Rubbish in the streets. No recycling if you’re lucky, no collections at all if you’re not. The city half-masticated, mangled along its edges by the gnaw of late modernity: new flats for students, oligarchs, students who happen to be the children of oligarchs; HS-fucking-2; The Tram to Nowhere. The Tram’s almost done another leg, mind, the empty tracks stretching (after five years) a short walk up Digbeth High Street. It’s 2026 and this is what progress looks like. 

It’s at least satisfying to see the back of those insipid signs telling us they’re digging for Digbeth. Poor consolation though. My mum had a cafe at the top of Bradford St, since sold. One of many victims of this impulsive roil, this development brainstormed in boardrooms and pissed down on the rest of us like acid rain. And did you know you can’t even drink rain anymore? But that’s a global problem, not just ours. We’ve got enough of our own. Which is to say: what the fuck are we doing?

It’s easy to hate Brum, I know, and that’s what I’m going to do. Nobody does self-deprecation better than us natives. Small caveat for transparency: I was born in Manchester, but this city abducted me within months. My only non-Midlands toddler-memory is staring out over a field of long grass, the framing of it so dramatic in my head I suspect it’s from telly and not my actual life. Baudrillard calls that simulacra, the way media goes so fast it wipes out the real, becomes self-referential, all meaning reduced to slick tautology. A colonisation by speed, our inner lives replaced by the short-circuit babble of screens. How we speak in memes and reels, think in cartoons and films; the zombified husks of words like growth, innovation, change. 

Birmingham could be its own simulacra, a city too fast for itself. I grew up in Great Barr, an area bisected by one of the M6’s fat limbs. Might be why I’ve got asthma, the city’s car-smog sedimented in me, molar become molecular. Now and then it closes around my throat. Tightens my chest, reminds me who’s in control.

Even that’s a bluff. Nobody’s in control. They can’t be. Surely not. Labour council’s sat on their thumbs waiting for Reform or something worse to snatch their seats. Mayor Richard Parker follows in Andy Street’s footsteps by doing nothing much quickly. Another from Baudrillard: inertia by acceleration. You go so fast you go nowhere. Owen Hatherley frames it as a kind of masochism, Birmingham’s “natural state… one of self-destruction.” An echo of Ian Nairn, who says the city urges you towards shallowness, an inverted Paris. Shallow might be the word. The topsoil is constantly churned. The urge to rip it up, doesn’t matter what it is, and replace it with the same, or the same but worse, or worse and only worse. The Old Library. The Electric Cinema. Smallbrook Queensway. Oasis Markets. Bullring Indoor Markets. Stinking structures, too much concrete, good for heritage and not much else. The city’s unofficial motto: just get rid. 

There are solutions of course, but they remain abstracted, faraway things. Maybe the Greens will get in and tax the rich, reverse our managed decline. Maybe Farage’s project will implode alongside Starmer’s given Steve Bannon, Nigel’s post-UKIP mentor and arguably Reform’s architect, is all over the Epstein files like a noncey wart. I’m hopeful but not expectant. Hard to think of a Green win when our roads are stained with tatty windtorn flags, scraps of nationalism which look like they were dragged out of a skip, which make you ask what, exactly, they’re meant to make us proud of. And the Bannon stuff, that’ll never stick to Farage. He’s alright, our Nige, you could have a pint with him while he courts abusive elites. Starmer would probably order a wine. Woke.  

It’s not encouraging, thinking all we can do is wait for something to happen in London and hope it happens here. We’ve lost so much energy, that electric will which once defined our industrial unfurling. My nan’s back garden is made of an old factory wall. We once laboured in workshops no bigger than houses, two fingers up to the guilds and our neighbours. Invented more things than you can hold in your head. We still make a fair bit of jewellery and that, but it’s not what we make, never been what. Rather how. We focus too much on the content, forget the form. It’s the disposition we’ve lost or are losing, the knack for self-sufficiency. Birmingham is being remade but not by us. No longer even pretending to be for us, as in the early Post-War days when Herbert Manzoni excoriated the city to install his precious ringroads. Things are added and taken away according to sums whose workings we’re not allowed to see. We’re told it will make things better, but I’m not sure even the most panglossian YIMBY truly believes that.  

We still like to bang on about our independence, but there’s a trace of the hollow. It so often becomes sloganeering which hews too close to brandspeak: city of a thousand trades; workshop of the world, more miles of canal than Venice. Bab, the spectre haunting the Midlands. Go to the basement floor of that Bladerunner Primark in the city centre and you’ll see what I’m on about. The walls are pasted with unintentionally patronising civic grandstanding. It has the tone of someone who’s just moved here and believes they’ve made a terrible mistake, who’s looking for anything about Brum which might soften their despair. To paraphrase (the actual quotes are perhaps worse): It’s actually quite colourful here. / Isn’t Old Joe big? / I love how friendly everyone is, they always say alroit.

