"Birmingham - Britain's Frankfurt " a Birmingham Travel Page by JohnnySpangles

Having visited Birmingham on numerous occasions I now feel qualified to chuck a few pearls of wisdom in your direction. Should you be lucky enough to have them land on you, then I hope they serve you well.

Birmingham is allegedly Britain’s second city however I think it only gets this silver medal because of how many people it has crammed into it. Unless you know where to look it appears to be a barren, soulless place that doesn’t even have the working-class bonhomie of a Manchester, a Liverpool or a Newcastle to endear itself to nation’s psyche. Indeed, on the face of it, the only good thing to be said for Birmingham is that it is ‘in the middle’.

The casual visitor to Birmingham has probably arrived there through no fault of their own. It is most likely that they have been sent there by their callous employers to spend several days of brain-numbing tedium manning a trade-show stand at the National Exhibition Centre. Had they been given a choice in the matter then they’d probably have found something better to do, like nailing their nuts to a wall. The NEC is the UK’s largest exhibition venue and is about ten miles from Birmingham centre. They built it near Birmingham partly because Birmingham is fortuitously ‘in the middle’ but mostly because Birmingham had bugger-all else to keep the population employed after we scrapped the motor, steel and ceramics industries in a fit of Thatcherite pique.

If you take a look at the NEC website you’ll see that it hosts such exciting extravaganzas as the Workwear and Corporate Clothing Show, Embedded Systems Expo and Aesthetics Today. The vast NEC site comprises around twenty aircraft hangers. Any one of these is capable of becoming temporarily transformed into a carpeted paradise for the benefit of those whose lives revolve around corporate clothing or embedded systems, whatever embedded systems may be. Having said that I find it hard to believe how the NEC could ever be transformed into something that would keep the Aesthetes happy. Perhaps they booked Birmingham by mistake after all it is next to Barcelona in the big book of exhibition venues.

So, if you have been made to glad-hand like a grinning buffoon on your company’s stand for eight hours, where do you escape thereafter for some more interesting activities with some infinitely more stimulating company i.e. your own?

For nosebag, Birmingham excels in Indian cuisine. This is because the city invented the ‘Balti’, which means you get to eat your curry out of the saucepan it was cooked in. This saves on the washing up for all concerned hence it is very cheap and nobody looks askance at lone diners as they’re not proud and they’ll take anybody’s money.

For sporting entertainments there is speedway racing at Monmore Green in Wolverhampton (North Birmingham) and greyhound racing at Hall Green (South Birmingham). The latter also has an excellent restaurant enabling you to scoff in comfort whilst you lose your expenses budget.

For the art lovers amongst you, or indeed the aesthetes that are bitterly disappointed that Aesthetics Today is being held in Birmingham, there are three great art galleries in Birmingham. There’s Birmingham Art Gallery, and the Water Hall Modern Art Gallery which is right next to it, and then there’s the Barber Institute of Fine Arts which has a very eclectic permanent collection housed in an interesting thirties building. All of these galleries usually have excellent temporary exhibitions…. except for Birmingham Art Gallery which seems to concern itself more with patronising exhibitions driven by such tiresome concepts as ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘youth’. For example they’ve got one all about hair at the moment. Although these exhibitions reach new lows of drivel they no doubt get the gallery the Arts Council funding they’re after. So, on the plus side, the gallery does get to maintain the best collection of pre-Raphaelite paintings in the world.

For the ‘not so aesthetically minded’ Birmingham also boasts a wide array of massage parlours, should the urgent need for a rub and tug arise.