Brum deal: A second city with a third-rate reputation

It should be boomtime for Birmingham, with landmark architecture, high-speed rail links on the horizon – and world-class culture. But Britain's 'Second City' has a third-rate reputation. Why can't it shake off its image problem?

Usain Bolt, the fastest man on earth, will prepare for the 2012 Olympics at Birmingham's Alexander Stadium.

But – as residents of Britain's "Second City" will be only too well aware – he won't be making his celebratory archer sign, or standing on any podiums in Brum.

The city wanted its own Olympics. It bid to host the whole games in 1992 and, two decades later, has to be content with the sight of the Jamaican and United States athletes warming up in the northern suburb of Perry Barr and at the University of Birmingham in Edgbaston.

Brummies have reacted to developments in a typically phlegmatic manner. News that spectators may have to pay to watch the training sessions has provoked grumbles about a "Scrooge" city council, while a local blogger satirised the "Olympic coups", claiming a South Sea island weightlifter will set up his training camp in the utility room of a semi in the unfashionable neighbourhood of Stockland Green.

Next summer's Olympics will throw into sharp relief what might have been for Birmingham, at what is a pivotal time in its history. Plans are in place for a high-speed rail network that could see passengers travelling between Birmingham and London in just 49 minutes on 400m long double-decker trains. The city will next year vote on whether to have a mayor with the sort of powers that Boris Johnson has used to raise London's global profile.

The beautiful Cotswolds – home to David Cameron, Kate Winslet and Jeremy Clarkson – are as easy to reach from Birmingham as from London. Can the city that hosts artistic institutions like the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Birmingham Royal Ballet regain national recognition as an attractive place to live?

Birmingham already has an unemployment rate of 11 per cent, double the national average, and areas of chronic deprivation. The city is bracing itself for £212m budget cuts. When I lived there at the end of the 1980s it was an internationally recognised centre of carmaking and often compared to Detroit, America's Motor City. We can't afford to allow Birmingham to deteriorate into the kind of urban husk that Detroit has since become.

As Brummies watch the BBC moving large parts of its production north to Salford and think wistfully of the Beeb's former Birmingham home at Pebble Mill, their feelings might be as close as you'll find on this island to the sense that US Midwesterners have when their homeland is described by coastal dwellers as "Flyover Country".

In other parts of Britain there is an almost wilful ignorance of Birmingham's attractions; a determined refusal to acknowledge that there is anything worth tasting inside its spaghetti swirl of motorways.

"It's seen as this grimy manufacturing city with an impossible one-way system – when it's actually long-gone," says Clare Short, former International Development Secretary. "Then everyone despises the accent. That's the sneer at Birmingham."

But Siô* Simon, the former Birmingham Erdington MP who hopes to be the Labour candidate in the first mayoral election, believes the city's first task is to generate some hometown pride in Brummies themselves.

"You have to start with a whole city that lacks a sense of confidence," he says. "What does it mean to be a Brummie? People don't know."

One boast that Birmingham folk do seem to have is this: they don't boast. There's an almost in-built humility that would feel alien in Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, London or Brighton. The Birmingham diffidence, in my own experience, means that strangers have fewer barriers to overcome. "Birmingham is a very self-deprecating place, which makes it very pleasant because you have not all this ego all over the place. But the city can undersell itself," says Adrian Goldberg, a writer and broadcaster who recently moved back to Birmingham from London.

"The Brummies don't brag and they don't show off," says Simon. "The marketing challenge is how do you brag about not being a bragger?"

The sense of disbelief that surrounded Birmingham City's recent triumph over Arsenal in the Carling Cup Final extended even to their own fans, who were witnessing the club's first major success in its 136-year history. Steve Dyson, former editor of the Birmingham Mail, describes the achievement as "absolutely phenomenal" and identifies it as one of several reasons for optimism about the city's future.

"Birmingham City fans were always the ones who were most downcast – 'We will never win anything.' This year it has changed and they are jubilant - they have won the Carling Cup and now they're in Europe."

