Today we’re publishing the second half of Stephen Bromage’s essay on Blythe Valley, ‘Neo-Birmingham’, and urban processes of centralisation/dispersal. If you’ve enjoyed this work and wish to provide feedback, he urges you to contact him at in11bromage@gmail.com.
From around 1970 to the present day, Neo-Birmingham has been under construction. It took advantage of a new urban form, the Suburb, and applied this to the task of creating a Centre. It would both benefit from the effects of agglomeration and from the pastoral, half-timbered landscape of Tudor Warwickshire (the only heavy industry in rural Warwickshire, coal mining, had never been as widespread as in Nottinghamshire or the North, and working-class pit villages could largely be avoided) and the Metropolitan Green Belt, which prevents the establishment of a continuous urban carpet but is porous enough to allow business parks and exurban development totalling hundreds of thousands of square feet to proliferate.
Neo-Birmingham is based on an archipelago of business parks scattered throughout the countryside, fed by a supply of workers who, depending on their wealth, live either in surrounding urban areas or, for the elite, inside Neo-Birmingham’s villages and market towns and country manors. Agriculture is no longer the primary source of economic output and accounts for infinitesimal employment, but still remains the predominant land use; an elaborate, living form of set dressing, which can easily be cannibalised should the need for more semi-detached houses and business parks arise (unlike urban land, full of inconveniences such as council housing and working factories). Commuter rail serves Neo-Birmingham almost as well as Old Birmingham (it’s no coincidence that there’s no direct link between Solihull and Coventry, but both are connected to Leamington Spa) and the area is crossed by a grid of B-Roads as busy as any arterial in Old Birmingham (although the speed limit is 20 miles per hour faster).
The view from one business park another is blocked by hillsides, rapeseed and woods; from one housing development the other is separated by a ten-minute drive. I’m so lucky, I can live in the beautiful countryside while working my big city job! – and it’s true, but so does everyone else, apart from the retail workers on the margins of their towns and villages, the pensioners who find themselves trapped in lifeless bedroom communities once driving licence has been revoked, the migrant workers paid illegal wages, working illegal hours, in debt to ruthless gangmasters, who maintain the pastoral delusion of English farmland.
This is where my thin veneer of impartiality must be dropped – Neo-Birmingham is much more exploitative, much less sustainable, much less vibrant, amusing, diverse, exciting, entertaining to be in than Old Birmingham. Not only has it hollowed out a vast tract of England’s already scarce countryside, but it has created new, more insidious spatial systems of wealth inequality and car dependence which must be dismantled if the coming ecological crisis is to be averted. It has siphoned wealth that could have benefitted the city of Birmingham (the only city of its size in Europe to lack a metro system; a city whose council has due to funding shortages been forced to close its public toilets), Coventry, and the Black Country, and instead used it to create a series of characterless non-places scattered across the countryside.
Liverpool’s captains of industry built the Liver Building. New York’s built Rockefeller Plaza. Birmingham’s built the sweep of Smallbrook Queensway, the lurid red clay law courts, its Parthenon-inspired Town Hall and its successor, the Constantinople-like university buildings, the baroque Council House, the ziggurat Central Library, the brutal tower of 103 Colmore Row, the tragic beauty of Spaghetti Junction, and a big blue King Kong statue; Neo-Birmingham’s built a few gutless office parks which can’t even be seen above the treeline, by design experienced only by those who employed inside them, admired by none.
Birmingham itself continues to grow population despite this siphon, but its centre, its trendy suburbs, are sectorial, marketed at a “type” – millennial and generation X “creatives”, academics, and young professionals, a significant minority of England’s white collar workers but a minority nonetheless – while the anodyne identityless Neo-Birmingham is the workplace and residence for the majority who have no interest for coffee more crafted than Costa and find filling the boot of a Nissan Qashqai in Knowle Tesco (for which the provision of free parking is a political issue significant enough for an independent councillor to break the Tories’ local stranglehold) or getting Ocado more convenient than organic shops and independent butchers.
The Conservative Government has recently announced plans to revise its housing formula, which would prioritise development in the Midlands and the North over the South East. For Neo-Birmingham this will not mean Bath, Bourneville, Belgravia as Create Streets and the Build Back Beautiful commission, high on wishful thinking, are convinced but Blythe Valley, Birmingham Business Park, Warwick Manufacturing Group; more Range Rovers, more manicured lawns, and more archipelagos of private dominion.