Last chance to lay ‘Second City’ claim

DEAR Editor, It was disappointing, though not surprising, that the perception is gaining ground that Birmingham is no longer worthy of its former status as the nation’s Second City.

The beginning of the city’s inexorable decline in the eyes of the world can be traced directly to that fateful day in 1974 when the inept and calamitous decision was taken to allow Birmingham to be subsumed into a nebulous and confusing geographical nonentity known as the West Midlands.

At the same time, Greater Manchester was, at a stroke, gifted the chance to present itself as a potential economic powerhouse, centred on and united by a city with global recognition and aspirations.

Birmingham, meanwhile, was buried within a bewildering, ill-defined and grotesquely misshapen cartographical anomaly which consigned it to a permanent identity crisis and decades of self-defeating infighting.

Immediately, government departments found themselves seduced into directing such funding as remained, after London’s voracious consumption of the nation’s wealth, to our northern rivals.

The BBC and ITV abandoned the city and fled northward with such alacrity that nobody here seemed to notice.

The consequent reduction in wealth, investment and media exposure all combined to reduce the city’s status and national profile. Prestigious events together with their legacies largely passed us by as the truth slowly dawned that whatever Birmingham aspired to do, it must do alone.

Wealthy, high-profile organisations were not going to risk backing a loser.

With the regional devolution process gathering pace, we do now have one last opportunity to reverse some of the most damaging decisions of the past.

Yes, we do have a strange architectural blend of relatively low-rise buildings and hopeless football teams, but the opportunity to present the region as Greater Birmingham and so compete on a level playing field with Greater London and Greater Manchester supersedes