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“We’re within the coronary heart of the West Midlands,” says the voice, its heavy New York accent reassuringly acquainted. “Driving the categorical elevator to the highest of one of many metropolis’s highest buildings, that is the view that just about took my breath away . . .” The digital camera pans throughout a sun-drenched Seventies cityscape. Factories, high-rise blocks and busy roads. “I discovered the town thrilling . . . You’re feeling as if you happen to’ve been projected into the twenty first century.” After which the clincher: “Sure, [Birmingham] is my kinda city.”
The voice belongs to the American movie star Telly Savalas, and these quotes are from his commentary to the 1981 documentary Telly Savalas Seems at Birmingham. Sadly, it was all narrated in a dubbing studio someplace in Soho; Savalas by no means set foot within the metropolis. He narrated equally daft movies about Aberdeen and Portsmouth — most likely on the identical day — however it’s his paean to the UK’s second metropolis that stands out. That is maybe as a result of Brummies themselves, with their self-deprecating humour, are so keenly attuned to the discrepancy between the realities of Birmingham and Savalas’s try and painting the town as a cross between Detroit and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
And but, was his comparability up to now off the mark? Postwar Birmingham was at all times designed to operate like an American motor metropolis. The actual fact is impressed upon us on this absorbing e book by Richard Vinen, a local of Birmingham who’s now professor of historical past at King’s Faculty London.
The primary chapters of Second Metropolis attain again to the eleventh century, however the overwhelming majority of the e book is dedicated to the previous 150 years of Birmingham’s historical past, bringing us as much as the current day whereas stopping in need of the town’s current internet hosting of the Commonwealth Video games. Vinen reminds us that the roll name of people who lie behind Birmingham’s declare to “second metropolis” standing — not simply when it comes to inhabitants however cultural, political and financial clout — consists of Herbert Manzoni, the town’s chief engineer within the postwar years.
“Making Birmingham right into a automobile metropolis,” Vinen writes, “was a aware imitation of America. In 1955 Manzoni mentioned: ‘I see no purpose why site visitors on this nation mustn’t attain the proportions of site visitors in America.’” Therefore Birmingham’s notoriously pedestrian-unfriendly community of ring roads and twin carriageways, which reached its apotheosis within the creation of the “Spaghetti Junction” intersection within the early Seventies. The result’s that immediately, as we lastly get up to the disastrous environmental penalties of our dependence on the automobile, Birmingham faces a disaster of identification and concrete design uniquely acute among the many main British cities.
Its fortunes have been certain up with the motor business since Herbert Austin opened the Austin works at Longbridge, on the outskirts of the town, within the early twentieth century. A manufacturing unit that employed simply 50 folks in 1906 had by the late Nineteen Sixties expanded to make use of greater than 25,000 staff. But by the Seventies it had develop into symbolic of the decline of British manufacturing. Vinen recounts the surge of unofficial strikes throughout this time, and British Leyland’s (because the now-nationalised Austin firm grew to become recognized) portrayal within the press as a hotbed of militant unionism — one which Margaret Thatcher was decided to rein in when she grew to become prime minister in 1979.
That is an often-told story however Vinen uncovers new layers of nuance in his portraits of the principle gamers — store stewards Dick Etheridge and Derek Robinson, and Leyland chairman Michael Edwardes — the place the union males have in earlier accounts been too typically seen merely as communist troublemakers and Edwardes as a Thatcherite stooge.
It’s revealing that Birmingham’s principal opposition to Thatcherism was concentrated on the Longbridge plant, because the politics of the town as an entire have at all times been arduous to outline. In 2016 Birmingham voted to depart the EU by the slenderest of margins (50.4 per cent). Neither of the principle events has ever actually predominated there, and as Vinen demonstrates, Joseph Chamberlain, the presiding spirit of Birmingham politics and the town’s shortlived mayor between 1873-76, was an ambiguous determine, finishing a journey from radical Liberal to Conservative Unionist.
What can’t be denied is the extent to which Chamberlain improved life within the metropolis throughout his transient tenure as mayor, bringing fuel and sewerage underneath municipal management and reworking the central city area. Whether or not Liberal or Conservative, he sustained a perception in a benign, paternalistic type of capitalism that was in line with the imaginative and prescient of one other of Birmingham’s most well-known households — the Cadburys — whose chocolate manufacturing unit at Bournville was a sensible mannequin of this philosophy earlier than it was taken over by Kraft Meals in 2010.
The historical past of Birmingham’s race relations doesn’t at all times make for comfortable studying: Vinen describes it as “a cauldron of racial hostility” within the Nineteen Sixties however ends his account on a extra celebratory observe, hailing it as a “metropolis of migrants” during which relations between completely different ethnic teams are marked by “a deliberate and playful hybridity”. On Birmingham’s cultural life, he writes comprehensively about pop music, however in any other case his protection is patchy. The duvet guarantees a e book “about figures everybody has heard of, from JRR Tolkien to Duran Duran”, however Tolkien is barely talked about as soon as, and no reference is made to the work of different vital Birmingham cultural figures similar to Tony Hancock, Jim Crace or David Edgar.
Possibly it is because of this that Vinen by no means fairly pins down the elusive character of the town. Straddling England’s north-south divide, it presents an unassuming face to the world, which belies its historic standing as an industrial powerhouse and a trailblazer for multiculturalism.
Understatement is among the metropolis’s defining options, and ultimately Vinen falls again on this himself, concluding that “Ordinariness . . . confers its personal significance”. There’s unlikely to be a fuller or extra informative historical past of Birmingham than Vinen’s, however at instances we’re left eager to know slightly extra about why, precisely, this wealthy, difficult, irritating metropolis is “his kinda city”.
Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Fashionable Britain by Richard Vinen, Allen Lane £25, 592 pages
Jonathan Coe’s new novel ‘Bournville’ shall be printed by Viking in November
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