Second city blues

Why are clever-clever people so rude about Birmingham? Bruce Chatwin dismissed his hometown as absolutely hideous, Kenneth Tynan called his birthplace a cemetery without walls. Britain’s second city has always been belittled, not least by those who’ve left it, and now the old slights have been revived in the current debate about HS2. Never mind the pros and cons of that controversial high-speed railway — it’s the destination which really gets London’s goat. If HS2 went to Liverpool we’d be sure to mind our p’s and q’s, but Brum has always been an easy target. As Londoners never tire of telling one another, ‘Fancy forking out all that cash, just to make it a bit easier to get to Birmingham.’

To be fair, not so long ago these patronising put-downs had some substance. Birmingham’s city centre was uniquely awful — a sociologist’s paradise of high-rise flats and flyovers. Yet when I returned here last year, for the first time in ten years, I was amazed to find this unloved metropolis had had a dramatic facelift. Birmingham was still a concrete jungle of subways and dual carriageways, but for the first time in half a lifetime the city centre seemed like a single entity. You could actually walk from place to place.

I walked from New Street station to the Mailbox, Birmingham’s smart new shopping centre, and along the towpath of the old canal — once a no-go zone, now a pleasant place to stroll. I walked to the municipal art gallery, to see Britain’s finest collection of Pre-Raphaelites. I dropped into the Symphony Hall, famous for its rich acoustic. And then it struck me: the entire debate about HS2 has been about business. Bugger business. Businessmen (and women) will still drive their company cars between London and Birmingham, as they’ve always done, or Skype each other, or whatever else they’re doing nowadays.