On Writing

Friends bought us a family ticket to Sandbox VR, ‘an immersive experience that feels like the future’. Sandbox VR is at the top of the ramp that connects New Street to the shiny new Grand Central mall above the station. The ramp is made of concrete and is iconic. When I was a child, it was the location of the Danish Food Centre, a large cafeteria-style restaurant that was opened by Princess Margrethe and Prince Henrik of Denmark in 1970, and introduced Brummies to rye bread and the roll mop.

Last year there was a fight on the ramp. ‘Kerr, who was topless’ reported Birmingham Live, ‘threw something at a group of homeless men before he brandished a glass bottle and either jabbed or swung it at Hewitt, aged 27, who was on the floor asleep’. The prosecutor said Hewitt reacted by picking up a metal bar and the two men proceeded to confront each other in front of the glass doors to Grand Central.’ The year before that, BirminghamWorld highlighted ‘Terrifying footage showing the moment a knifeman brandished a huge machete in McDonald’s restaurant on “the ramp” in Birmingham city centre before being tasered by police.’

We arrived at the ramp in the early evening. It was covered in litter and people. There were people standing up outside McDonalds and people lying down outside Baguette World, there were people catatonic and people ranting outside a shuttered chicken shop. ‘Welcome to the meltdown,’ a fella announced to no-one in particular, ‘the meltdown started in 2005.’ We tried to avert our gaze. Sandbox VR was cavernous, metallic and brightly lit. There were dark corners. We were shown into a room and, suited-up, choose from a variety of weaponry. Our task was to defend a derelict mansion against an army of zombies. The zombies were relentless and eventually we were overwhelmed. It was enjoyable, although there was a moment when we heard what might have been excitable screaming and couldn’t quite tell where it was coming from.

As we picked our way down the ramp to get the bus home, I wondered whether anyone realised how open the Sandbox VR branding – ‘an immersive experience that feels like the future’ – might be satire and mockery. Bloodthirsty zombies, the mall in Dawn of the Dead and all that. This is what I do. I’m a writer. Like and unlike the writers of BirminghamWorld and Birmingham Live, I see the world in metaphor and allusion, I am obsessed with finding the right words. I can’t help myself, but I also sometimes wonder if this is an insular self-indulgent preoccupation, a form of engagement with the world that is illusionary rather than substantive, a cop-out. If it is possible to live too much by language alone.

On Direct Action

I live in a suburb of Birmingham that is perhaps most notable for its unremarkable nature. The High Street is half a mile long: there’s an Asda and a Lidl and a Sainsbury’s, there are maybe half a dozen fried chicken joints, there are charity shops and a fairy-lit bob shop, all vapes and tat and money-laundering, which is frequented by both cheerily threatening youth and the old bill. There are four pubs, including a Spoons – ‘The Pub At Kings Heath.’

Just off the High Street, where the rents are less, there’s evidence of a more communally-minded environment of publicly-managed space and commercial activity. Low traffic neighbourhoods have made the backstreets quieter and – despite the protestations of those who feared the opposite effect –encouraged a number of bars and specialist small traders to open up.

As well as moving the lucky few a couple places along the happiness scale – Kings Heath is now home to the Independent Bookshop of the Year and an eatery dedicated to brunch – this change highlights what I imagine is a similarly typical disparity in economic/existential security. Last summer, on my way to a bar on the pedestrianised York Road, where people sit with dogs at tables in the sunshine, watching their children play, I passed two homeless men squatting on the busy pavement, their hand-held consoles cable-hooked into an advertising stand.

The unremarkable nature of Kings Heath extends to the politics of its populace. The suburb is covered by two main constituencies and the majorities secured by each of the main parties are invariably small. Citywide turnout in the general election was barely 50%, with the lowest figures recorded in areas of the highest deprivation. I suspect this rejection of the two-party system is a consequence, in part, of the consensus on Austerity that has – with a brief interlude for the remedial propositions of John McDonnell – been poisoning what passes for our democracy for a decade and a half. Whatever the reason, it has created a space into which various forms of direct community action have emerged.

Some examples. The application by a popular Junior and Infant School to become an Academy was thwarted by a parent-led campaign. When the owners of a 75-year-old hardware store – which has seen off the likes of B&Q, Homebase and Do It All –announced their retirement, it was bought out by a hastily convened co-op. Online opposition to the Low Traffic Neighbourhoods was coordinated and strident, and matched – rant for rant – by support for the initiative.

There’s plenty of scope for more such community action too. Birmingham City Council has been both underfunded and mismanaged for years, and the impact on essential services is profound. Refuse workers have been out on strike for 6 weeks now, and the dispute has reached the national news. The issues are complex but parsable. The difficulty is that for all of their sound and occasional fury, even the most successful of recent direct actions have taken place in isolation, informed less by a guiding principle than opportunism. They are underpinned not by the sense that renewal is possible but by a resigned acknowledgement that occasional inchoate expressions of dissatisfaction are the best we can hope for.