Landlord-free homes in Stirchley get a…erm…landlord

Dear readers — well, the sun was nice while it lasted. Allow us to brighten up your day with a jam-packed Monday Briefing, starting with a reminder that this is the final week you can apply to work for The Dispatch.

We are looking for a new reporter, someone who can write stellar sentences while breaking big stories and who has a nose for investigations. If that’s you, head to the link below and send us your application by Sunday 22 March.

Catch up and coming up:

On Saturday, we published our first ever Good News edition which pleased readers. One commented: “I loved reading this so much. Thank you for brightening my weekend!”
Last Wednesday, photographer-reporter team Harry Mitchell and Fonie Mitsopoulou headed to the NEC to capture the oddity that is Crufts.
Do you have any fond memories of eating chips and watching the world go by at Neo Cafe in the Bullring market? Send them in to editor@birminghamdispatch.co.uk

Now, on with today: in Stirchley, where house prices and rents have risen faster than you can down a Guinness on St Patrick’s Day, locals are reeling from some housing-related news. The Stirchley Cooperative Development (SCD) has been ten years in the making and was meant to provide 39 affordable homes for locals to own. But Green Square Accord, the housing association that owns the land and took over construction of the building two years ago, has just delivered a blow: they plan to rent the flats out instead. Find all the details on that dispute in your Brum in Brief below.

Elsewhere, do you remember John Sweeney? He was the 2024 candidate who ran to be Sutton Coldfield’s Liberal Democrat MP. He lost that race but has returned to Birmingham to help launch the Lib Dem’s local election campaign with a story about almost puking on Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, the Peaky Blinders movie has been slated by a Birmingham-born journalist in UnHerd, and we interview local author Taylor Burns on why his debut novel is "not as wanky as it sounds".

Photo of the week

Local photographer Mac McCreery recently captured this rain-soaked shot of “a two umbrella household pootling down Needless Alley”.

Brum in Brief

Stirchley’s landlord-less dream under threat — A ground breaking housing scheme in one of Birmingham’s most sought-after suburbs has been thrown into doubt at the 11th hour. Members of Stirchley Co-operative Development (SCD) — a community-led initiative to build 39 homes and three spaces for worker-owned businesses — say their housing association partner has hiked the cost by £2m making it no longer affordable for the group to buy.

SCD was established by locals to provide low-cost homes in Stirchley where house prices and rents have rocketed over the past decade. Unlike many other affordable housing schemes, SCD was going to be owned by the people who lived and worked there, i.e. there would be no landlords whatsoever. The co-op was formed by residents in 2016, with construction work on the three-storey building, on the corner of Pershore Road and Hunts Road, starting in 2023. They partnered with the housing association Green Square Accord (GSA) who purchased the land, with the plan to sell it to the residents when the building was done. When the building firm that was originally working on the project, Tricas Construction, went bust in 2024, GSA brought in its construction team to finish the job. It was scheduled for completion by June 2025 — at an expected cost of £10.68m, according to SCD.

That deadline has flown by and costs have spiralled by £2m, a spokesperson for SCD told The Dispatch. While the group has raised their offer considerably to try to bridge the gap, a shortfall of £1.2m remains. Last Thursday, GSA informed SCD that they would not be handing over ownership of the building after all. A statement published on the GSA website the same day reads “it is now clear SCD can’t meet the cost of the project, and the most responsible option is for us to retain and manage the development”. GSA’s CEO, Ruth Cooke, said “as a not-for-profit social housing provider it would be irresponsible for us to absorb the £1.16m shortfall between the cost of the development and SCD’s offer” and GSA will “ensure the 39 much-needed homes at the site are let at social rents”.

But, in a statement to The Dispatch, SCD disputed that it could not meet the cost of the project, claiming that the £1.2m GSA is asking for is “well above” the valuation of the building. They claim GSA is trying to “recoup losses from construction delays” and to “pass on the costs onto the community”. An SCD spokesperson said: “we can’t believe this is happening at the very last moment. It feels like all our work is being undone. The timing couldn’t be worse for residents and businesses, we are very worried.” A GSA spokesperson told The Dispatch that “a number of challenges during construction – including the original contractor liquidating and associated challenges which we had to pick up when we took over the site” had led to the increased price.

