In the summer of 1998, the writer and documentary maker Jonathan Meades broadcast a series of films on a somewhat unpromising subject — Birmingham. Meades framed the city as a bewildering public mystery: a city without a shorthand or a trademark.
Newcastle had the Tyne Bridge, Liverpool had the Liver Building, and London had several thousand years of being London. When Britain thought regionally, it pitched chippy northern aggression against stuck-up southern arrogance, with the Midlands an enigmatic afterthought.
What exactly was Birmingham? A city dragged into existence by heavy industries and manufacturing jobs but now bereft of both. Riddled with canals but without a major river or estuary. Far away from court, Birmingham maintained a hair-thin literary tradition and barely marked British history before the 18th century. In Second City, the historian Richard Vinen records that 1960s city planners “were sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had been settled in the first place”.
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Birmingham’s orchestra, exemplary concert hall and choirs had no hold on the national imagination. Less cocksure than Manchester, less flinty than Sheffield, Birmingham was “in the middle of England and middle England”, Meades declared, “an ignored void at the heart of the country”.
That began to change last year. Birmingham’s image shifted. In a less optimistic time than 1998, when Meades concluded that Birmingham stood for Cadbury, motoring and ironical humour, the city instead became a metaphor for squalid national freefall. Rather than being a puzzle, Birmingham was the actual capital of the United Kingdom outside of London and the southeast, leading the nation in decline.
It started on YouTube. In February 2024, Bald and Bankrupt, aka Benjamin Rich, a travel vlogger who made his name shooting grey and grimy post-Soviet countries, returned home to Britain and filmed himself walking around Birmingham’s Soho Road. Rich tuts at overflowing bins, knife-amnesty boxes, waterlogged mattresses, one-star hotel rooms and south Asian mini-marts. He is offered sex on the street; he passes crackheads. The resulting film, Offered Business on England’s Worst Street, has been viewed more than three million times.
Rich’s video instigated a new genre of online travelogue. It mixes the microscopic focus on decay found in Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier and JB Priestley’s English Journey, the point-and-judge amorality of Benefits Street’s poverty porn and the unfiltered talking points of ethno-nationalists on the continent.
Many more films followed, all featuring young white men striding around Birmingham’s immigrant neighbourhoods in Handsworth and Alum Rock. One of them, Joe Fish, claims to have read that around here “rats are the size of dogs and the rubbish can be seen from space”. Another, aka “Going GlobAll”, says Birmingham “feels like a dying city in a dying country of a dead empire”. For Backpacker Ben, “This place is filthy … people just throw their rubbish on the floor.” The word “minging”, indiscriminately used by all of them, sums up the vloggers’ aesthetic and moral verdict on the city. There is zero compassion for the injuries and insults that have been suffered by these places.
Readers might blanche at being told about young men filming themselves for monetisable clicks. But they have wide influence. Robert Jenrick appeared in Handsworth with a GB News camera crew a few days ago. Dressed in vlogger uniform of black puffa, black chinos and pristine white trainers, a disgusted Jenrick was still less furious than the resulting film’s YouTube title: “‘Like a slum!’ Britons seethe as vandals DUMP hordes of ‘filth’ outside their homes and council ‘does nothing’.”
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A stone-faced Jenrick huffs past women in hijabs, an abandoned tyre and some soiled underwear muttering about the Labour council. “Good, law-abiding Brits are furious as their streets are being trashed by a small minority who have no respect for their communities,” he says. The only surprise was that Benjamin Rich didn’t make a cameo to share in Jenrick’s despair.
With such content, Jenrick has come far closer to hitting on the likely future of right-wing politics in Britain than Kemi Badenoch has. Everybody hates fly-tipping. Nobody likes the idea of urban “no-go” zones. Aping the style and manner of online influencers, this politics will film the most downtrodden and alienating urban areas, then blame multiculturalism for all that’s gone wrong.
Far from being an “ignored void”, Birmingham has become the most critiqued, and in some ways most representative, city outside London. Whether it’s council malfeasance (the local authority is bankrupt), painful industrial action (the binmen are going on strike — again), sectarian politics (pro-Gaza independents surged here last year), stabbings (the West Midlands has a higher rate of knife crime than London), a huge skills shortage (the metro area has a higher proportion of the working age population with no qualifications than all English regions), Birmingham is the crossroads where Britain’s most ominous trends meet. Without any obvious civic identity aside from the “diversity” mindlessly invoked by city councillors last week as they gave themselves an above inflation pay rise, Birmingham is also typical of so much British sprawl, from Luton to Southampton.
Can it recover? The emergency surgery begins with £300 million of budget cuts over the next two years. The city’s motto is “Forward”. It would be a brave person who knew where that led in Birmingham.
