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On a drab Monday morning, I cross Chester Road and pass the ornate sign welcoming me to The Royal Town of Sutton Coldfield, the town I grew up in and, despite leaving in 2008, still think obscurely of as “home.” I’ve done this journey countless times — I was here yesterday, taking my daughter to the park. Today, though, I’m focused on the town.
My grandparents came this way in 1956, moving to Sutton from Erdington. In doing so, they were leaving Birmingham for what was then an independent borough in Warwickshire. Just as their parents had swapped squalid inner-city slums and dying agricultural villages for interwar suburbia, now they too were improving their lot.
Seventy years later, much has changed. Sutton, swallowed by Birmingham in 1974, is in a protracted identity crisis. Since I moved away, it has lost its retail clout, main library, much of its night-time economy, two newspapers, law courts and a fair bit of surrounding countryside — most notably to an enormous Amazon warehouse. Thousands more homes, almost 80% of those earmarked for Birmingham’s greenbelt, are planned.
Yet it’s arguably more exclusive and expensive than ever. It regained its own council and mayor in 2016; ex-council houses on Falcon Lodge estate, parts of which rank among Birmingham’s most deprived areas, cost upward of £250,000. The social mobility my grandparents achieved, with a young family, on Grandad’s wage from the Dunlop factory is, like the tired town centre, a relic of the last century.
A fellow Sutton expat I knew through the various Wolverhampton pubs I worked in once told me, “It’s a strange feeling, knowing you’ll never afford to live in your hometown.” I’ve since learnt exactly what he meant.
Parking up, I wander down The Parade and around the 1970s-built Gracechurch Centre. There’s a buzz in the air — literally. It’s coming from a faulty alarm on the former Poundland, boarded up since 2024. Combined with the drizzle and faint mist, it lends a dystopian vibe to the ghost-town-like surroundings.
“Wants a bomb dropping on it” was a common sentiment about the area in The Duke, the nearby pub where I spent my late teens and early twenties pouring pints and firming up my handshake. Twenty years on, you’d be forgiven for thinking it had landed.
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