Home Coming: Birmingham

As the salty air rushed at them out on the boat’s deck, tears sprang to Eileen’s eyes: The more sensitive of the two sisters, she was having second thoughts about the journey ahead. Margaret didn’t have any such conflicts, however – in fact, other than some mild annoyance at what she felt were babyish protestations from her travelling companion, she felt only excitement about the life she felt was about to begin. 

In 2021, I am aged 27, and I am sitting on the train from London to Birmingham for only the second time in about 14 months – enough time for two birthdays and a Christmas to have passed. My makeup is rubbing off onto the underside of my mask, and I have eaten an M&S sandwich. The packaging is on the fold-out, seat-back table in front of me. I have lived in London almost six years by now, and even though the trip home is a relatively convenient 90 minute train ride, I have made it only once in the past year, kept at arm’s length by the pandemic.

When my boyfriend and I get off the train to meet my mother, who has come to collect us in the car, she cries. Now we're all vaccinated, she is finally able to hug me. As we drive along, I look out the window at the sights I’ve known forever – the accountancy firm that’s been on the corner of Hall Green Parade since I can remember, the part of Cateswell Road where my godmother used to live. Closer to my mom’s house, we go past an undertakers’ storefront. “They’ve got a new sign,” I say.

In size, Birmingham is England’s “second city”. Culturally, it’s overlooked in favour of Manchester and Liverpool, though summer 2021 saw a renaissance and reassessment thanks to Jack Grealish’s calves and Liberty from Love Island. The city centre is small-ish but Birmingham’s sprawl is massive. The city has a population of about one million, but the wider metropolitan area – which includes towns like Wolverhampton, Solihull and Walsall – covers 598 square kilometres, and is home to almost four and a half million people. 

Birmingham is totally landlocked, but has more canals than Venice – not that you’d know, because we’re not showy about it, unlike that lot with their gondolas – and our people’s demeanour tends to be informed by the place itself. Always playing third or fourth chair to London and the other big name cities of the UK, we’ve learned not to make a fuss (more than one person has said to me, upon finding out I’m from the Midlands: “Birmingham’s more north than the north”); we say “mom”, not “mum”, our accents flat and spacious like the terrain.  

From the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries onward, Birmingham became known as a centre of manufacturing – “the workshop of the world”, the “city of a thousand trades”. Like many rising stars, its reputation preceded it: Jane Austen disapproved, or at least her 1815 novel Emma’s snobby character Mrs. Elton did, when she remarked: “One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.” Ouch – but as a great philosopher once said, “You know you’re that bitch when you cause all this conversation.” Charles Dickens, on the other hand, was a fan, and returned a number of times throughout his career to give readings. After one such event, he is reported to have told a friend, “The good people of Birmingham seemed to understand everything, respond to everything, and misinterpreted nothing.” (Go off, Dickens.)

Cars, toys, custard and other commodities were made here, a thriving hub right at the centre of England – the place all roads, and waterways, lead to, at least eventually. And as with many economic centres, one of Birmingham’s main characteristics is that it has long been a home to immigrant communities. In south Birmingham, for example, is the city’s Balti Triangle, the collective name given to Ladypool Road, Stoney Lane and Stratford Road, for their one-time concentration of curry houses founded by Indian and Pakistani immigrants. Adil’s on Stoney Lane, in fact, claims to be the original home of Balti cooking, stating that their chefs prepared the first dish consisting of what we now think of as Balti in 1977 – and though the claim obviously can’t be officially substantiated, isn’t it kind of better that way?

Digbeth, just outside the city centre, is considered Birmingham’s Irish Quarter in honour of its once-strong Irish community. And while the area is in flux it is still home to an important date in Birmingham’s social calendar: the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. While many of Digbeth’s Irish venues have closed (including the Irish Centre, where, aged eight, I had the afterparty for my Holy Communion, which I consider to have been my Met Gala), some new ones have opened, and redevelopment feels like a constantly looming presence, the parade is a constant. It takes place every March, and is apparently bested in size only by Dublin’s and New York’s St. Patrick’s celebrations – though it is certainly a challenger to both in terms of the significant metrics “gallons of Guinness consumed” and “amount of people who end up just walking about barefoot and pissed in the road”.

Immigrant cultures (not just Irish and South Asian, but Caribbean, Polish and Chinese, among others) have shaped Birmingham, and this rings true in my own life. I was born and raised here, but all four of my grandparents – including Margaret O’Reilly, the woman whose story opens this piece, and who I know better as Mag O’Neill, my nan and best pal – emigrated to Birmingham in the 50s and 60s, three of them from Dublin. The other, my father’s mother Maria, a four foot ten firebrand who decorated her home with magazine clippings of Pope John Paul II, hailed from farming people in southern Italy.

