me that Meades: “really likes Birmingham, thinks it is quirky and interesting and full of history, nuance and character, which is not the usual approach to the city.”
In a sense, the West Midlands are a perfect subject for Meades. He is a journalist, essayist, former restaurant critic, novelist and filmmaker who has spent a large part of his career pushing the proposition “that the exotic begins at home.” His documentaries stand up for the aesthetically unpopular and patronised, including Brutalism, caravan parks, Fife football towns, Scottish bogs, Essex, the eccentric suburbs of Brussels, and Northern Europe as an alternative holiday destination to the Mediterranean.
This is partly because, despite his RP accent (probably picked up at RADA), Meades is a consummate outsider to the establishment. He was born in Wiltshire in 1947 to a lower-middle-class family. His father was a biscuit salesman, hailing from the West Midlands, while his mother, a school teacher, came from Scotland via Southampton (another city which is consistently ignored by our media and heritage sectors).
Even when he writes about covering Birmingham and its surroundings, there is little to suggest Meades is speaking with an insider’s authority in his films. This is despite his initiation into the landscapes of the Severn, Teme and Avon valleys, the Malverns, and the Worcestershire countryside by his incredibly parochially proud uncles — Hank and Wangle. Instead, on this ‘home turf’ he presents himself as an outsider, as a cosmopolitan looking in from the outside.
The fact that Uncle Hank was the town clerk of Burton-upon-Trent never stops Meades from excoriating his legacy and veneration of the countryside over towns, writing in an Encyclopedia of Myself (2014): “Under his stewardship Burton destroyed itself. The mega-brewers, whom Uncle Hank sucked up to…were given carte blanche to demolish the great brick warehouses that defined Burton…They were expendable (and Victorian). Cities are temporary things. Only the country, the specially sanctioned parts of the country, are eternal.”
Much like the Midlands itself, Meades challenges established British assumptions. Meades is a former BBC employee who increasingly reviles the institution; a documentarian who is suspicious of the very form he works in; an Englishman living in exile in Marseille; a figure who sounds posh but grew up in petit-bourgeois provincial obscurity; a British know-it-all who didn’t attend Oxford or Cambridge; a modernist who doesn’t like minimalism; a character actor playing a presenter and, most important, an architectural writer who prefers the town and ‘ordinary’ buildings over the countryside and great aristocratic houses.
His films have always had a large amount of cachet with a certain breed of university-educated, London-based, (let’s be honest) men, and he has his proteges in architectural writers like Owen Hatherley, Christopher Beanland and Douglas Murphy. However, Meades’s main tendency is a democratising one, celebrating the overlooked and misunderstood, and his work ought to be more widely known, especially in the West Midlands and Birmingham, and outside his standard enclave of anoraky middle-class blokes. With a rise in the popularity of Brutalism and the release of the feature film The Brutalist, his appeal should widen.
For a filmmaker who has covered a broad array of topics: from Stalinist buildings to the uses of jargon, it is telling that he dedicated four works to the West Midlands over his television career. There is an affection for the region that goes beyond Meades’s familial connections to the place. Not that these connections don’t matter: his West Midlands work for the BBC is full of a wry and detached reverence for the towns his uncles and father took him to: from Bewdley and Stourport to Pershore, Malvern and Wolverley.
Indeed, in a recent essay for The Oldie, Meades writes about his Oldbury-born grandfather’s memories of the industrial heart of the Black Country in the early 20th century when: “the floors of two-room pubs were glossy with freshly hawked Dudley oysters and the markets sold blewits and pies, the Black Country really was black with soot, with the issue of belching chimneys.” Meades, despite his performance as a consummate outsider dismissing his family roots, seems to continuously return to his childhood memories and family connections.
For instance, his documentary Severn Heaven details childhood trips to pleasure boat waterways, fun fairs, Victorian railway lines, cave houses, and self-built cabins in the Severn Valley near Birmingham. This is a zone of working-class folk architecture outside the confines and dictates of planning departments and private development. Indeed, over decades, the local council has repeatedly tried to demolish Bewdley’s cabins. Meades scorns those who’d dismiss these DIY cabins as worthless, instead claiming that the buildings are representative of the: “spirit and resourcefulness and often fantastical bricolage of the indigent inventors who built them by themselves, for themselves.”
For him, it takes an outsider to recognise the architectural worth of these overlooked places: “Because these buildings are unself-conscious, there’s a gap between how those who live in them conceive of them and how outsiders conceive of them. So far as the inhabitants go they’re pretty riverside cottages. The outsider…would exclaim something like: this is a collective marvel, this is a five-star folly, this is a work of unwitting surrealism.” Indeed, Bewdley’s most famous son, British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, notoriously hated the cabins.
In Meades’s Worcestershire documentary, Travels with Pevsner, we get a glimpse of the filmmaker at his most elegiac: narrating a tale of childhood hikes in the Malverns to the Victorian poetry of A.E. Housman and music of Edward Elgar — both Worcestershire men of the same generation. Meades calls Worcestershire: “west of the Severn, the loveliest part of England.” But this isn’t a documentary of nostalgic retrospection. Instead, Meades describes these Worcestershire artists as patriotically appropriated: “the one’s music and the other’s verse came to stand for England — for England’s martial virtues and imperial swagger; and for England’s melancholia and hopeless enthrallment to an irretrievable past.”
Meades includes the standard iconic houses and cathedrals of Worcestershire in his documentary. However, it is a strange ruin which, ultimately, steals the show. Indeed, Meades tells me over the phone that he had once thought of buying a lodge outside Witley Court, the vast derelict Italianate country estate where Bob Dylan once went hunting for ghosts. Travels with Pevsner makes the case that the whole estate should be left to rot: “I loved it, because it was wild and nature was taking over — improving that artifice that sought to improve on nature…Witley Court is currently being cleaned into newness — it’s going to be a brand-new ruin. English Heritage’s wretched stewardship of this place is an insult to all notions of graceful decay.”
Indeed, Witley Court seems to encapsulate Meades’s attitude to the West Midlands. He approaches the whole region through a haunted lens. This is the England of his 1950s childhood, but it is also an England that is paradoxically declining even as it is reinventing itself. Meades seems unsure whether places like Witley Court, and by extension the West Midlands, should be regenerated, lest they lose their authenticity. For now, balancing development and authenticity is a challenge for Birmingham and West Midlands leaders: and that’s exactly why they should watch Jonathan Meades.
Comments