Britain doesn't have a second city

A little-known law states that neither Birmingham nor Manchester are big enough

Dear Patchers — you may have noticed an eerie sense of quiet this week. Your inbox feels somehow… emptier. We’re having a pared down week; Kate is enjoying a thoroughly deserved holiday, and after the rush of election madness, eyes propped open with cocktail sticks, it feels like a good time to take a pause and catch up on a few things. Once we’ve hired another full-time reporter in Birmingham, we’ll be able to co-ordinate time off and ensure this doesn’t happen. But please bear with us for now.

But fear not! We are not leaving you completely empty-handed, with a cracker of a long read today. We asked David Rudlin, an urban design expert who has lived in both Birmingham and Manchester to answer the age old question: which is the UK’s second city? His controversial answer: neither.

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By David Rudlin

When asked whether Manchester was Britain’s ‘second city’, its former council leader Richard Leese famously replied: “of course not” — and that he was happy for Birmingham and London to fight it out between them. Manchester, naturally, was second to no one (typical boosterism from a city that has never lacked in self-confidence).

In the recent Observer special on Birmingham comedian Stewart Lee described Brummie’s fears of getting above themselves as one of the city’s ‘most endearing traits’. By contrast Manchester, he wrote, is ‘the city equivalent of an endlessly farting dog that expects nauseated passers-by to applaud’. I’m not sure about Birmingham’s fear of getting above itself: in my experience, it goes on and on about being the second city; Manchester, on the other hand, does not say it out loud, but that’s only because it thinks it to be so self- evident that it hardly needs stating.

But the answer to the vexed question of second city status might actually be: there isn’t one.

London by night. Image credit: Universal History Archive

I was born and brought up in Birmingham and have lived most of my adult life in Manchester, and I love both cities. I agree with Lee that they couldn’t be more different, but they do have one thing in common. They have both failed to become a true second city — the UK equivalent of Milan or Barcelona. Instead, it seems that Britain has somehow… mislaid its second city.