As for the three businesses — bakery Loaf, bike repair shop Birmingham Bike Foundry, and bar-gallery Artefact — SCD claims that GSA has “offered each business individual negotiations about the lease which could include rent rates that could place them at financial risk.” GSA declined to comment on the specifics but told The Dispatch “we are meeting with representatives from each organisation this week with the aim of reaching an agreement as quickly as possible.”

Putin, puke and polls in Dudley — The investigative journalist John Sweeney put in an appearance at the Dudley Lib Dem local elections campaign launch in Stourbridge on Saturday. He regaled the audience at a fundraiser with the tale of how he almost threw up over Putin after a dodgy kebab in Yakutsk, and the backstory to his decision to get a T-Rex tattooed on his left shoulder in tribute to his Lib Dem staffer partner, after he stood for the party in Sutton Coldfield in 2024. Sweeney, who Nigel Farage once accused of causing more misery to him and his family than anyone else in 25 years in politics, advised hammering home the Reform party leader's links to Trump and Putin as a campaign tactic. “If I meet a Reform voter, I'll switch to Russian… I want to say to Reform people — have you got private medical insurance?” he said. Sweeney also argued Britain should seek to re-join the EU as quickly as possible. The Lib Dems currently have five councillors in Dudley, and are hoping to double this at the polls on 7 May when one third of the council’s seats are up for grabs. As for Birmingham, if Labour collapses, they could find themselves major players in a coalition.

Quick Hits

Five historic train stations will re-open in the West Midlands this month and next — starting with Willenhall and Darlaston on Thursday. (BBC).
Last week, the poet and activist Benjamin Zephaniah was posthumously awarded the City of Birmingham medal. (Express and Star).
Birmingham city council has unveiled plans for a major city-centre regeneration scheme called “Birmingham Central Heart. (Inside Housing)
An uninsured driver who killed four-year-old Mayar Yahia in Highgate in 2024 has been jailed for five years and four months. (Sky)

The big interview: debut author Taylor Burns is going to ‘milk’ his novel Trav

What is the book about?

Very briefly the book is about a decade in the life of Travis Barnes, the novel’s protagonist, whom we follow from 13 to 23. It’s a coming-of-age story, I suppose, but I don’t love that term, so Bildungsroman is better, though really I prefer Künstlerroman, a subgenre of the former that deals specifically with the formative years and creative maturation of an artist. It’s not as wanky as that sounds, though; the book is a slim voice-driven thing, told, I hope, with the South Birmingham speed that is completely at-odds with the stupid drawl idiots perform when they try and mimic the accent. Anyway, we follow Trav through genuine grief and early love and family fallout, and we hopefully feel for and with him while he tries to square his artistic ambition with the fact that he lives in an environment that doesn’t necessarily allow acts of such highfalutin self-expression.

What made you want to write it?

If we’re talking formative experience, I suffered some proper life-altering bereavement in my early teens. I don’t really want to go into that here (& it’s all in the book), but I guess I’m mentioning it because it meant that very early on, afterwards, like, I was drawn to things that might tell me something about what I was feeling, or who I was, or that tried to express something profound. Art, basically. It’s a cliché for sure, but I still believe that the best art is made by people who have for some reason had to turn to it when there was nothing else — those people then in turn get so obsessed that they want to make some themselves. That’s what happened to me, anyway.

If you want me to be a bit more specific, I can narrow it down to a single line, and say that when I read Truman Capote describe someone’s eyes as “like ale held to the light” in In Cold Blood, I went yep, there: I wanna do that.

What has your experience of the publishing industry been like, especially as an author living in, and from, Birmingham?

I’ll focus on the Birmingham part of that question because if I go in on my overall experience there might not be a Novel Two. That’s mostly hyperbole — I’ve had it better than some and incontrovertibly worse than most, though I suppose when I’m thinking about this question I’m mostly thinking about the purgatory between a complete book and the arid years thereafter as you try to get it out in the world. There’s a reason not many writers talk about this period, especially as regards first books — it’s a fucking mess.

