The Municipal Birmingham We've Lost
I was playing Skate 3 recently and I realised it was giving me major pangs of nostalgia. It confused me because the game came out shortly before my 12th birthday and I didn't really play it until I was 16 or 17.
The more I played, the more I realised that the map of the game is a kind of love letter to mid-2000s urbanism, where the civic value of public spaces was given absolute priority and cities were full of publicly-owned municipal facilities, operated at cost for the benefit of all.
Growing up in Pype Hayes, I was right on the edge of the Sutton / Erdington border. When I look back to my childhood, certain things stand out - Saturday swimming lessons at Wyndley Leisure Centre, Sunday walks around Sutton Park with my grandparents, afternoons in the Sutton Library after school. Weekend trips into the City Centre on the train to go to Nostalgia & Comics with my mom, birthday parties in community halls and in soft play areas.
I know now, as an adult, that the 2000s were an era of government where councils had the money to say "we're going to build this thing, maintain it and clean it, and it's yours to use". Public spaces and facilities were built for no other reason than to improve the quality of life of the community. There was a basic understanding that people needed places to read, keep fit and enjoy nature, regardless of their class or station in life.
It's an era which firmly came to an end at the dawn of the 2010s with the age of austerity. Local government funding was absolutely gutted, and when councils are faced with a choice between the social care budget and keeping the paths clear in the local park, the park loses out every single time.
These facilities were left to fall apart, and people justifiably stopped using them. When they stopped using them, they were quickly sold off into unsubsidised private ownership or bulldozed for redevelopment into commercial spaces.
Some of these spaces have survived, but Birmingham is far from the civic utopia that it used to be. People commonly complain nowadays that there's nothing to do - and they're right, there isn't, but it wasn't always the case. These are things which have been taken away from us.
To roll back the clock on this sort of managed decline is a difficult thing. With local authorities starved for money, direct investment rarely happens, if ever. Public Sector organisations turn to the Private Sector to fund their civic offerings - 'Social Value' is more or less a given requirement of public sector tenders, but as with any plea for corporate charity, it's often the first part of any given project to be cut, done away with or simply lied about to begin with.
What our city requires - and what all cities require - is investment in public spaces and services which go beyond "well we'll make sure that the Metro stops have benches" or "we've just sold 200 acres for a new state of the art privately owned leisure centre".
I'm not sure what made me decide to write this - nostalgia, perhaps. I'd be interested in the thoughts of this community as to the things we miss the most about the 'old Birmingham' and what we think is needed to recapture that golden age of civic spaces.