Birmingham's $1.9B refit fails to impress

No amount of urban renewal can end centuries of slagging

By Steven Edwards 

BIRMINGHAM - The jewel of a $1.9-billion extreme make-over for the centre of Birmingham, Britain's second city, is a curvy, undulating building that houses the upscale department store Selfridges.

Alas, all the chatter focused on a Ferris wheel when I visited my hometown last month.

The 60-metre-high contraption was meant as an exclamation mark proclaiming the downtown changes. It was also Birmingham's answer to the London Eye wheel.

The city may well have been impressed, but for one tiny oversight. Commentary inside the wheel's gondolas invited riders to admire not the wonders of Britain's revitalized manufacturing heartland -- but the Eiffel Tower and the River Seine.

Worse, the narrator spoke in French.

The wheel after arriving from Paris: SVP, parlez en Brummie

The company in charge of the wheel blamed "technical difficulties" after borrowing it from Paris, where it had stood for three years.

The goof has done nothing to end the traditional view that Brummagem, as the city is known locally, is worthy only of scorn.

A mere village in the 1600s, Birmingham led the industrial revolution, helping earn Britain the title Workshop of the World.

But its rows of sooty industrial silos and soaring smokestacks also made it a place to avoid by anyone with the slightest sense of refinement.

"They came from Birmingham, which is not a place to promise much ... " says the haughty Mrs. Elton in Jane Austen's Emma. "One has not great hopes from Birmingham."

It does not help that the local accent is unintelligible to most of the rest of the world.

Advertisers have long capitalized on prejudice against its laughably adenoidal tones. A commercial for Coleman's mustard gave a big fat pig a Birmingham accent.

A poll found that 85% of company directors believed the Brummie dialect conveyed dishonesty and below-average intelligence.

Which is why any hint of a goof can shatter Birmingham's multi-million-dollar attempts to turn itself into an international tourist destination.

The Ferris wheel fiasco is not an isolated case.

The downtown renewal is centred on the Bull Ring, which has an 800-year-history as a place of commerce.

Anyone who has heard of Birmingham has heard of the Bull Ring and knows it is full of shops.

That was not the case for the tourist guide at a hotel information booth in the city's main railway station. When I asked her for directions to a mall called The Mailbox, she replied: "I don't know that one, but I'm pretty sure there's a shopping centre right here -- the, um, er, Ring Bull."

Her accent revealed she was from another part of Britain, but surely she was hired by Brummies to win over tourists.

Relying on signposts proved to be just as frustrating.

The city's new science museum -- The Think Tank -- is located at walking distance from the city centre, and a sign does indeed get you on your way.

But with no follow-up sign where the museum walkway takes a turn, the unsuspecting visitor continues headlong into a maze of expressways and ring roads filled with cars racing by at high speed.

At least, the media have recognized that problem. When we arrived at the museum an hour later than planned because of our detour, we found ourselves being filmed by a BBC TV crew reporting on the lack of signs.

Did we have a story to tell!

The 1960s saw Birmingham's first modern urban renewal. The Bull Ring became a mass of concrete that drew comparisons with architecture typically found on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Underground walkways became havens for muggers.

It was all such a turn-off that non-Brummies joked how planners built Spaghetti Junction, the famous intersection of several of the country's expressways, with more lanes leaving the city than entering it.

The latest make-over has replaced everything in the Bull Ring except St. Martin's Church, the Market Hall and the Rotunda, a circular office tower that became a postcard landmark.

The Selfridges building opened last September to rave reviews.

Some critics have hailed the structure -- a windowless mosaic of 15,000 spun aluminum discs on a sheer cobalt-blue skin -- as rivalling the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, or the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Selfridges: a slice of life in Brum

Cynics have likened it to a giant armadillo, a caterpillar, a loaf of bread and a soap bubble.

Other buildings in the area, now called the Bullring, add stature to the spire of St. Martin's by framing it like a picture.

Birmingham has also given itself a world-class symphony hall and put paid to snide remarks about being Britain's most land-locked city by trucking in millions of gallons of sea water and creating Sea Life Centre.

But centuries of being maligned is a hard thing to shake. A reference to the new toll road bypassing Birmingham has replaced the Spaghetti Junction joke.

"Now you can pay to ensure you don't enter Birmingham," say cynical non-Brummies.

© 2004 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.

National Post
Mon Feb 9 2004