What is about to happen to Birmingham is devastating – it will ruin the city I love

Europe's largest council must make urgent budget savings of £300m – but at what cost? Birmingham’s ‘golden decade’ now means the city faces years of paying more for less, says proud Brummie Chris Stevenson

Host of the 2022 Commonwealth Games, Birmingham’s ‘golden decade of opportunity’ is now a mere memory (PA Wire)

It was a little over two years ago that Birmingham residents were told that their city was at the start of the “golden decade of opportunity”.

It was about to host the Commonwealth Games, the HS2 high-speed railway between London and the north – of which it was the major interchange – was well underway, and a number of smaller local projects would have a huge, transformative effect on the entire West Midlands.

I’d felt that sense of optimism in my hometown for years. Cranes dot the skyline as you drive into the city centre, a sign of the wider development across the region. Longbridge, in south Birmingham, a couple of miles from where I grew up – which, for decades, was home to British car manufacturing – was going through a regeneration of its own.