But, as with Usain Bolt's pending arrival, the sense of pride is mixed with feelings of regret. Most Arsenal fans attending the still newly-refurbished Wembley had made but a short journey across north London. The national football stadium could easily have been built in Birmingham – but the Football Association and Labour Government chose not to move to Flyover Country. For Khalid Mahmood, MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, the 2002 decision still hurts. "Manchester had the Commonwealth Games and everything else it wanted. We wanted the national stadium and we lost that. We have a fantastic road network to get people to and from the stadium. We lost the Olympics 1992 – over the last 25 years we have been very much the underdog in terms of big cities."

Birmingham was shortlisted for European Capital of Culture in 2008 and lost out to Liverpool. It was recently shortlisted again as the inaugural UK Capital of Culture – but was beaten by Londonderry. It won't be easy for Birmingham's civic leaders watching Wembley host the Champions League Final this month between Manchester United and Barcelona, the great sporting symbol of Spain's second urban centre, the city that beat Brum to the Olympics back in 1992.

Birmingham might be regarded as culturally disadvantaged when compared to a place associated with such figures as Gaudi, Miró and Picasso. But it is the birthplace of Edward Burne-Jones and today hosts the most important collection of Pre-Raphaelite painting in the world. Even more significantly, it was home to the scientific discoveries of Matthew Boulton, James Watt and William Murdoch when Birmingham was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and no city on earth could match it for newly-registered patents. "Woven into the DNA of the city is creativity and innovation," says Simon, who complains that he was not taught about this heritage during his Birmingham schooling. "It used to have entrepreneurship too but that has been beaten out of it by municipal mediocrity over generations."

Barcelona has La Sagrada Familia, Birmingham has the new Selfridges, which is "a great piece of architecture" according to the advertising agency boss Trevor Beattie, who is not shy of his Brummie background. He recently bought an apartment at the top of another remarkable building, The Rotunda, Birmingham's 1960s answer to the Tower of Pisa: "I grew up looking up at [it] and it's an absolutely iconic part of the Birmingham cityscape."

Birmingham has had mixed success in trying to create the buildings that would lead it out of the economic decline that came with the loss of so much of its manufacturing. It spent £150m on an International Convention Centre, £30m more on a Symphony Hall and then opened a 13,000 seat National Indoor Arena aimed at making the city a hub for sport. But by the mid-1990s the council was realising that the anticipated influx of tourists, business people and sports fans was not having the desired effect in regenerating the city's poorer residential areas.

The period of expansionism has left a valuable legacy that includes the Royal Ballet (lured from its old home at Sadler's Wells) and the boast that Birmingham now hosts "more World and European [sporting] events than any other UK city." But does any other UK city really notice? Birmingham needs some story-tellers. JRR Tolkien grew up in the city and The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit were partly inspired by the Moseley Bog nature reserve, a fact that is no doubt lost on most of those who watched Peter Jackson's New Zealand-based blockbuster trilogy.

Goldberg notes the role of the late Manchester cheerleader Tony Wilson in "fanning the creative flames" of that city, a feat recognised by the hit movie 24 Hour Party People. "What's the great Brummie film? The Brummie Trainspotting that makes it look cool?" demands Simon. "There isn't one. There's [former ITV soap opera] Crossroads."

Although strenuous efforts have been made to turn the rebranded Eastside district into a centre for digital excellence, Birmingham's traditional media appears in retreat. Aside from the scaling back of the BBC, the once prestigious daily Birmingham Post is now a small scale weekly and the daily Birmingham Mail, which is published overnight, has seen circulation plunge below the sales of titles in smaller cities, such as Leicester and Newcastle.

ITV's local coverage serves a vast chunk of central England. The cash-strapped national media is retrenching and rarely looks beyond the capital. It all leaves Birmingham searching for its voice.

Some Brummies point out the shallowness in Liverpool and Manchester having built so much international fame on the back of football and pop music. Birmingham does have a strong musical legacy and the Museum of Heavy Rock is one building that the city council has neglected to invest in, despite Birmingham having produced such bands as Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Napalm Death. Inventive music festivals such as Mostly Jazz and Super Sonic are largely unknown outside the city.

