Staying alive: The story of Stirchley, the ‘cool’ southside of Birmingham

It’s been rated as one of the coolest neighbourhoods in the UK and home to one of the best 20 bars in the world. Sean Smith charts Stirchley’s unexpected rise

Serving sourdough in Stirchley has made the owner of Loaf feel part of something bigger (Alamy )

After decades in the doldrums, overshadowed by its genteel neighbour Bournville, the south Birmingham district of Stirchley started to stir. A minor miracle was unfolding:  Stirchley was becoming cool.

Stirchley’s story is all the more remarkable because it didn’t seem to have any room to manoeuvre. Pressed hard up against the thrombosis throb of its Pershore Road pinch point, the suburb was struggling for breathing space – sometimes literally.  The single lane main road is a notorious hardened artery that ferries second city south-siders to and from the city each day.

But the suburb slipped this chokehold precisely because its confined space conferred an evolutionary advantage that kept its high street safe from predatory “chain-ification”: its shops were just too small and its parking too scarce. Rents stayed low and Stirchley remained  the place for independent traders to “roll the dice” and set up small, lifestyle businesses in its unloved shopfronts. It wasn’t long before Stirchley’s locally sourced independent scene started drawing people in.

And many stayed, putting down roots in the warren of adjacent streets well stocked with affordable terraced houses. Slowly but surely Stirchley started to change and property prices really started ticking up. As its shuttered shops were repurposed as artisanal bakeries, yoga studios, coffee shops, microbreweries and cocktail bars, Stirchley began to exert its raffish charm. Birmingham boasts more young people than any city in Europe and according to local estate agents it sometimes seems as if they all want  to live in Stirchley.

But the true tipping point came when two young brewers from London chanced upon the perfect location for their brewery and bar in a disused factory unit right on the  trainline that serves the city. There was nothing micro about this brewery bar. Its wide open spaces warehoused vast industrial-sized brewing vats with room for hundreds of paying customers.

The bar was The Attic and co-owner Oli couldn’t believe how it became an instant, sensation fuelled by social media. From across the second city and beyond they came – piling in by the bus and trainload. The bearded hipsters, the real alers, the young and the old were drawn to The Attic but spilled over into Stirchley’s smaller bars, restaurants and cafes.

The balmy summer evenings of 2019 saw queues forming on the narrow pavements outside Stirchley’s unlikely nightspots.

Conde Nast Traveller magazine rated Stirchley as one of coolest bar-hopping neighbourhoods in the UK and The Telegraph voted the new tiny cocktail outlet Couch one of the 20 best bars in the world!

With the benefit of 2020 hindsight, we can say with some confidence that this was the moment of Peak Stirchley. Because then the pandemic hit. And for independent traders in confined spaces ill-suited to social distancing, it hit hard.

The studio is a space for everyone in the community to enjoy, grow and connect… whether that be connecting with your body or with your neighbours

Couch’s reputation as one of the best bars in the world might be a matter for debate but few would contest a claim to be one of the smallest. Even before the lockdown, tables were only bookable by appointment and walk-ins were turned away as soon as its capacity of 30 was breached. Its proud proprietor Katie Rouse grew up nearby and remembers Stirchley as a void: if you didn’t want to go bowling or zap your friends at the local laser quest there really wasn’t much else to do.

But when Stirchley started to move Katie and her partner Jacob knew it was the right place to serve their cocktails. “We always wanted a small intimate bar. It took us two years to find the spot in Stirchley we have now. We couldn’t have found a better space.”

Couch was open for just five months before the forced lockdown and survived by offering batched cocktails delivered to the doors of local customers.

Social distancing has posed a severe challenge since reopening with Couch losing half of its internal capacity, but Katie has overhauled the garden to hold up to 16 customers. With external heating Couch is prepared for a long, hard winter.

Although Katie admits that the “fun and cosy atmosphere around the bar isn’t possible for us in the foreseeable future”, she is upbeat, optimistic and clearly committed to her community: “We adore our suburb and all the people in it.”

Since retail parks and Amazon colluded to hollow out the high street, few independent retailers have been prepared to take the plunge, so Quietude is an outlier even for Stirchley. But drawn by the attractively low rents on offer in 2018, Sam took the bold decision to open a shop promoting mindfulness and wellbeing.

Sam is the impressive embodiment of the dictionary definition of quietude, exuding a state of stillness and calmness, as the HGVs trundle past on Pershore Road.  

Candidly, he admits that the ability to access the chancellor’s £10,000 grant for small businesses explains their survival.  But continuing to exist in the staccato, stop-start limbo of local lockdowns is testing even his equilibrium.

Sam laments that the fall in footfall on the Stirchley scene has stalled the impulse purchasing that was his lifeblood but the former software developer is appropriately stoical about a future that may lie elsewhere. If he leaves, he will miss Stirchley’s sense of community.  

It’s a view echoed by Emily Marchant a few doors down at Yogaborne. As the proprietor of Stirchley’s first independent yoga studio, her website reflects her determination to use her business to foster community cohesion: “The studio is a space for everyone in the community to enjoy, grow and connect… whether that be connecting with your body or with your neighbours.”

