My beloved Birmingham, the city I called home for 26 years and where my children grew up, is drowning in a sea of black bin bags. It’s a shocking sight to see this once proud city, that was arguably the centre of the industrial revolution, in such a state. Thousands of tonnes of rubbish is piling up, rats are everywhere – and the stench is dreadful. As the weather warms up, life in Britain’s second city might become unbearable.
It wasn’t always like this in Birmingham. Two hundred years ago, great thinkers met here: Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt and Matthew Boulton among them. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, George Cadbury established his Bournville ‘factory in a garden’. Later, the British motor industry set up shop in the city. There are more miles of canal than Venice and almost as many trees as people. But this spring, Birmingham is an embarrassment rather than something to be proud of.
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