Who can blame us for grasping at these markers? For projecting so much hope onto Ozzy the Bull, mooing away in New Street? We want to shout about our city, we want to show we are worth something, and in today’s climate that means shilling ourselves. Manchesterification. They have the bee; we have the bull. Capitalism was invented there but its machines were invented here. Jewellery and canals and brassworks. Heavy metal as a counter to Manchester’s britpop. A yearning for identity which repackages civic pride into logos and soundbites. 

Simulacra, as above. A corruption of meaning for the sake of transmission. The city flattened to a photogenic gloss, mirroring the literal flattening by our construction sites, ground razed and buildings thrown up into the sky to make us look like anywhere else. We risk becoming a two-dimensional place, something made to be decoded into flitting bits and bytes so it might emerge on screens all over the world, hoping someone other than us might give a shit about, take notice of it. 

My misery shouldn’t be taken as dismissiveness. What’s being flattened is genuinely worthwhile. Interesting things are happening here as they always have. Have you ever been to a foundry? I went to one of the last ones left near the city, a year or two before it closed. Rattling metal and clogged air. Molten brass and bronze treacling into sand. Hench blokes with delts like tree burrs hauling crates of castings about. As I said, shut now, lost except to the hundreds of people who lived most of their lives inside its walls, the few historians who might care to remember. And this might be a stretch, and display my own obvious biases, but if the remnants of our makers’ disposition are anywhere outside those last foundries and factories, they’re in the arts. The Emma Press, Writing West Midlands, Brum Radio, Suki10c and Centrala are notable independents who’ve been pushing the city’s words and sounds for over a decade. More new shoots post-lockdown: Voce Books, The Heath Bookshop, Floodgate Press, Sigil Radio, Concrete Mag, Pan-Pan, The Dispatch. There’s even a dynamism to the unending skin-grafts of Digbeth’s warehouse venues, swapping their signage faster than we change Prime Ministers. At least we’re not knocking the buildings down (yet). And maybe it’s naive to valorise it like I am, but you can’t deny the DIY-ness of our recent output. The sheer ability which swarms these places, the shared stubborn commitment to whatever art is meant to be. Not bad for an intermittently bankrupt city.

Looks like I’ve done that classic Brummie thing, saying I hate this shit-hole before I aggressively big it up. But this is our duality. What we do isn’t the problem, never was. It’s how. I hate how we have to make ourselves so digitally legible, so seamless and optimised like we’re waiting to be slipped into a property brochure. How the easiest way to prove our worth is to convert our city into totems and catchphrases, Manchesterify our own history, alright bab our answer to ‘avin it large, itself an answer to a question nobody ever wanted to ask. How it feels impossible to criticise these tendencies without partaking in them, how saying we’ve got something about us in any context, with any nuance, still feels like stagesetting for a corrupted development whose products we will despise. 

The precarity of the ground on which our culture sits. How easily these shared infrastructures can be ripped away. And like the acid rain, it’s both Brum’s problem and a problem of capitalism (sorry, but it is), of how notoriety necessarily comes at the price of commodification, and how commodification is the leech of meaning. But it still feels like it’s happening here more than a lot of other places. We seem to be heading to some juncture, some critical mass of selling ourselves that other cities have long since passed, or are yet to reach.

A final one: cultural static, an immersive fuzz so dense with nodes and nodules we can’t seem to navigate it. No directionality. And what I’m saying, what I’ve taken too long to say, is we need to be wary of the static, which after all is an effect of screens, of phones, of radio signals. We need to find a way of seeing the city in layers, to card out the real from the representational against a society that melts their boundaries. None of this is to suggest we become banal contrarians, sneering at any expression of civic joy. It’s unavoidable that we’ll talk ourselves up to outsiders with the usual catchphrases about miles of canal and workshop of the world. Buy our bab mugs and Ozzy the Bull postcards, argue the toss on r/brum. But this can’t be all we do. We need to be more on it—and I include myself in this, prone as I am to receding from the world for months at a time. To put the effort in, go to the shows, lock into the radio, get pissed at the prose nights. Engage with some, one, any of the things the tat and memes are meant to be shouting about. Better still, if we can steal the time, dig up the energy: make. Plug into that ambient doingness which veins the West Midlands. Refract ourselves through the city’s ethos, its hard-headed concrete philosophies. 

If this doesn’t seem like enough it’s because it isn’t. We can’t stop our city being paraded before the ghouls of development like a stolen antique at a backroom auction. But we can try to keep its soul alive beneath the glamour, some simmering and dimensional aspect which resists compression. To not mistake branding for the thing itself. To not let the simulacra overtake the real. Baudrillard would say that’s impossible, but he never visited Brum.

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Works Cited

• Jean Baudrillard (2008), Fatal Strategies, Semiotext(e).
• Jean Baudrillard (1994), Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press.
• Mark Fisher (2009), Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zer0 Books.
• Nicholas Gane (2006) Speed up or slow down? Social theory in the information age, Information, Community and Society, 9:1, 20-38.
• Owen Hatherley (2022), quoted in Birmingham: The Brutiful Years, The Modernist Society.
• Frederic Jameson (1992), Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso.
• Tom Kew (2023), Birmingham, The multicultural Midlands, Manchester University Press, 131-146.
• Ian Nairn (1968), Nairn’s Paris, Notting Hill Editions.