The band you are most likely to hear on a Birmingham jukebox is UB40, who grew up in the same Balsall Heath neighbourhood as Beattie: "Where I came from there were no two races, creeds or colours within consecutive houses. It gave birth to UB40 and it's no surprise that [in that band] you have eight people of six different races."

While UB40 symbolised a time of scarce job opportunities, their mix of Caribbean rhythms and urban British experience made them part of a wider Birmingham sound that included the ska-influenced The Beat, the soul and jazz-orientated Dexys Midnight Runners and the pioneering reggae acts Steel Pulse and Musical Youth.

And it is this cross-fertilisation of cultures that gives Birmingham, which is also a key city for Punjabi Bhangra music, its greatest appeal and biggest opportunities.

Happily, Birmingham is twinned not with Detroit but with Barack Obama's dynamic Chicago, and the young and fast-developing cosmopolitan metropolis that is Johannesburg.

Goldberg is Birmingham-born of German-Jewish and Irish-Catholic heritage and with his partner, a Muslim-Pakistani Brummie, is pleased to be bringing up their two daughters in a city with a long history of immigration.

More than half of the children in the city's schools are non-white but it is the stability and deep roots of the various ethnic groups that make Birmingham different from other big British cities.

"Ethnic diversity is in the DNA of Birmingham – it's part of who we are and what we are," says Goldberg. "It's a place that understands immigration and embraces it. So many of these migrants are part of settled, established communities nobody would question their right to be in Birmingham."

Dyson says that the city's immigrants (who make the city one of the youngest in Europe) have brought a more forward-looking attitude that is changing the place. Birmingham's mosques and gurdwaras are important and are not known for that same Brummie self-deprecation.

Manchester's Curry Mile in Rusholme can be matched by many Birmingham neighbourhoods, while Simon's old Erdington community is considered a traditional white area locally, though its 20 per cent non-white population would make it a cosmopolitan quarter in other British cities.

Though Khalid Mahmood points out that Birmingham needs to do more to reflect its demography in the senior ranks of the council and police force, Clare Short – who describes Birmingham as "probably one of the most diverse cities in the world" – recalls a party of Rwandans visiting the city to study its education system. "They were absolutely stunned by the diversity of the pupils in the system. A lot of international people come to Birmingham and think the diversity of the city and the graceful way it works with it is really impressive," she says, saying that the G8 Summit in Birmingham in 1998 helped give the world a different view of the city from the mocking one often put forward by other Britons.

How much longer will such sneering persist? Lonely Planet recently published a student guide to the city, aimed partly at persuading more graduates to stay in the city after graduation (a real problem). Rough Guide has recognised its cosmopolitan appeal. But Short believes the city's "reputation lags behind the reality".

Helga Henry of the Birmingham arts production company Fierce Earth recently watched a production of Stravinsky's The Wedding by the Birmingham Opera Company, which is led by director Graham Vick, who has also worked at La Scala in Milan and the Met in New York. The Wedding was staged in the AE Harris factory in the Jewellery Quarter, the epicentre of Birmingham's creative heritage.

"I thought if this had been in a Hoxton [London] warehouse it would have been everywhere – instead it was in a factory in Hockley [Birmingham] and it was relatively invisible."

As this youthful but historic conurbation becomes even more accessible – and it is centrally-situated amid some of England's most beautiful rural counties – it is hard to believe that more people will not head there to study, set up businesses and buy homes.

They might discover the maze of Victorian canals, the Balti curry houses, the green suburbs, the low cost of living, arts events like the Flatpack film festival and restaurants such as Purnell's, run by the Michelin-starred Birmingham chef Glynn Purnell.

Whether those self-deprecating Brummies are capable of selling their own city is another thing, as even Trevor Beattie admits. "Everyone else will discover it before we do," he says. "Brummies will wake up one day and say: 'This is a brilliant place isn't it?'"