Where the Iron Heart of England....

Growing up in Birmingham (or at least going to school there) as I did, you quickly got used to the fact that most of the rest of the country tried to act like the city didn't exist.

Birmingham was perennially the "flyover" city - on the way to everywhere, but a place that people knew nothing about, except New Street Station, Spaghetti Junction, and *that* accent. I say that accent, what most people think is the Birmingham accent is actually that of the Black Country. Birmingham's is a wee bit softer. Paul Anderson, as Arthur Shelby in Peaky Blinders, nails it.

The problem was always that Birmingham was good at too many things. The workshop of the world, or city of a thousand trades, never had one identity around which its reputation could coalesce. It was never the capital of coal, the city of steel or cottonopolis. That's not to say that it lacked major employers, between them Cadbury, Austin and the BSA employed enough for a small city by themselves. Just that it was always the city of artisans - which it remains today in areas like the Jewellery Quarter.

And because it was good at too many things, it was a target for the Luftwaffe. Birmingham suffered in the war, and then suffered after the war when the city fathers decided to remake Birmingham in the image of Detroit. Britain's motown. This perhaps reached it's apex in the promotional film Telly Savalas Looks at Birmingham. I'm not making this up, look on YouTube. Allegedly Kojak phoned in his performance from a studio, and never visited the city he extolled. Remember that as you hear him wax lyrical about the disco dancing competition in Cannon Hill Park...

By the 1990s it was rather battered, bloody but unbowed. The outdoor escalators of the Bull Ring were mildewed, the Electric Cinema (Britain's oldest) was reduced to showing the more "interesting" end of the cinemascape, and New Street station was a dark, cavernous hole in the ground. There had been the odd attempt to break out of the grimness, Symphony Hall was a triumph, and a great setting for Simon Rattle's CBSO before he took himself off to Berlin. Then there was the ICC, with it's bridge that wasn't quite wide enough (allegedly), and the turn of the century development of Brindley Place.

Personally, I think fortunes turned with the publication of Jonathan Coe's hymn to Birmingham, The Rotters Club. I'm not sure why that should be, but I went off to university and devoured Coe's depiction of the 1970s, and a school I knew very well, then came back to discover that the city had finally had the rockets put under it. The new Bullring may be a temple of shopping, but it is a supremely intelligent. light and airy bit of architecture. Selfridges is like something that has landed from another planet. The good thing throughout is that the bombs and the 60s planners made a lot of central Birmingham a blank canvas for architectural experimentation. You don't have to like the new buildings, but these days it's rare that anything worthwhile has been demolished to create the space for them.

This trend is likely to continue. Railway enthusiasts mourn the loss of the Euston arch, and the other buildings of the great terminus of the London and Birmingham railway. Well HS2, if it ever gets built is going to breathe new life into the terminus at the other end. Curzon Street still stands, isolated in the wasteland of an abandoned marshalling yard. If you go and look round it on the rare open days you find a building comparable to the best Georgian industrial architecture of the nation's dockyards. Stone faced, sweeping stairs, light and airy, Curzon Street is an unlikely and forgotten survivor and it's about time more was made of it.

Of course, there have been casualties along the way. The 1930s saw the start of the trend of civic vandalism with the destruction of Barry and Pugin's King Edward's School in New Street (although these days, I suppose, King Edward's House which replaced it is worthy of a preservation order itself). It was by the time of demolition utterly unfit as a school building (the school itself relocated very successfully to Edgbaston) but you can't help but feel that they wouldn't demolish it now.

More recently we've seen the destruction of the Central Library, which wasn't to everyone's taste but stood as an example of the best brutalism you're likely to see. I even supported those who wanted to list it as a warning to the future if it would save the damn thing but it wasn't to be.

Birmingham now stands on the threshold of a new age. The West Midlands region, with it's own mayor is waiting in the wings, and this should be the opportunity for Brummies to seize back control of their destiny.

They're a quiet lot, the people of Birmingham, but they know what they're doing. They don't need the glitz and glamour of the brash northern upstarts like Manchester or Leeds to know who they are and where they're going. The Second City is back.

Notes from Moseley

And so we roar back into life with a look at rugby union. It seems appropriate to begin with a note on Joost Van Der Westhuizen, who died earlier today aged 45. That's no age at all. I don't suppose anyone who saw it will forget the immense tackle he put in on Jonah Lomu in the 1995 World Cup Final - helping the Springboks on their way to a famous victory.

At a time when there's more money in the global game than ever before, stories are beginning to break in the press that the fans have known were coming for years. Rugby below the premiership in the UK is suffering. Championship and National One rugby has been an entertaining "product" for years, but it doesn't get the crowds that the spectacle deserves. It's not hard to see why when so much of the money in the sport is kept at the Premiership level. London Welsh tried valiantly to beat the system, winning the principle of fair funding, but much good it did them  - their liquidation was announced the other week. Now we read in the press that the great and good are considering introducing a promotion playoff between the team finishing top of National One, and the side that comes bottom of the Championship - and so drawbridges go up, players lose hope, and fans lose interest.

Of course, the problems started when the game went professional - the RFU lost control very early on, and put the leading clubs in the driving seat. Some prospered, others, like Moseley and Coventry, got themselves into enormous trouble trying to keep up. And so we've ended up in a place where the top clubs have bought their spots around the table, leaving the others doomed to spend eternity hanging round the fringes, grateful for the scraps.

