Nasty, brutish and on credit

Who says the leisure class is no more? On the contrary, as a recent weekday visit to the new spiritual heart of Britain revealed to me, it is very large indeed. Of course, the modern leisure class is not necessarily very high on the registrar-general’s scale of social classes from I to V, but that is another matter altogether.

But where, you ask, is Britain’s new spiritual centre? The very idea of such a centre seems a bit odd – absurd even. It is certainly not Rome or Jerusalem, much less Canterbury. In good pagan fashion, Britain’s spiritual centre is close to its geographical centre. The answer is the Bull Ring, Birmingham, or rather – as it is now called – Bullring.

The unutterably hideous Bull Ring (on the site of which there has been a market for 800 years) has been torn down, except for the Rotunda – a horrible 1960s monument to British architects’ incessant search for originality in the absence of taste or imagination – which has been preserved by the kind of criminals who allowed it to be built in the first place, in the hope that by doing so their own lack of taste and imagination will be justified or overlooked.