[Second] City Blues

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Birmingham: Britain's second city; despite more north-westerly claims to the title. But whereas one of those cities, Manchester, has been on the ascendant in recent times due to an increased media presence and a thriving University; poor old Birmingham, which was looking so promising recently: remodelling the much-maligned 1960s town centre, with its vehicle-centric, brutalist architectural vision of a 'modern' city centre; has seen a sudden, rapid decline in it's fortunes.

This has been widely commented on in the media the last week or so and the closure of John Lewis' flagship store stands testimony to the very thing that was wrong with the City's recent regeneration: putting all of it's eggs in the corporate retail basket and mortgaging itself to the hilt with vanity projects. After the pandemic hit, there was no backstop to fill the gap; nothing. With hospitality in free fall and retail on its knees, there is nothing left to pay the bills.

Sad though this all is to someone who grew up in the tatty but relatively vibrant Birmingham of the '50's 60's and even the '70's (it really wasn't as bleak a decade as people make out) I'm not really surprised. The same scenario is being played out worldwide: High Streets emptied of locally run, independent shops with the rise of out-of-town corporates and online sales; the latter leveraging even more business through Covid and its restrictions on movement. Now, the larger companies which created, or at least exacerbated the situation are also retreating: waiting for a recovery that might not come while their staff are laid off at the worst possible time imaginable.

Most cities of a reasonable size bounce back from times like these and Birmingham has done just that many times; but at what price next time? Focussing on the people who live, work and contribute to the life of a city has to be made paramount, with a heavy premium to be paid by the companies with deep pockets for the privilege to trade alongside smaller firms rooted in the community. But there will be a quid pro quo: the people of those cities will need to start believing in and contributing to the places in which they live, rather than  just swallowing the myths of corporate retail culture from pay-check to pay-check. Maybe by ignoring the fairy tale cycle of endless consumption and concomitant waste that has no place in a world gripped by pandemic and facing human-inflicted, potentially terminal climate-change; we might just for once be able to effect some positive social re-engineering for a change.

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