New Street is in desperate need of renewal

One time, while working on a story about the Britannia-owned Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, a colleague of mine was propositioned for a threesome in the hotel lobby. It was just after midday on a Tuesday. According to Tripadvisor, Birmingham’s own Britannia iteration — the simply named Britannia Hotel Birmingham — is 0.6 stars worse than the Adelphi. Make of that what you will.

I’d travelled to the Britannia Hotel for a spot of Birmingham-bashing. I’d heard it was all the rage. On the train I’d been sprawled out across two seats, pretending I was on a chaise longue, and leafing through my copy of The Times when I chanced upon an article about how Birmingham has become a “punchbag for those who hold it up as a microcosm of an England in freefall”. Birmingham, I read aghast, is now the “crossroads where Britain’s most ominous trends meet”: sectarian politics, a lack of civic identity, council incompetence, knife crime, bad education outcomes and the rest.

It didn’t sound great. The street lights are dimming, there’s no money in the public purse, the shadow justice minister is marauding around Handsworth pointing at soiled underpants by the roadside. The residents of Small Heath are contending with rats as big as feet. The residents of Sparkhill are contending with pigeons that are even bigger than feet-sized rats. Britain’s so-called second city had become a basher’s paradise — a land of oversized rodents and undersized dreams. My only fear was being late to the party.

The focus of most of this unwanted attention appears to be on a particular patch to the city’s north: Handsworth, Lozells, Soho. It was on Soho Road, in fact, with a visit from one Benjamin Rich, aka Bald and Bankrupt, that it apparently all began. Rich, the pied piper of new age poverty pornographers, racked up some three million views on YouTube with his video about Soho Road last year. After that, scores of camera-clutching acolytes flooded in. We’ve covered this trend before, but there’s a new addition to the canon: Robert Jenrick appeared last week in Handsworth, leading a team of GB News cameras on pant patrol (he was pointing out the area’s litter problem, including discarded tyres and “dirty underwear”).

Why Handsworth? Why Soho Road? The answer is obvious — these areas are a useful shorthand. Onto them, you can project many different stories about Birmingham and its supposed ills. You might even say that Robert Jenrick’s soiled pants are a powerful and potent metaphor. If you, like Jenrick or the scores of vloggers who walked these roads before him, believe immigration is the root of all the country’s ills, then the fact that these pants can be found at the roadside of one of England’s most diverse communities speaks for itself. If you believe that the Labour Party’s fiscal incompetence is the problem, then the fact Birmingham’s Labour-run council oversees the scene of the crime tells a story that fits that glove. If you believe years of Tory austerity hollowed out many of Britain’s already struggling communities, then you might suggest Jenrick take a look in the mirror. In fact, you might even posit — metaphorically, for legal reasons — that Robert Jenrick is the Handsworth pant soiler.

What confuses me about this trend, is that Soho Road is doing fine. It has issues — where doesn’t? — but it also has an identity. For one thing, its 150-odd wedding shops have made it a place people visit from far and wide. It has a story to tell. Whereas if I’m going to be forced to jump on the Birmingham-bashing bandwagon, I’d be looking somewhere else entirely. The street that makes me most depressed about the state of the city is the one smack bang in the city centre: New Street.

Why? Because the problem of New Street feels entirely self-inflicted. To my mind, there’s only one story you can tell about it: a city that doesn’t know how to sell itself.