Nevertheless, Moseley vs Rosslyn Park on Saturday afternoon was as entertaining as you'd expect, with a blizzard of tries from Mose's Ed Sheldon, more yellow cards than you can shake a stick at, and enough entertainment to send the crowd home happy. But as you stand in the clubhouse at Billesley Common, it's difficult not to feel that the place is haunted by the ghosts of the past. Names like Teague, Webster, Finlan, Doble, Jeavons, Everest, Warren. Names from a time when the country looked at Mose vs Cov as the England trials game; when sides feared to come to the Reddings.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Thankfully, there are supporters who have kept the faith with Moseley, and that there is rugby to watch at all is little short of astonishing after the lows the club experienced - losing the Reddings, a period on the pitches at Birmingham University, and the early infrastructure-light days on the Common. But to kick on Moseley needs investment. Birmingham needs Moseley. It shouldn't be difficult, but it never seems to happen.

Us fans just have to keep the faith and hope something will turn up.

Up the red and black

Back to the subject of spatial strategy (do try and stay awake...), or the coming sacrifice of Meriden on the altar of new city building

Interesting article in the MoS today (which must nearly be an oxymoron) about government plans to put 100,000 houses in the increasingly narrow gap between Birmingham and Coventry.  Is there any common sense left in the world.  The same article, in what we must hope is just typical Mail outrage/spin, suggests the rebranding of Birmingham International Airport to, wait for it, Birmingham London Airport....  You know those occasions when you truly think you are living in the end of days?

Actually there is some method in the airport madness, in as much as assuming HS2 gets built then it will be quicker to get into London from Birmingham airport than it is from Stanstead.  That having been said, it doesn't do much for the sense of Birmingham as a city in its own right, rather than some form of extremely northern dormitory suburb of the great metropolis - rather like a super-sized version of Acton...

The problem is that this answers part of the demand for expansion of the national housing stock, without really addressing what it is that all these new Brummies are going to do when they get there (other than commute to London).  The idea of a forty mile continuous urban sprawl from the rust belt of the Black Country through to Coventry is something that really ought to make people stop and think about what it is that they want from where they live.  I know the relaxation of the planning laws is going to create a presumption in favour of new development, but at what cost to the domestic environment, and the sanity of the inhabitants?

I'm going to write something in the next couple of days about the coming referendum on whether Birmingham should have an elected mayor, but it would be interesting to see where the putative contenders stand on the idea of annexing Coventry as a flagship policy....  Not quite local democracy all this, is it?

Marchout Already

The other day, I realised that I was old - either that or that my friends were too young.  It wasn't just my thirty first birthday, but that I found myself having to explain to two separate people who Ocean Colour Scene are...

If you were anywhere near Birmingham in the mid 90s it would have been inconceivable that anyone would not have known OCS, probably personally.  London had Blur, Manchester had Oasis, Liverpool, God help them, had Cast...., we had Ocean Colour Scene.  And they were visible.  It wasn't just their appearance playing The Day We Caught the Train on Top of the Pops, or The Riverboat Song belting out every time TFI Friday came on, but you had a good chance of running into them down the pub - either the Flapper (behind Symphony Hall), or the Tap & Spile off Broad Street.  OCS had a national profile, but largely only one that involved being attacked by the NME as purveyors of "Dad-rock."  Thank you, Steven Wells...  They sold out arenas though, because away from the press the UK is not short of people with taste - or, at least it wasn't - in the era of the X Factor frankly who knows....

Britpop has been accused of many things, probably most accurately of being a magpie genre; nicking a riff here and a middle 8 there and putting them together to create something less than the sum of its parts.  At least OCS had the intelligence and taste to raid the back catalogues of some minor heroes - where Oasis spent their time listening to the Beatles, Birmingham's finest had immersed themselves in the back catalogue of the Small Faces and supped deep at the well of Northern Soul and the Wigan Casino.

On Friday night I took myself off to the Oxford Academy to see a band I last saw playing at the NEC to a crowd of about 20,000 in 1998.  Timing to a perfection so as to miss the support act, I'd just got my first pint by the time they wandered on stage and struck up the first half of the set, which would see the seminal 1996 album Moseley Shoals played in its entirety.  It was like being 16 again.

Simon Fowler always did have one of the most bell clear and distincttive voices of the 90s, and it hasn't suffered at all over the last decade - demonstrating a note perfect musical sensibility on everything from Robin Hood to Get Blown Away, and a storming, vocal chord tearing, rendition of Day Tripper at the end.

Steve Cradock demonstrated once again his claim to be one of the most technically proficient guitarists working in the UK, although it has to be said that the absence in live performance of the "5th member of the band", 90s producer Brendan Lynch, meant that the sound lacked some of the distinctive tape loops and squelch which typified Moseley Shoals and Marchin' Already.

Oscar Harrison was great on drums, and they really don't miss ex-bassist Damon Minchella.  Great night all round really...

So, Ocean Colour Scene, then, poets of the Birmingham suburbs and small West Midlands towns; champions of the underdog; backing band by appointment to Paul Weller; and still standing.  More importantly, still marching....

And where are the Undertones now then NME?  In fact who even reads the NME these days....?