On Soho Road, a new scourge is terrorising the community: Vloggers

The road in Handsworth is faced with plenty of issues. Their biggest? An onslaught of camera-toting forty-somethings

By Jack Walton

A woman — one eye ringed by a deep bruise, makes her way along a street. Her face is grey, the sky is grey, the street is greyer still. She has a black hood up over her head. A man offers her a tenner. She assumes he wants “business”. What kind of business? “Jiggy jiggy”. “No, I’m okay for jiggy jiggy today,” he replies. The woman disappears.

Turning the camera back towards his own face, the man addresses his (very large) audience. “Well, there you go. I was just asked if I wanted jiggy jiggy on Soho Road,” he says. “This has been a little bit too much for me…[This is] the town, the street that intimidated me.”

His video, with its bombastic title “Offered Business on England’s Worst Street”, has been watched two and a half million times. In it, he makes his way along the offending road — Soho Road in Handsworth — as he pulls discarded bottles of Smirnoff from roadside vegetation in disgust, zooms in on overspilling bins and knife amnesty boxes, frets over whether he’s locked his car on a residential road (“You locked the car?” “Fucking right I have”), complains about the state of his guesthouse and objects to the number of migrant businesses. “How to put it delicately? It doesn’t feel very British,” he says.

The man speaking, known as “Bald” (real name Benjamin Rich) is best known for his travels abroad. His most popular videos can fetch around 10 million views. Titles include ‘Solo in Bolivia’s Most Dangerous Hood’, ‘Solo through War-torn Donbass’, as well as dispatches from Chernobyl and Siberia. In one video he supposedly gets “trafficked” through the cartel-controlled Darien Gap. All of that, but it was Soho Road that truly shook him to his core. 

Of course, this isn’t the first time that Soho Road has faced criticism. The neighbourhood’s reputation has long taken a battering; criticisms centring on its run-down appearance, crime levels and supposed lack of cleanliness. In 2022 Birmingham Live called it the city’s “Red Light District” with “sex sold from 8am and condoms stuffed down drains”. What’s different this time round is that vloggers are making hating Soho Road a national sport, with them and their commenters alike pitching in in the comments to revel in a sort of gleeful disgust about the area. But how fair are the criticisms the neighbourhood regularly attracts — that it’s unclean and dangerous? And why do locals believe that the vloggers have got it all wrong — that in fact, it’s one of the neighbourhoods with the most potential in the city? 

I’ve decided to investigate for myself. I’m standing in Chana, a high-end menswear shop on Soho Road, located above the very popular Badial department store. The owner, Pindy, hasn’t actually seen the video (unlike Rakesh Soni, the manager of the Soho Road Business Improvement District, who is taking me on a tour of the street’s businesses). I feel somewhat guilty for bringing it to his attention. He stands in front of me watching it on his phone for the first time, aghast. “Oh my,” he says. “Oh my God. Oh my God!”

Bald makes his way down Soho Road. Screenshot: Bald and Bankrupt.

Bald didn’t invent slagging off Soho Road, of course, but he has brought slagging off Soho Road to the masses. Since Bald’s video, a series of wannabes have followed suit. This area of Birmingham has now found an unfortunate kind of online fame. Backpacker Ben (this is Bald’s friend) managed just shy of 750,000 views on his own video (“The UK’s Most Dangerous Neighbourhoods”). Going Globull racked up 110,000 (“Inside Birmingham’s No Go Zone”) and Joe Fish got 61,000 (“UK's DIRTIEST Street — ‘Piles Of Rubbish Can Be Seen From Space!’”). For both Backpacker Ben and Going Globull, these are the second most successful videos they’ve ever posted. Which is to say, slagging off Soho Road can deliver a tidy return. 

And it hasn’t gone unnoticed in the area. Akshat is a local business owner who I approach while drinking chai on some seats outside a cafe. He cuts me off mid sentence. 

“Don’t even talk to me about the bald man,” he says.

Much like their natural antecedents, the poverty porn genre of British documentaries that became highly popular throughout the austerity years (Benefits Street; Benefits Busters; Skint; Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole) these videos aren’t here merely to provide a voyeuristic window into the brutal realities of life in Britain. The “content creators” use these places to speak to a wider theme: namely, they believe that Britain has gone to the dogs. Once a great nation, an Empire, what we’re left with is London and a smorgasbord of provincial shitholes; people with so little pride in their towns they won’t pick up their litter; decaying buildings, criminality and (the unspoken part) migrants. Outside the capital, Bald laments, “things ain’t going too well”. Soho Road in this rendering is a synecdoche of Britain itself. Broken and grey. The problem with this theory is that it falls apart immediately on contact with reality.