Margaret, my maternal grandmother, and my great aunt Eileen came to England having heard from their siblings about the abundance of factory jobs here. In fact, my nan says now, there were so many jobs going in Birmingham that if you didn’t like the one you were doing, “You could go out at lunchtime and come back with another.” Over her time in Birmingham’s factories, my nan worked for Slumberland (putting springs in mattresses), Thornton’s (using hand presses to make weighing scales) and Smiths (packing crisps). She lived in a boarding house not far from where she lives now, which she comically still remembers as “very clean”, and she met my grandad, Michael O’Neill, one night at a dance. It was funny – they had Dublin in common, but it was Birmingham that landed them together, in the end. 

Scanlon’s social club is to your right as you walk down The Hill, run by one of Birmingham’s Irish dancing dynasties; five years ago, my grandad’s wake was held there until three in the morning (the free bar was a fitting tribute for a publican who loved his trade – he always thought you got a decent Guinness in Scanlon’s). A bit further down is the now-shuttered shop that, when I was a kid, housed a Slush Puppy machine so elite – a self-serve that dispensed rare flavours like orange and cola – that I frequently wonder if I dreamed it as a sugar addled child.

If you keep going, to your left is a construction site without much construction; the fenced-off land was razed years ago. Nobody seems to know what to do with this odd little patch of Tyseley, once a beacon of Birmingham’s industrial prowess, now afflicted by underfunding and unemployment – though a clue may be found in the fate of a similar plot about 15 minutes’ walk away, which recently welcomed an Amazon Fulfilment Centre.

These were the landmarks I passed as I walked home – properly home – for the first time in almost a year. It was very strange to be in a landscape so familiar but so different to the one I’d become conditioned to for months previous. During lockdown, I barely left the patch of London where I lived, walking myself like an ailing, reluctant dog in the park around the corner for some semblance of doing anything at all. I took up jogging, for fuck’s sake (a heinous pastime that I thankfully have now distanced myself from), and in other words generally became isolated even from a part of myself, which I find only really when I’m near my family.

My accent, sharpened at the corners by a decade in the south, softens again, my vowels squishy and my pronunciation and turns of phrase a funny Birmingham-Irish hybrid created by the home I was brought up in, but one I rarely reveal outside of it. The whirr of constant anxiety that I tend to feel during my interactions with everyone other than those closest to me switches off. It’s a relaxation, an essential self-ness, that I only find at home.

I settled into it as soon as I went in through the back door that day and stood in my nan’s garden while she stayed inside, surprised to see me because I’d kept my trip a secret. I talked to her over the threshold of the open patio doors, and took her photograph on my film camera, because in the months I spent away, I realised that I didn’t have a picture of her to put up in my room. It had been so long and yet no time at all. My mom stood outside with me, but at a distance. She brought our dogs so that I could play with them. It was good to feel their wriggly bodies underneath my hands; I thought that it seemed like they were pleased to see me.

It was more than another half a year after that till I was actually allowed into the house, but I did eventually make it back again in 2021. This time, I stayed for longer and spent more time in the city centre of Birmingham, where I did a lot of my growing up: crying on the street in a tartan skirt (evergreen teen aesthetic) when a boy hadn’t wanted to hold my hand at a local alternative music event (like I said, evergreen). Sitting in Pigeon Park, a churchyard near a McDonald’s – a clarion call for kids in eyeliner and Schwarzkopf Live XXL hair dye – which, every weekend in the late 2000s, was descended on by underage emos being served antisocial behaviour forms for drinking White Lightning near some graves. Getting my nose pierced twice in the Oasis Market. Crying in public some more.

Being an adult is weird for lots of reasons, including the fact that you are allowed to eat what you want whenever you like and nobody can say shit to you. But one of the strangest is that the longer you live, the more you find yourself passing through places that at one point were completely formative, feeling little about them other than amusement at how dramatic you used to be, and dull alarm at the quickstep of time’s passage. That, and fondness. That’s how I feel about Birmingham when I walk around it now.

As with many cities in the vice grip of Westminster, it can sometimes feel like Birmingham’s identity is based almost solely on its history rather than any good that’s happening now, as politicians elsewhere continue to strip away the things that make a place itself while empowering the type of capitalism that makes everything and everywhere start to feel and look the same. I think Birmingham is steely enough to resist succumbing to these pressures entirely, though. I can see that whenever I go home – in Broad Street, a nightspot so notorious and delightfully ungovernable that St John’s Ambulance parks up every Friday and Saturday night just in case; at the top of The Hill, where the sun will set for you beautifully over the concrete if you turn up at the right moment. 

Birmingham has coming and going built in – that’s how I ended up there, after all. It’s a thoroughfare; at the middle of things. I think that its momentum is built into me, too, which is part of why a year of stasis felt so wrong and uncomfortable in my life. It was luck, really, that brought my family there, to this big nucleus of back-and-forth in the first place. But what keeps me returning is the way that I know the city and the way it knows me back: how my muscles guide me around instead of the maps on my phone that I’m glued to elsewhere, the memories on every street in town. I can always slip into myself there, like a favourite dress or a well-fitting glove. How lucky I am to have somewhere like that to go. A place to come home to.

@hiyalauren / @christopherbethell