In praise of a fair city…

Following on from my ramblings about homesickness the other day, I thought maybe that I ought to qualify a bit more about what makes “home” special - other than being the place of my birth.

Having said that, there are a lot of people out there who never particularly feel a sense of place.  Maybe they didn’t live in their home town for long before moving on; maybe they have lived in many places and have adopted somewhere else as home; maybe there are a whole host of other reasons.

I have never had any problem with feeling that I belong to Birmingham.  It seems to have been in my blood for ever, so when I started researching family history just over a year ago, it was no surprise to find out that nearly all of my ancestors had been there for the best part of two hundred years, often in places just a stone throw from me.

When I was a child, Birmingham was the archetypal “dirty old town”.  There were factories almost everywhere and the small of manufacturing hung in the air.  Although I grew up in leafy Edgbaston, about a mile from Tolkien’s Twin Towers, just a few streets away there were the last vestiges of Lee Bank’s decaying terraced houses, swept away to be replaced by the unsuccessful “streets in the sky” as the tower blocks crept up like monoliths, a vast temple to 1960s culture.

I grew up believing that most of the city centre’s old public buildings were black and it was quite a surprise to later find out that they were Cotswold stone.  The place was a mixture of Victoriana and gross post-war concrete.  Urban renewal was a twinkle in some architect’s eye at that time and we were grossly unfashionable.

That has all changed, particularly over the last twenty years and I have watched Birmingham blossom into a beautiful city that I am proud to show to a visitor.  The city centre is now a blend of styles including some impressive modern buildings that would grace any European capital city.

But Birmingham isn’t just about the city centre; it’s about the places where people live and there are so many parts of it that are dear to me.  Edgbaston was my home until I was eighteen, but since then I have lived in a number of different parts of the city and also out just beyond the edge of it, in Bearwood, another place which I now miss greatly.

The city has given me an appreciation of so many things; the canal network which drove me to want to own my own narrowboat, Victorian Revivalist architecture, the Arts and Crafts movement, our rich, industrial history, the joy of living in a huge, thriving urban network and the simple beauty of red-brick terraced houses.  They are all parts of the whole, parts of what I love.

It’s not pretty, or charming, like the whitewashed Cornish fishing village or the chocolate-box Worcestershire hamlet, but it is impressive, full of variety and just a comforting place to be.  I feel safe in these streets; they have laid and woven themselves over the heart of England, engendering and fostering a people who have learnt to laugh at themselves in the way that almost no others can.

After all, we have variously been branded unintelligent, unsexy and generally unalluring, so we need something to laugh about.

Brummies are the salt of the earth and Birmingham is the home that we can be proud of.  It may not vie with the likes of Rome and Paris, but it is ours.