LIZ and I have a wish-list of cities to visit and over the years have whittled it down steadily, if irregularly, as time and funds permitted. But partly from my ingrained memory of an overnight stay, partly from too often seeing its unattractive underparts from the M6 and partly from its reputation as a boring city full of boring people talking like Frank Skinner, Birmingham was well down that list.
In fact, England's second city was not on our list at all. The memory of trying to find my way round Spaghetti Junction as a youngster then driving haplessly round the Bullring city centre for an hour before finding the road I was looking for is stil
l with me. As is the approach to Birmingham that autumn night with mile upon mile of yellow street-lighting fading into the murk, one of the most melancholy views I've seen.
My friend Jack's lodgings didn't help when I finally tracked them down. Those were the days when students stayed in boarding houses with worn stair carpets and cabbage smells, and our meal that night was a pink, spongy meat which we forced down while Jack muttered that the family Alsatian hadn't been seen for two days. I left Birmingham next morning quickly and without regret. Since then I've passed by on the other side, or at least as fast as the clogged M6 will ever allow, although we have visited Jack and family occasionally where they now live, well away from the city centre.
But revelation comes in many forms and I found last week that the revamped Birmingham city centre compares well with many cities of more glamorous reputation. Going by train helped that revelation, Cross Country getting us there bang on time via Newcastle, York, Leeds then the thickening list of stops that included Derby, Sheffield, Wakefield, Chesterfield and Burton-on-Trent. Arriving that way gives a different impression to arrival while trying to find the correct lanes by car.
Next day the revelation continued as Jack and Sue walked us round one of the most pleasing open-space city centres I've seen. The silver exterior of a Selfridges shaped, allegedly, like Marilyn Monroe's famous posterior might dismay the purists, but not me. The famous Bullring bull statue has pride of place on a new site, while Antony Gormley's The Iron Man sculpture is as ruggedly impressive as his Angel of the North. Not forgetting the giant sculpture of a reclining woman in a fountain, the wall inscribed with poetry by TS Eliot, the lady herself referred to less poetically by locals as "the floosie in the Jacuzzi" even when, as at present, the 3,000 gallons-a-minute water flow is turned off. You can't have everything.
But Birmingham, to my surprise, has a lot more than I thought and, like Glasgow and Edinburgh, most of what it has is in a compact, visitor-friendly area that can include a walk by the canal, art galleries, Symphony Hall, the Rep theatre, and dozens of multinational restaurants and cafes. For young late-nighters – both categories I now marginally fail to ease in to – there is Broad Street. On second thoughts, forget Broad Street. But give the rest of Birmingham the benefit of the doubt.
