Time was when Birmingham’s most celebrated association with food was Spaghetti Junction. It was not a place for gourmets. Indeed, many of its residents could hardly afford to eat out.
“In the late 1970s Birmingham collapsed,” said Sir Albert Bore, the leader of Birmingham city council. “We lost 200,000 jobs. Unemployment was at 25% in 1984. Some parts of the city, it was in excess of 50%.”
Thirty years later, something small yet significant has just happened. A fifth Birmingham restaurant, Carters of Moseley, was awarded a Michelin star last month, joining others such as Glynn Purnell’s, and the city now finds itself at the epicentre of the nation’s culinary map. Birmingham now has more Michelin-starred restaurants than any city outside London, pushing Edinburgh, with four, into third place. Manchester has none.
Carters of Moseley in Birmingham
That Carters exists is testimony to the city’s economic resurgence. Brad Carter, 33, the head chef and co-owner, left the city’s acclaimed catering college, UCB, in 2001. “Everybody from my college went to London or abroad,” he explained. But after stints in Minorca and Marseille, Carter felt sufficiently confident in his native city’s future to open his small restaurant five years ago. “People focus on the five Michelin-starred restaurants,” he said, “but there are so many more great restaurants here. Once, there was nothing between the city and the country pubs outside Birmingham, but that’s not the case now.” Indeed, the rise in high-end dining in the city has been mirrored by a burgeoning cafe culture. Birmingham has 1,500 cafes, restaurants and bars – up almost 10% in the last five years.
Jack Brabant, 32, co-founder of the Digbeth Dining Club, which meets on Friday nights in a disused taxi depot, where 1,000 people sample some of the city’s best street food, returned to Birmingham in 2008 to find a different place. “For a lot of people, Birmingham was shit, but then you come back and see the passion; you see a city that wants to take back the mantle that we are the nation’s second city.”
An increasing number of people agree. More than 10,000 people aged 25 to 34 moved to the city last year, the largest influx into any of the UK’s core cities. More than half were women, many attracted to living somewhere that, according to consultants Mercer, has the best quality of life of any regional city. The arrivals have helped to give Birmingham the youngest demographic of any major city in Europe and have been skilfully exploited by its PR machine, which has coined a name for them: the Yummy Brummie.
However, Hilary Smyth-Allen, a consultant with two small children who has lived in Moseley for 10 years, is keen not to paint the city’s resurgence as an exercise in gentrification. “Birmingham is super-diverse; it has a vibrant cultural scene,” she insisted. “I don’t want my kids hanging out just with the kids of lawyers.”
Nevertheless employers such as Deutsche Bank and HSBC are relocating many operations to a city where office space costs a third of that in London. Yet Birmingham is still … Birmingham. It may have a world-class ballet and orchestra and, in the Hippodrome, the UK’s busiest theatre, but it still has an image problem, often self-inflicted.
“We have this innate ability to do our city down,” said Jonathan Cheetham, general manager of Grand Central, the city’s recently opened shopping centre which sits above a gleaming New Street station, transformed by a £600m makeover. The first Saturday after it opened, 102,000 people flocked to Grand Central which, in a previous life, was called the Pallasades and would never have attracted the John Lewis flagship store that its successor boasts.
Cheetham suggests there is a “wall of money” waiting to come in, as foreign investors see the potential of the HS2 railway line, which will put 45 million people within a one-hour journey of Birmingham airport. The investors, many of them Chinese, have been buoyed by the success of Birmingham’s previous regeneration projects. The canals, once home to dead dogs and dumped cars, now thrive. The Bull Ring was pulled down, apartments went up. The centre went from being a place where few ventured after dark to where people live. “It is one of the safest city centres in Europe,” Cheetham said. “Last Friday night there was not one logged incident of crime.”
However, the unemployment rate is still 7%, above the national average, and the east of the city has benefited little from its new swagger. Economists calculate that Birmingham is burdened by a £17bn productivity gap.
How the city embraces devolution may determine whether the influx of Yummy Brummies becomes a tidal wave. The city council wants to create a West Midlands Combined Authority, with powers over some four million people in Birmingham and its surrounding area.
“We have a population of 1.1 million that will grow to 1.25 million in the next 10 to 15 years,” Bore pointed out. “And that means 80,000 new homes, 30,000 school places, 100,000 jobs, just to stand still.”
A linear city sprawling across the belly of England would dwarf other regional powerhouses like Greater Manchester and throw down the gauntlet to London and other European capitals. It would be the final act in a comprehensive rebranding of the city, decades in the making. “Michael McIntyre has this joke about the Pallasades,” Cheetham said. “Nice place to shop – providing you’re wearing a stab vest. But he needs some new material now.”
[Source – The Guardian].
