Birmingham – the site of the first urban motorway (the Inner Ring, completed in 1971), the home of Spaghetti Junction, and arguably the quintessential British city of the car. The car promised prosperity – look to the sprawling sites of Castle Bromwich Assembly and the Longbridge Plant; the looming behemoth of Fort Dunlop, which at one point employed over 10,000 workers. Such scale is indicative of the wealth tied into these industrial endeavours. And as much as cars were constructed in the city, under the eyes of Herbert Manzoni (Birmingham’s City Engineer and Surveyor, 1935-1963,) the city was constructed in the image of the car. The concrete fabric of post-war Birmingham was woven out of roads, tunnels, and flyovers, crossing wildly over and under each other to create a modernist landscape that is the lasting image of the city.

However, this mid-century techno-utopian vision of Birmingham grows further from reality every year. With the 2021 introduction of the Clean Air Zone and a spate of ‘serious incidents’ leading to the city council declaring a Road Safety Emergency in July 2024, it seems clear that attempts are being made by the city to turn its back on the car. More and more streets are becoming pedestrianised and in the past few months I’ve noticed at least three new bus gates crop up in Digbeth that make the area increasingly hostile to drivers.

I’m sure most people who have spent any significant time in Birmingham have a sorry tale to tell pertaining to its roads. Feeling the wind rattle through your bones as a taxi careens past you, just a hair’s width-away, as you stumble out of a Digbeth Bar. Your first kiss and your mother’s face flashing before your eyes as you attempt to cross the Pershore road, blearing horns shaking you out of your reverie almost as soon as it begins. Queueing for an hour to move approximately 30 metres down the Aston Expressway, and some arsehole cutting in front of you after cruising down the red middle lane, seemingly oblivious to the flashing signals screaming at you not to use that bit of the road. The car is no longer Birmingham’s childhood best friend, laughing and swapping toys. Vehicles are perhaps more comparable to the guy you’ve mostly lost touch with but still see down your local pub every time you go, that you try to avoid if you can, but you’ll still give him a forced smile (teeth clenched, not meeting the eyes) and a raised glass for the sake of those good old days on the playground. 

However, whether these “good old days” can even be thought of as that good is up for debate. In the years immediately following the completion of the Inner Ring the cracks began to show, and the belief in the power of the road/ motorised vehicles for urban renewal dwindled. Through the 1970s, the demand for foreign motors was on the rise, and former giants such as Dunlop and the Longbridge Plant began to see their status decline. In April of 1974, the ‘very serious concern’ of lead levels rising around the Gravelly Hill Interchange and Copely Hill was raised in parliament by Jeff Rooker and Julius Silverman (20th-century MPs for Perry Barr and Erdington/ Aston respectively).² In the first three months of 1970 alone, twenty-nine people died and over 1,500 were injured in traffic accidents in the city. 

In 1972, former Superintendent Bob Morris stated, ‘when I first saw [Spaghetti Junction] in a model, it frightened me to death’.³ Although Morris carried on to explain the safety of the road system, perhaps he was onto something with his initial reaction… Maybe he was too quick to dismiss that uneasy feeling in his gut; maybe he saw beyond the sheen of the concrete interchange, strewn across the city’s vista like glittering and tangled silver necklaces… maybe he saw through it all to its grotesque core…

In that initial feeling he truly understood the horror of post-war urban planning and Birmingham’s roads, even if just for a moment.

Another visionary who seems to have understood this truth is film and television director, Dirk Campbell. Although he, unlike Morris, refused to shy away from it; he embraced the darkness of Birmingham’s streets in his art through the 1990 cult horror film, ‘I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle’. A film I have been fascinated by since I first learned of its existence. As a long-time lover of both vampires and Birmingham, it felt almost as if ‘Vampire Motorcycle’ had been made for me (albeit nearly ten years before my birth).

Shot and produced in Birmingham, the film centres around a motorcycle haunted by an evil spirit following an occult mishap with a crossbow (if you’re not sold from that sentence alone, I think there’s no hope for you really). ‘Vampire Motorcycle’ has everything you could want from a late-night horror flick – decapitations, brawling biker gangs, priests, a literal talking shite through which a character speaks from beyond the grave, and not to mention some glorious shots of Birmingham’s back streets being terrorised by the titular demon bike. After watching it, I was a woman possessed, compelled to reach out to Campbell to try and talk to him about it. To my surprise, he quickly responded to my (slightly manic) email, and we arranged to have a zoom call.

It’s hard to explain exactly what I mean by saying this, but ‘Vampire Motorcycle’ has a distinct “Birmingham-ness” to it, so I was quite surprised to learn that Dirk Campbell grew up in Canada. Although born in London in 1948, he only came to Birmingham as an adult to be employed by Central Television in the 1980s. After spending all his money on making a series of archaeological documentaries across the Middle East, he was in debt to a film laboratory. Hearing of his predicament, a friend gave him a tip that the streets of Central Television in Birmingham were paved with gold for TV workers. Apparently, they were making so much content that they simply couldn’t get the people to work on it, and they were desperate for staff. When Campbell arrived in Birmingham, he found the tip off to be true, and it ended up that about fifteen of his friends moved along with him. Some of this group worked together on the TV show ‘Boon’, and then many of them went on to work on ‘Vampire Motorcycle’.

