Bring back Birmingham’s oligarchs Victorian bigwigs gave the city pride

Gray is hardly the first Birmingham resident to see fault with his Midlands home. In the middle of the 19th century, a small network of monied notables thought the town could do with improvement. With their great industrial fortunes, gained through industry or the law, the city’s bourgeoisie rolled up their silk sleeves and got to work. Why? Partly ambition and self-promotion, with Joseph Chamberlain, industrial magnate and Birmingham’s mayor between 1873 and 1876, a monocle-wearing, orchid-collecting exemplar. 

Yet if making Birmingham a commercial success was obviously crucial here — explaining, among other things, the Victorian obsession with railways — that also dovetailed with philanthropy. Especially for Quakers like the Cadbury family, but also for more mainstream Christians, Birmingham’s elite saw themselves as public servants. Chamberlain’s mayoralty saw municipal services — gas, water, provision of lighting — all taken into the public realm and owned by the town. Before that, private concerns snatched profits away from locals, even as areas like sanitation were mostly ignored altogether. 

Nor was this merely an area of utility. “Forward” was the motto Birmingham’s civic leaders chose for their town, and nowhere was that aspiration clearer than in architecture. Council buildings were built like Venetian palaces; libraries like churches; central boulevards like Paris itself. “We were shouting that we’re a city-state like Florence,” reflects Professor Carl Chinn, an ex-broadcaster and activist, “a self-sustaining Birmingham”.

The arts were also central to the city’s civic ambitions. Sir Whitworth Wallis, a curator and director, began a best-in-class collection of Pre-Raphaelite works. Encompassing some 3,000 pieces — including stunning works by painters and designers like Edward Burne-Jones — it both bolstered and exemplified Birmingham’s thriving art scene. Wallis was also the first director of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Partly financed by industrialist cash, and founded in 1885, the council bypassed public funding laws by housing the nascent collection in its own buildings. It’s chutzpah you’d like to see today, though hardly unique for its era. 

Such bullishness could be seen across the public realm — and sometimes the lower classes gained explicitly. Jesse Collings, Chamberlain’s successor, secured free libraries for the city, while the Birmingham and the Midland Institute was established to deliver education to the masses. No less striking, outsiders noticed these successes. Near the end of the century, the Magazine of Art called Birmingham’s collection “the handsomest” around. Harper’s Magazine, for its part, described Brum as the best-governed city on Earth.

By comparison, today’s landscape can feel like a fight for table scraps. Whitehall austerity has resulted in closures and efficiencies across the arts sector for the last 15 years. For Cheryl Jones, founder at the Grand Union gallery, yet another round of cuts risks giving the impression that Birmingham is a cultural wasteland. “We have to talk about the amazing stuff here,” she says, “because if people think there are no arts here, they won’t come.” 

Not that the situation is completely hopeless. At Grand Union, Jones explains how she rents out space for offices, and plans to open a new café. This entrepreneurial approach is clearly successful: the gallery has provided both nominees and judges to the Turner Prize, all without much in the way of council funding or support from some self-satisfied button manufacturer. 

And, to be fair, there is some investment elsewhere too. Officially, the city is excited about the big-ticket development of new BBC studios, just around the corner from where many galleries are housed. But Jones argues this worries “those who are here already” — especially when the Beeb’s arrival will probably mean higher rents nearby. Not to be downbeat, Jones has tried to become an artistic partner to the BBC, with the hope of deepening links with big, flashier projects, and ultimately securing financing over the long-term. All the same, Jones feels future development needs to be planned with the smaller organisations it affects. As she puts it: “That wouldn’t cost much.”

Unlike in the age of the great Victorian oligarchs it can feel like everything from arts to services are an afterthought in Birmingham. Some here feel the council’s ambitions start and end with property development, with little appreciation for what that actually means for the people who live here. Plans for an apartment and retail megapolis, worth some £2 billion, have recently been approved despite sitting on top of historic wholesale markets, and the exact spot where Birmingham was born.

Elsewhere, the historically significant Ringway Centre was recently signed off for demolition, with new towers due to replace the Brutalist giant. It’s fair to say that the Ringway isn’t universally adored, but it does nonetheless represent another era of civic ambition. Half-finished and car-centric projects they may have been — but the city’s erstwhile social democratic leaders still equipped the Ringway Centre with a library. Chinn feels such focus on shiny new private flats is out of kilter with Birmingham’s need for social housing, deepening a split between the city’s administrative class and the people they serve. “The poor get pushed further out and I fear our council bows down to developers,” he says. “We lose our distinctiveness as a city.” 