Re. Birmingham, the positives are all the ones you expect from working small and local with underpaid people who care. The negatives are that despite the myriad reasons we are given for this city’s resurgence — many of them valid — and despite so much industry nonsense about visibility and class and underrepresentation, most of it spun by some of the most insufferable people on earth, it remains that the publishing industry just isn’t that interested in Brum.

The cover of Trav, featuring art by Black Country Type, aka Tom Hicks. Image: Zer0 Books.

Do you think there is such a thing as Birmingham Fiction or a Birmingham Novel?

Sadly I don’t, not really. There are great Birmingham books and great Birmingham writers, and it certainly feels like something might be about to happen in the city as regards its literary scene, but as a readily identified sub-genre: na, not even close. Ask someone outside of this city about Brum fiction and see what you get. I’m not sure it even matters, though, you know? The people who coin these things are, what, in marketing or something? I dunno. Like, is there a Liverpool Novel? And who gets to decide?

I’m not saying it couldn’t happen of course. I know a fine group of people here trying to write their way out of or through various situations, and some of us are lucky enough to be published — if something comes from that, great. Clive Judd [the local playwright] in his very kind write-up for Trav said it was a novel for the New Birmingham, and I liked that idea more: flensing the reputation of the Old Brum and all its attendant self-deprecation — which is both our great trait and fatal flaw — and having a bit more civic pride. I mean, look, earlier I said one unusual word in Künstlerroman and felt the need to clarify that I wasn’t a boring pseud, almost like I was scared to sound “smart”. I do it all the time. We all do. It’s relentless.

In your opinion, what is the most interesting thing about your novel, or that you want readers to know about it?

To me the most interesting thing will always be style, the sentence-by-sentence building work until you have a book. I’d like to think that mine is quite unique — a sort of slangy Brum soliloquy that’s both profane and verbose. I think if you come to literature linguistically, you’ll find that as interesting as I do. What do I want readers to know about it? Mostly that it’s been an absolute bastard to get here, so you best believe I’m going to milk it.

Trav will be published by Zer0 books on 30 June.

Media picks

📰 A week after its release, Peaky Blinders: the Immortal Man has received generally middling reviews — apart from in UnHerd, where journalist Tracy King has slaughtered the latest chapter in the franchise for crimes against Birmingham. “The film makes a casualty of Birmingham with the town increasingly trapped in an endless nightmare of flat caps and razor blades,” she writes, unhappy with the film’s less-than-accurate portrayal of life in the second city in WWII. That setting makes no sense for King given that Brum’s gangs were “disbanded by the First World War, and were anyway always more street thugs than globetrotting criminal masterminds,” but moreover, she takes issue with the film’s “cartoonified” portrayals of Roma and Irish communities. (UnHerd)

💻 We’ve been revisiting the 2009 grime-crime drama 1 Day, a film made by a middle class white Londoner and starring British-Jamaican, gang-affiliated Brummies. Filmmaker Penny Woolcock recruited the cast by auditioning members and friends of the Burger Bar Boys, known for their ongoing conflict with the Johnson Crew. In this blog post reflecting on the time, she recalls an “angry phone call” from a Johnson’s member: “one of them said that they would come and shoot up my set if I didn’t make the film with them. I yelled back. ‘Don’t shoot my set, shoot me! If you think I’m worth doing twenty five years for, do it.’” (pennywoolcock.com).

Our to do list

Talks

At this free-to-attend talk, tonight at the University of Birmingham, the author Dr Brian Kwoba discusses his new book about the working-class Caribbean-born journalist Hubert Harrison who played a pivotal role in the rise of Marcus Garvey.

🎶 Parades and parties

🇮🇪 It’s St Patrick’s day on Tuesday, and there’s plenty of ways to celebrate in Brum. The official parade has been cancelled, but no bother, head to The Old Crown in Digbeth where they’re making the celebrations last for two whole weeks. Read more about your options here. Noughties favourites the Cribs are playing the O2 Institute on Sunday — skinny jeans ON.

🎨 Art

On Thursday, head over to MAC for a talk with artist Saba Khan and senior curator Roma Piotrowska to discuss Khan’s exhibition: Riverless Water. Tickets are free and can be booked here. On Friday, Luke Jerram’s five-metre illuminated sculpture of the sun is being unveiled at The Exchange. Pop on down to be one of the first to see it. More here.