Over the phone she fizzes with a zeal to help yoga shed its elitest image and bring pliancy and companionship to aching Brummies.  

Undeterred by the lime green legacy of her letting agent predecessor and her need to make a change of use application Emily broke down partitioning walls in search of Stirchley’s scarcest commodity: space.  

Her newly open plan studio could house 15 people but Yogaborne only had four months in full operation before the March lockdown.

Emily admits that she found that period particularly “difficult” and also cites the chancellor’s grant as a lifeline. Her yoga instructors have been offering virtual Zoom yoga classes but without the ability to offer all important “physical assists, it’s not quite the same”.  

And that problem of non-physical contact will continue when the studio resumes its classes next week with a capacity reduced to just seven to comply with social distancing guidelines. Like Sam, Emily admits to being apprehensive but is hoping for the best.  

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s Stirchley’s restaurant sector that seems the most bullish. Like Emily, Amir – the owner of the popular Kolkata – is investing in space. Amir has stripped his premises back to the brickwork to make room for a bar area and external garden seating.

To paraphrase Philip Larkin, we live in an age where we’ve allowed work to push us to the side of our own lives

Amir is hardened to economic downturns. When he opened Kolkata in 2007, he was soon wrestling with the aftermath of the financial crisis. When I baulk at his intention to spend £ 120,000 on the new refurbishment, endearingly, he tells me not to worry. He believes in Stirchley, he says and will recoup his investment handsomely.  

Ming Nham displays a similar steel at his feted startup Eat Vietnam. Ming has brought authentic Vietnamese cuisine to Brummies and they love him for it. From its opening in July 2019, Eat Vietnam has garnered rave reviews; it was almost impossible to book a table and at its peak employed 13 staff. But it’s tiny.  

Now it’s down to three core staff members and only opens three evenings per week. When I meet Ming Nham he is mulling over the implications of the latest strict government guidelines. He will have to zone the floor space and designate serving staff per table to prevent cross transmission. When I ask if that will be possible, he seems to shrug off a moment of self- doubt.    

“We’ll make it work,” he insists.  

Not everyone in Stirchley is struggling. Over at Venture Bikes, 10-year Stirchley veteran Ben Froggatt explains that it’s boom time for his business. The day after lockdown was announced the government released an exclusive list of exemptions and bicycle repair shops were on it.  

He’s had to take on extra employees to meet the sudden hike in demand spiked by the government’s £50 repair vouchers. Stirchley is well served by two scenic trans-city cycling routes and local commuters have rediscovered their love of pedal power.  

Literally suspending his work on the bike stand behind him Ben explains how Stirchley has been transformed. Ten years ago there was almost nowhere to eat or drink and now we’re spoilt for choice. He is the only interviewee who uses the loaded G-word: gentrification.  

At the other end of the high street, the Birmingham Bike Foundation offers a different perspective. They’re a not-for-profit workers’ co-operative who used to offer membership to a “Tool Club”. For a small fee, local residents could access their tools and workshop one evening per week in order to develop their own maintenance skills. Unfortunately, Covid restrictions mean that they’ve had to suspend this and other training courses.

Nancy was a founding member of the co-operative but beforehand had no real interest in bicycle maintenance; it was simply the right fit for the co-operative business model she wanted to pursue. Workers’ co-operatives start by defining the environment in which they want to centre their working lives. Nancy’s quietly spoken resolve has been influential in Stirchley and the same business model has been adopted by the arts-based cafe Artefact and by an artisanal bakery called Loaf.  

At Loaf, Martha expounds on the virtues of the co-operative business model that shares out the pay, workload and decision-making between its nine members. It’s a haven from the “horrible hierarchies” she’s experienced in her earlier career. Serving sourdough in Stirchley has made her feel part of something bigger and again she talks of the interdependence of the independent traders who lean on each other for support in this most trying of times. At the height of lockdown Loaf did donation bakes for the children of key workers in local schools and made deliveries to vulnerable locals.  

In fact, the three worker co-operatives have made a joint application for planning permission to put their operation under one roof in conjunction with a housing association. It’s a syndicalist business model that also interests Liam at the real ale bar Wildcat. He’s thinking of going that way too if his business can ride out the challenge of the coming months.  

Making a living against the hard shoulder of the Pershore road has always been a tight squeeze on narrow margins but Stirchley found a way. Now that those margins are about to become slenderer still, its independent traders seem to be drawing deeper on their interdependence. At Quietude, Sam uses the word “symbiosis” to describe the way Stirchley’s scene was a rising tide that raised all boats.  And there’s a definite sense that the traders feel their fates have become intertwined.  

But something more nuanced than gentrification is at play in Stirchley. To paraphrase Philip Larkin, we live in an age where we’ve allowed work to push us to the side of our own lives but Stirchley seems like a heroic hold out of independent souls who are pushing back. Because they haven’t just built their businesses here; they’ve built lives into their businesses that have in turn resuscitated the area. And like Katie at Couch, I can remember the void that was here before. Community is the emergent property that springs up when likeminded individuals cluster together with common purpose and Stirchley is lucky to have found it and them. If anything, fighting for survival seems to suit these people: they seem lit from within. It will be a dark day if any of them have to shut up shop and rejoin the gloomy procession of the Pershore purr.