According to Campbell, he and his friends weren’t immediately enamoured with the city (although he must have come round in the end, thank god, as he still resides in the West Midlands today.) Campbell described the area around Central Television studios (the studio was located opposite the Rep Theatre) to be ‘a mess’, with ‘none of the pedestrian walkways working’, no underpasses, no way to get into New Street Station, and just a whole load of ‘derelict roundups’. Around the same time Campbell moved to the city, artist and author Beryl Bainbridge wrote about an elderly couple she saw during a brief trip to Birmingham – she described them as ‘clinging to each other, stood marooned on the pavement beneath the massive bulk of a multi-storey car park. They were trying to cross the road, but they were on a corner and the traffic swept round and round without ceasing.’[44] A passage which adds colour to Campbell’s descriptions of moving through Birmingham as a pedestrian, evoking this sense of horror and human vulnerability tied to the roads. The fragility of flesh amidst the hard concrete and metal materiality of a Motor City. Something captured beautifully in the essence of ‘Vampire Motorcycle’ as a Birmingham-made Norton Motorbike literally rampages through the streets, thirsting for the blood of the city’s residents.

Paradise Circus, close to the former site of the Central Television studios, is the centre of the Inner Ring – and therefore, geographically speaking, at the centre of the 1970s vision for Birmingham. Today, this area has been redeveloped into the (slightly sterile and empty) Paradise, but when this was Campbell’s stomping ground in the 80’s, the modernist vision of Birmingham as Motor City was in steep decline. We knew about the lead poisoning. We knew about the fatalities on the roads. However, when we were chatting, Campbell suggested that this link between ‘Vampire Motorcycle’ and the disillusionment with the techno-utopian ideal of Birmingham’s Road system and the cost of Birmingham’s industrial past was unintentional. 

The reason, according to Campbell, for using a Norton motorbike as the evil machine was because the American company, Harley Davidson, responded to their request for a prop bike with a resounding ‘No’. They shot in Birmingham because Campbell and his friends were already working in the city on ‘Boon’, so it just made sense to use the same facilities, crew, and sets. The iconic shots of the Vampire Motorcycle ripping the opposing biker gang to shreds under the dark bricks of Digbeth’s railway arches were conceived by a need for a ‘spooky’ location, not through any conscious commentary on the state of Birmingham’s infrastructure…

But it feels myopic to say the conditions of the city and its roads didn’t shape the film, even if it was not designed. The context in which Campbell found himself living and working was a city diminished and hollowed out by the failed modernist project. He existed within the twisting, stained, and crumbling concrete that came to symbolise this failure, and that locality surely must have had an impact. ‘Vampire Motorcycle’ was made within a city with knocked confidence and its identity in flux, and I would argue it is a stronger piece of art because of that context. The ‘industrial grunge’ and emptiness Campbell found in Birmingham was essential for the film’s vision, and I wonder if the idea of Vampire Motorcycle could have been truly brought to life in any other location? The creativity of the film rose from the coffin, as it were, of a city dying of lead poisoning.

It is interesting, perhaps, to think about this period of history in relation to today (although I will not go into much detail for concerns over the length of this essay…). Birmingham once again appears on the world stage as a failure, marred by bin strikes, the debasement of the world’s oldest working cinema (I miss you, Electric), and bankrupt councils. All this, despite the hopes of success and prosperity that were borne out of the Commonwealth Games and Birmingham Festival of 2022, as well as, of course, the (now delayed and reduced) arrival of HS2. Cycles of regeneration and decline in Birmingham continue to repeat: we should not turn our backs in shame but explore, excavate, and respond to these conditions, much like Campbell, who didn’t look away but instead made work imbued with the decay and dread of the city in the 1980s, and produced a frankly excellent cult-classic horror film.

It is artists, like Dirk Campbell, who have the ability to inject new life into Birmingham. But council cultural funding has been cut to zero, and increasing amounts of cultural space are being sold off with creatives turfed out. We should stop staking our city and its artists through the heart and rather support them to continue to sink their teeth into the neck of Birmingham, drawing out inspiration like warm blood. We should foster and encourage the making of amazing/ silly/ terrible/ excellent/ bad-taste/ high-budget/ grass-roots/ profound/ stupid/ beautiful/ powerful and every other kind of art about and within the city. A strong arts and cultural scene can push back against the bland and sterile redevelopment of the city (i.e. Paradise) and help us avoid a soulless, boring future.

In order to truly explore these ideas I think the time is ripe for a new Vampire film based in Birmingham – and who better to do it, than the Concrete team? Please let us know if you are interested in funding us.

---

Footnotes