To be fair, we shouldn’t fully romanticise Chamberlain’s era. As Chinn says, Chamberlain’s developments brought disease through public water, even as his new boulevard pushed out the poor and raised rents. “Chamberlain’s legacy is mixed,” he concedes. “The poor are excluded, and while the great Victorian industrialists did care about Birmingham, it was the place, not the people. That said, since Chamberlain, we’ve not had someone at the top table fighting for Birmingham.”

Yet if we shouldn’t idolise Birmimgham’s imperial heyday, could today’s council learn something from the erstwhile Workshop of the World? Chinn believes so. If, he says, Birmingham once again owned its own water company, its own gas company, its own electric company, it could “stick two fingers up” to London bureaucrats when they arrived demanding spending cuts. 

In this hypothetical Birmingham, certainly, desperately needed public services would stand more of a chance, as would its famed art collection. No wonder other councils are trialling just this approach. One good example here is Preston, with its community wealth-building initiatives. For this to work, though, Chinn believes Birmingham would need a strong leader, fiercely determined to improve the lives of everyday people. They’d also need an ego comparable to Joseph Chamberlain’s, a lover of fresh orchids in his lapel and boasting a supremely unclubbable nature. Yet instead of a Midlands Leviathan, willing to take on the Whitehall establishment, Birmingham’s finances are currently run by a government-imposed overseer. The one councillor to publicly criticise library cuts, for their part, was suspended.

Nor are contemporary businessmen likely to come to the rescue either. Manufacturing, the industry that made Chamberlain rich, still has a presence in Birmingham. But the biggest firms now take money elsewhere: Cadbury is now Mondelez and Jaguar Land Rover is owned by an Indian billionaire. The funding paradigm has changed too. In the second half of the 19th century, local wealth could finance the arts at will, with Birmingham Victorian culture dictating it be donated to the city. Chamberlain himself gave the equivalent of £140,000 in cash to Birmingham’s art gallery. 

But funding and power is more complex now. The many ways Victorian political leaders could raise serious cash for ambitious projects, artistic or otherwise, are effectively forestalled by private business interests or political powers beyond the city’s boundaries. Spending power in Birmingham has fallen 60% since 2010, not least because money from London has dropped off too. In Birmingham specifically, a young population piles pressure on services. With municipal services no longer in the public realm, council tax is one of the few sources of local income. But in the city, that tax is already set to rise by over 20%, while pushing up business rates would heap even more pressure on hard-up local firms. And such a deprived corner of the country, there’s only so far people can be pushed. That’s echoed by other factors beyond the council’s control — not least the suffocating power of the Green Belt.

It’s easy to see how all this could, once more, foster a retreat from both civic ambition and self. We Brummies risk retreating even further into our Midlands home, lost in a pointless fight with Manchester over London’s attention. Speak to locals, at any rate, and you certainly sense fatigue. “People don’t believe it’s going to change,” Chinn says. “Isn’t that terrible?” But here, at this low ebb, there’s also a grassroots resistance, with arts and culture playing a central role. The city saw a bipartisan backlash after a BBC article framed Birmingham’s £451 million art collection as a saleable escape from our financial pickle. As Anooshka Rawden, a cultural heritage professional, told the Museums Association: “These are assets that belong to the city, not a local authority, and once gone, they’re gone forever.”

Clearly, then, the city’s Pre-Raphaelites can still, at the margins, foster a collective sense of civic ambition. But for that to convert into an actual political programme, Chinn says Brummies should abandon their quixotic campaign for second-city status, and instead focus on what the city can offer in the here-and-now. “The finest stained glass in the world,” Chinn says, “is from Burne-Jones — a Brummie!” Birmingham’s arts cuts have seemingly galvanised interest in Brum’s cultural impact. A recent Observer article, penned by erstwhile Birmingham resident Nathalie Olah, listed the city’s impact on dance, theatre, literature and music. 

Inside the ring road, meanwhile, there are green shoots of progress. Library cuts are being fought by volunteers from kitchen tables, while Jones cheers some collaboration with the council on small artistic projects. Among other things, that involves pioneering a public lighting scheme, pointing locals towards businesses and arts organisations affected by HS2. Chamberlain, who plotted for Birmingham to have publicly-owned streetlights, would surely be proud. “If we can bring different sectors and people together,” Jones believes, “there’s a sense of joint pride and ownership over the place,” adding that various funding pots, notably set aside from HS2 funding, are available for galleries or museums.

These efforts may yet bear fruit. Yet in the short term, what comes next for Birmingham seems depressingly clear. No Victorian funding model, or rich industrialist saviour, seem to be forthcoming. For now, then, Birmingham’s harried population might need to take on their city’s fortunes themselves, like Gray having the courage to state when their city is shit — then take the fight to their equally putrid political masters.