This week we are publishing a longform essay from Stephen Bromage. Stephen dwells for us here on his local area and how it fits into broader processes of (sub)urbanisation and wealth concentration. The first half is provided here, and we’ll publish the second half this coming Monday. As always, the views expressed here do not reflect those held by the Compass Magazine, CUGS, or the wider Cambridge Geography Department. Hope you enjoy!
In search of a decent sauna, I joined a local gym this autumn located in Blythe Valley, a short cycle ride from my house. Entering Blythe valley by bike, by negotiating an awkward, almost hostile series of traffic lights, petrol station, and supermarket car-park exists, one is greeted with an undulating landscape bisected by the pristine tarmac of a one way road which merges into a grand boulevard. A curious building comes into sight – rotund, glass, squat, like an airport control tower without its tower. Offices materialise; Squat, angular, plate glass, electric lights, information technology. Suddenly this campus environment is interrupted– Townhouses, Apartments – housing, laid out to impeccable New Urbanist principles; People live here, in urban housing units jutting onto the manicured lawns of plate-glass campus suburbia, all under corporate dominion. This is absurdity: and the metropolis that does absurdity better than any other is Birmingham.
Birmingham has seen fit to base both some of its largest blue-chip corporate bases – Arup, Lounge, Gymshark, parts of multinational corporations with vast turnover – as well as thousands of houses here, in an exurban office park with precisely zero recognisable architecture or even buildings tall enough to make a dent on the local skyline. The traditional explanation, summed up by the great Jonathan Meades in his documentary on the city, Heart Bypass, “The tendency of all English cities save London, is towards centrifugality”, makes sense, this landscape being the epitome of car-centric suburban design, Brum being the epitome of the motor city.
Certainly, the English city’s growth is characterised by a fear of the urban, a love of the car, and a yearning for imagined bucolic idyll, which has driven the country’s grim suburban development for decades. Birmingham is no exception. But in the business parks of Cannock Chase and Redditch and Dudley there is striking lack of global corporations, regional headquarters, luxury brands or sleek offices; a preference for corrugated steel and tarmac rather than glass and manicured lawn. Birmingham’s buildings may be distributed evenly outwards, but its wealth – as wealth tends to be – is concentrated.
For that matter, London is also anything but centripetal – its wealth flows inwards but its population, and with it its culture, is flowing outwards, as Zone 1 becomes a sterile corporate space. Perhaps that’s why incongruously urban housing has been built in Blythe Valley – it’s a remarkably similar experience to walking around the Vauxhall, Nine Elms, Battersea Opportunity Area, except the buildings there are a bit taller and there aren’t as many small trees.
I would argue that Blythe Valley is not a symptom of decentralisation, but of centralisation. This does not contradict traditional urban theory – in fact, if anything it’s the apotheosis of Bookchin’s Urbanisation without Cities: this totally privatised space is completely outside the power of municipal democracy and totally divorced from the atmosphere, the ego, of the city. It’s an utterly suburban space in terms of architecture, population density, and transit access.
But rather than an outer fringe, Blythe is at the centre of probably England’s greatest concentration of wealth outside its south-east. I propose that Birmingham itself is the suburb, its urban core and vast population just the largest of a series of out-of-town business parks for the vast, archipelagic, true commercial centre which, for the purposes of convenience, and because I find the name funny, I shall call Neo-Birmingham.
Neo-Birmingham is, approximately, a triangle of land between Birmingham Airport, the southern edge of Coventry, and Stratford-Upon-Avon’s racecourse. Its industries are much the same as what Old Birmingham was built on: engineering, consumer goods, logistics. Jaguar-Land Rover, one of Britain’s few surviving indigenous car marques (most cars on the island being built in the name of Nissan or Toyota), manufactures its Range Rovers here and Jaguars a few miles south at Gaydon, Warwickshire, which are then driven by Neo-Birmingham’s residents. Construction giant Arup has based its Birmingham office here, in Neo-Birmingham.
The irony of Neo-Birmingham is that none of it is in Birmingham. Most of it is located in the Borough of Solihull or the County of Warwickshire – a region named the “West Midlands”, a label so anodyne as to imply a desert province of Kazakhstan rather than a metropolis larger than Vienna, Amsterdam or Madrid. This is a deliberate strategy to disguise the presence of Neo-Birmingham, for unlike “West Midlands”, which implies nothing, the name Birmingham has connotations. Connotations of concrete, motorways, railways, grilled meat, shisha, coffee, simmering onions, bubble tea, the smell of cardamom and diesel, the sound of a hundred different languages, artists, music, urbanness and tall buildings, human life – all things that English people have been taught to despise, summed up in the epithet “Shithole”, which they apply to every settlement larger than a village.
The English establishment hates cities but, with empire gone, depend on them for their wealth. Rent-seeking and farming in Britain’s much-reduced footprint is now unable to sustain standards of living to which they have become accustomed. They have dealt with this in different ways – in “redeemable” cities, such as London and Manchester, large swathes have been cleansed of working-class population, cut into slices, and resold as an Investment Opportunity for Young Professionals, where one never has to stray beyond the safe havens of universities and Creative Quarters. In irredeemable cities, such as Birmingham, which is far too diverse and has an inner-city urban form of myriad light-industrial workshops (much harder to turn into apartments and co-working spaces than hulking warehouses or cotton mills), they applied an ingenious new solution…