How a UK city changed its fortune

“It feels like it’s Birmingham’s chance to shine,” says Stephen Knight, the creator of Peaky Blinders, a hit television series set in the city. Two thousand performers took part in last night’s opening ceremony for this year’s Commonwealth Games. The city’s landmarks are splashed in bright paint or festooned with multi-colored banners. Brummies are brimming with pride.
The games are the highlight of several good years for the city. Several big companies, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., have located regional offices there, encouraged by the prospect of faster connections with London when HS2, the new high-speed railway, is finished. The city boasts a brand-new network of trams, a restaurant mile to make the mouth water, and the world’s biggest Primark. Andy Street, the mayor of the West Midlands Region that includes Birmingham as well as other Black Country towns such as Wolverhampton and Coventry, has emerged as the most influential of Britain’s six new metropolitan mayors, not least because he is a Tory.
Until recently, Birmingham’s history was one of decline and disappointment. But it didn’t use to be that way. In the 1880s and 1890s, intellectuals flocked to what one American visitor called “the best-governed city in the world.” Birmingham commissioned a succession of fine buildings and a broad new boulevard — Corporation Street. It also led the world in clearing slums and providing municipal services such as gas, water and sewerage.
The impresario of all this was Joseph Chamberlain, one of the great political figures of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who was mayor from 1873 to 1876, became an MP and a Cabinet minister. His sons — by different wives — were just as influential if not more so. Austen Chamberlain was twice chancellor of the exchequer; Neville Chamberlain was prime minister in the period leading up to World War II.
Joseph Chamberlain drew on two great local resources. The first was a civic gospel that preached that local industrialists had a duty to give back as much as they could to their communities. In many cities, industrialists — once they had made their pile — retreated to the countryside and lived like feudal barons. In Birmingham, local families, many of them Quakers and Unitarians, tried to improve the place that had given them their wealth. The Cadburys led the way by creating the model town of Bourneville for their workers, filled with spacious artisans’ houses with their own gardens.
The second was the creativity of local business. Chamberlain’s Birmingham was one of small workshops and niche products. The mayor himself was an exemplar of this: He moved there when he was 18 to take over his uncle’s company, which at one point produced three-quarters of the world’s screws. From the 1920s, the city reinvented itself as a motor town — Britain’s Detroit — with companies like Austin, Rover Motors and Dunlop Rubber within easy commuting distance.
The city’s fortunes changed sharply from the 1960s onwards. It is hardly original to say that Britain is an over-centralized country with London dominating the economy and Whitehall, and particularly the Treasury, trying to micromanage a country of which it knows little. The quality of governance in Birmingham plummeted thanks to ill-conceived reform, most notably the 1973 reorganization of local government.