Dear readers — today we head to Digbeth, where several business owners and one very angry Irishman are waging war against the Eastside Metro Extension.
But before that, your Brum in Brief.
Brum in Brief
🗳️ The local Green and Liberal Democrat parties have thrashed out an agreement to jointly-run Birmingham city council, four weeks after the polls closed with no clear winner. Plans that will go to a vote on Friday evening, suggest their two leaders will take it in turns to lead the council, in a first-of-its-kind arrangement for Birmingham. The Lib Dem’s Roger Harmer will get first whack, with no timeframe yet to indicate when he will swap with the Green’s Julien Pritchard. Together, the two parties are still 20 members off the 51 needed to form a majority - but they have got the backing of the seven-strong, recently formed Better Birmingham Group of independents.
🪑 Whether or not they will gain enough support from the rest of the chamber remains to be seen. Although they have ruled themselves out of a possible coalition, both Labour and Reform have criticised the plans for a rotating leadership. Labour’s leader, Nicky Brennan, said “the people of Birmingham deserve stability, not the uncertainty caused by a constantly rotating cast of leaders”. Reform’s leader, Jex Parkin, called it simply “musical chairs”. (ITV).
🚑 A man has died after a car hurtled into a chinese takeaway in Tipton on Tuesday night. The driver was found in a critical condition and died at the scene while the passengers - a woman, two girls and two boys - were taken to hospital. A cyclist sustained minor injuries. (BBC).
“Which crime spot would you like to get your Uber from? Would you like to get it from the Meriden Street crime spot, the Coventry Street crime spot, or the coach station crack spot?”
Peter Connolly’s boyish face splits into a grin as he extends the bit, picturing a dystopian Digbeth in which customers ride according to their preferred offense. “I’d like to be mugged, please,” he says, miming pressing a button on the app.
We are sitting in The Anchor on Bradford Street, one of two pubs Connolly owns in Digbeth. The other one is Norton’s, a large Irish bar on Meriden Street, with crusty cobs, live music and lots of Guinness. It is just after 1pm on a Tuesday and the midday sun is streaming through the Anchor’s stained glass windows behind him. It’s pints weather, but we are sensibly sipping sodas. This is work. Connolly has a grudge, and he wants a journalist to hear all about it.
His diatribe about Ubers and crime was inspired by a frustration particular to the business owners – and their punters – of Digbeth. The neighbourhood has long been plagued by roadworks, necessary for improving access to the area by tram. First it was the works to lay tracks along Digbeth High Street that saw a labyrinth of temporary walkways snake along the road between 2021 and 2024.
Now it is the Eastside Metro Extension, the tramline that will eventually connect Digbeth up with the HS2 station on Curzon Street, that is allegedly causing chaos. Construction workers are currently completing section four of the track covering Meriden Street, Coventry Street and New Canal Street. The roads are building sites; tall, Heras fencing wraps around deep ditches where builders are busy digging away.
It isn’t the first time this has happened: initial, preparatory work saw the roads in a similar state for around six months in 2022. The current round of works began last July meaning that, for some businesses, the roads directly outside have been a building site for 19 months out of the past four years.
On Monday, Connolly published a survey of questions, and an open letter to the Norton’s website demanding action. He outlined a number of complaints: visibility of the pub from the main road has been reduced to zero, he claimed, decimating passing trade and leading to reduced opening hours. Deliveries of Guinness and Lashford sausages can’t reach them easily and musicians have difficulty unloading their gear, he alleged.
There have been break-ins, always a risk in Digbeth he says, but he is convinced that the street has become more dangerous due to being less navigable — there are more nooks and crannies for illicit behaviour and fewer people to see it happening. “We’ve had to walk past people, just sat in the open, and they’re doing crack,” he tells me. Light is also an issue — there are no streetlights on this end of the road. Although the construction company installed floodlights, he claims the workers forget to turn them on when they leave for the day. According to Connolly, visitors don’t feel safe attempting to avoid the deep ditches in the dark. To assist, he's taken to putting out a large yellow road sign reading "creamy pints" with an arrow pointing towards the pub.
He scrolls through the 215 survey responses that have flooded in over the past 24 hours. I can see that lots of respondents are concerned the area has become more dangerous since building work began, and are especially worried about how difficult it is to get taxis to stop near his venue Norton’s. Connolly tells me people have to walk over to the coach station to get picked up. “That’s the next safest place to get a taxi, and that’s the next biggest crime spot!” he claims.
Other comments reveal frustrations around access: "The [metro] works are having a major impact on attracting musicians to play at a live music venue. Unreasonable load in, too far to carry equipment, hanging around with expensive equipment waiting for a taxi or a colleague's car,” writes one respondent. Another: “I want to be able to go into the centre of the city I’ve lived in my entire life and walk from bar to bar, but that unfortunately, has been made virtually impossible.”
The tram works are the responsibility of a consortium of private construction companies who, in partnership with the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA), go by the name the Midlands Metro Alliance (MMA). For a cluster of businesses operating here, they are a daily torment. Meriden Street, which leads northwards up from the high street, and crosses Coventry and Bordesley Streets to join up with New Canal Street, has been especially affected. But the managers of the little Nexus Cafe a few doors down, and Fancy Fabrics on the corner, are just as frustrated as Connolly.
Since July last year, they have effectively come to work every day with a construction site directly outside their front doors. The works were due to be completed last month — but anyone visiting the area can see they still have a way to go. Buoyed by the open letter, approximately 12 businesses have decided to hold a public meeting to air their grievances next Wednesday.
Still, it is Connolly who is the most vocal, which is probably partly down to the fact that his pub, larger, and less visible from the main road, requires more customers to fill it out. It is also partly due to the fact that he has the support of a public relations consultant, Lyle Bignon, a well known figure working in Birmingham’s night-time economy.
Bignon was evidently off shift last month, however, when Connolly took to social media in the late-night hours to vent his rage at an innocent local flaneur called Reiss Omari. Omari had uploaded some photographs of the ongoing construction works to X, commenting excitedly: “Hopefully we'll see some new businesses open up.”
He probably wasn’t expecting to inspire the rage that came next. “ARE YOU FUCKING MENTAL?” Connolly bellowed in sans-serif, replying via the Norton's Digbeth X account. “Enjoy the fucking beige business [sic] that open up along here. You know nothing about Digbeth. Fuck the fuck off.”
After a bit of back and forth, it appears Connolly saw sense: he apologised profusely (also on X) for his “pint-induced rant”, adding that he shouldn’t have taken out his frustration on an innocent observer. “We've had a really hard six months with the road closure and the last few weeks it's looked likely we'll have to close,” he wrote.
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