In 2020, I thought a lot about how to come to terms with Birmingham (and with myself)

Published on 15 December 2020

I've never stopped being surprised that when people ask me where I live, the word ‘Birmingham’ comes out of my mouth.

Birmingham is a good city — certainly a far better city than the one of England’s common imagination — but it's not mine.

I'm not from here, I don't really know anyone here, family aside. But here I am.

For much of the past 3 years, even though I've been living in Birmingham I’ve been working elsewhere: London, York, Manchester, Sheffield.

Before lockdown hit, I'd already stopped travelling for work. The pandemic made an informal thing formal. And so my relationship with this city started to evolve: from a place I ‘stay’ (as Scots put it) to a place where I ‘live’.

Before Birmingham, I'd spent 20 years living in London. Part of London's attraction is that its scale effectively enables tribes to form. Neighbourhoods of similar socio-economic profiles, seductive on one level but also dangerous on another. A real-life version of social media bubbles where almost everyone around you shares your outlook, values and privileges.

Birmingham isn't quite like that. More uneven, less homogenous, and healthier for it I think. But that’s also, if I'm honest, what I struggled with at first. I didn’t know where ‘my people’ were. The familiar anchors of a reliable neighbourhood restaurant, the familiar pub, friendly bookshop, even a football team I could feel invested in, just weren't there for me in the way that I'd become accustomed to.

Even the architectural language felt disorientingly foreign: homes in Birmingham just don’t look like the sandstone tenements and villas I’m used to from Glasgow or London stock brick terraces. I felt displaced.

But much more than all that, Birmingham had become an avatar of a kind of dissatisfaction: a thing I could channel negativity into.

In 2020, I thought a lot about how to come to terms with Birmingham (and with myself).

Learning to live in – and with – Birmingham has in part been about constructing my own map of the city. Not the city as it is being imagined by Birmingham’s planners but the parts that have come to have meaning for me. I’ve been open to discovering and experimenting, to slowing down and being surprised. Unlike my experience of London, it’s not a single coherent neighbourhood or feeling or place, but a series of fragments that joined together make this place for me.

Were I to draw you a map of the Birmingham in my head, the first thing I’d draw would be the canal that snakes from Edgbaston, south of the city, connecting the University to the heart of the city. This stretch of water takes you out of the roar of the city’s traffic and into a thin slice of peaceful greenery and wildlife that I’ve walked most days during lockdown.

There would be the parks and the broad tree-lined streets I run through before work begins, where I can listen to my breathing and let my mind slowly empty itself and my shoulders relax. There’d be the hand-painted ceilings of Piccadilly Arcade, and Faculty, the understated coffee shop you’ll find there.

And there would be York Road in Kings Heath, a neighbourhood in south Birmingham. Running west of a forgettable High Street, it’s home to The Hare and Hounds – a venue you’d regularly hear name-checked on 6 Music when gigs were still a thing – and it’s also where you’ll now find the city’s best pizza, it’s finest cheese and wine, and a barber shop that’s straight out of a Spike Lee movie. York Road isn’t pretty, but during golden hour it’s at just the perfect angle to receive a sun that floods it with light on clear days and seems to illuminate every store front.

It’s in these places, these streets, and the familiar faces I see in them, that I’ve found a Birmingham I can relate to and enjoy.

This enforced slowing down has been a bit like a never-ending meditation. Thoughts — good and bad — still come and go, but the slowing of the breath, the watching and the listening, have made me more aware than ever of my good luck, more accepting of things as they are, and more appreciative of what I have.

This city has become an important part of finding that peace.