English City Hopes for New Image in Centennial

Now England’s second-largest city, Birmingham has been around for at least 900 years, but this year it is celebrating a centennial and a new beginning.

It is marking its recovery from a severe recession, and it hopes people will forget what they thought about the city before and notice what is good about it now.

In 1889 Queen Victoria, who had her own misgivings about the place, granted Birmingham its city charter. That is the reason for the centennial. But the city is using the occasion to bury a recession that wiped out more than 200,000 jobs and ravaged its traditional metals industry.

The city of 1.05 million, which is 100 miles northwest of London, is hoping the yearlong celebration will clear away its image as a cultural wasteland and sterile, concrete jungle.

Birmingham-Bashing

Birmingham-bashing is as old as the city itself.

History books tell of Victoria’s drawing the shades of her royal carriage to block out its industrial soot, gloom and grime when she came here on her travels through the English Midlands.

In her 1816 novel, “Emma,” Jane Austen wrote: “One has no great hopes for Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.”

Explained Andrew Fretter, City Hall’s principal marketing officer: “Manufacturing used to be a very dirty industry. It’s not any more. People haven’t yet adjusted to that new situation.”

Birmingham has been a trading center for centuries, although the “Domesday Book” of 1086 rated it one of the poorest in Warwickshire County.

It prospered during the 16th Century as a finishing center and marketing outlet for basic metal goods from the surrounding area and is acknowledged to have been the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution long before it became a city.

Diverse Population

As England’s workshop, Birmingham attracted a rich diversity of immigrants, primarily from Britain’s far-flung empire, until the recession struck in 1979. “It hit hard,” Fretter said. “Vast swaths in the city of Birmingham were left totally derelict.”

Albert Bore, chairman of the economic development committee of the Labor Party-controlled City Council, said: “The shakeout of the Birmingham economy was catastrophic, to say the least.”

Birmingham’s recovery was spurred by the council’s sponsorship of several megaprojects, including a modern science park and the $215-million International Convention Center scheduled to open in 1991.

It also spent the equivalent of $2.5 million on a bid to host the 1992 Summer Olympics. The bid failed--Spain won out--but it signified the new confidence of a city that only two years ago came in dead last in a survey of the quality of life in 38 British cities.

Besides its traditional prides and joys--more canals than Venice, Italy; Europe’s largest public library; a rating as having the best tap water of any big city in the world, even if it is piped in from Wales--Birmingham is scheduling $2.5 billion for development.

Record Manufacturing

Manufacturing production has outstripped the previous record set in 1979, 80% of manufacturers are working at more than 90% capacity and unemployment has fallen to 7.5% from 1982’s peak of 16.8%.

Herbert Austin set up his automobile works in the city’s Longbridge district in 1905 and pioneered the popular Austin 7. Today, Birmingham holds Britain’s only street-circuit car race, the annual Super Prix, and the auto industry is once again the city’s largest employer, home to the Rover Group’s modern robotic car plant and the Austin Morris division of British Leyland Motor Corp.

Business travel to the city, streamlined by a modern international airport, has helped create 73,000 jobs and has made Birmingham the fifth-most-visited city in England. Visitors spent the equivalent of $635 million here in 1987.

“Brummies,” as Birmingham’s residents are known, concede that they must now pay attention to how their city looks, as well as how it works.

In the 1960s, most of the city’s Victorian heart was torn out and replaced by featureless concrete and mirror glass buildings, surrounded--some say strangled--by a beltway.

Its architectural style is still symbolized by two of its best-known landmarks--the Bull Ring, a covered shopping complex soon to be replaced by a $688-million continental-style arcade, and Spaghetti Junction, a vast crisscrossing of roads, cloverleafs and overpasses.

The planners “ripped the city apart in the 1950s and ‘60s,” Bore said. “The drive to clear the slums and to provide for the age of the motorcar lacked the sensitivity the planning community now has.”

The city has an eclectic mixture of performing arts: UB40, the acclaimed multiracial rock group, comes from Birmingham; “Spitting Images,” the wickedly satirical puppet show, is produced here, and Simon Rattle, the Wunderkind of British conductors, has led the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra since he was 25 years old.

In a recent coup, the City Council lured the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet from London with a $10.3-million financing offer. The traveling section of the Royal Ballet will move into the 1,950-seat Hippodrome in August, 1990.