In defence of the West Midlands, a little-loved county of hidden beauty
It is, I will admit, not the strongest start to a piece of work. It is one thing to be asked to pen a paeon of praise to "your" part of the UK; a slice of the British landscape which rarely receives effusive tributes. It is quite another to readily accept the commission, and then realise that you do not entirely know what you are writing about - that you need to go online and ask a famous search engine the precise contours of a place you called home for the majority of your formative years.
No, that is not a good start at all.
But then, such is the fate of the West Midlands - a segment of the UK so unappreciated by the rest of the country that even people who grew up in its swarthy arms are not wholly sure where it begins and where it ends.
Still, my short stint of research with the assistance of a global tech giant has been enough to bring me up to speed - and I now know the difference between West Midlands the county (effectively a seven-strong cluster or urban acorns running the gamut from Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton all the way to Walsall, Sandwell, Solihull and Dudley) and West Midlands the region (a broader area which lifts its gaze further west, all the way to the Welsh border, via Shropshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, and the sunshine-dappled slopes of the Malvern Hills).
Good lord, there's not a lot to work with there, is there? That would probably be my reaction were I reading, not writing, this. Because - this feature being part of a series of pieces about the counties of the UK - we can dispense with any talk of Shropshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire, leaving them for another day and another writer, on account of their being counties in their own rights. Which leaves us with Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley et al - the thinnest of gruels from which to produce a rounded meal.
At least, that is the image I've long battled against. I lived in the spiritual heart of the (county of) West Midlands as a child - in the industrial town of Tipton between the ages of four and 13, and in somewhat leafier Walsall as a teenager. I am used to the preconceptions that go with this. I am inured to the little comments, accustomed to the sly digs.
Maybe it is the accent (though I do not have it), which tortures its vowels and syntax, but in no more glaring a manner than the Scouse twang or the Geordie yawn, and - apparently - with none of the sense of romance that clings to those two regional variations. Maybe it is the lingering influence of that awful advert for a high-street pensions provider in 1991, which saw The Fast Show alumnus Mark Williams intone "we wanna be together" in the most hideous Brummie foghorn voice (Williams hails from Bromsgove in Worcestershire, so was clearly aware that he could hop back over the county line and leave the fire he had started raging behind him). But there has long been an assumption (not necessarily serious, but amused at the thought of itself all the same) that the West Midlands is a county of lumbering oafs and a general cluelessness.
I'll admit that the geographical cast list above doesn't give me a huge amount of room to manoeuvre in selling West Midlands: The Travel Movie. I cannot reach for the Peak District (largely in Derbyshire), nor even Cannock Chase (which is in Staffordshire). If I want to suggest an area of leafy tranquility in the county, I have to go for Sutton Park, on the edge of Sutton Coldfield. This is no small enclave - its 2,400 acres make it one of the largest urban parks in Europe. And yet it would be an optimistic writer who would claim that it has the must-see kudos of the Lake District and Scottish Highlands.
No, the flag of defence for the West Midlands must be planted firmly in its blackened metropolitan heart. And no, "blackened" is not the wrong word there. Plenty of the West Midlands's appeal as a destination is pinned to its mine-and-grime heritage. Take the Black Country Living Museum (bclm.co.uk) as an example. Pitched just outside the centre of Dudley, this 26-acre enclave takes a fond look at the sweat and soot which defined the area in the 19th and early 20th centuries, via recreations of Victorian streets, barges inching along the Lord Ward's Canal and vintage trams running along restored tracks. The latter trick in particular is repeated on the edge of Birmingham by Tyseley Locomotive Works (vintagetrains.co.uk), where the Great Western Railway's turn-of-the-20th-century depot hosts the chuggings of antique steam engines like the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe (built in 1936) and Clun Castle (a relative child, of 1950).
Not, of course, that Birmingham, spends its afternoons peering dimly back into the mists of the Fifties. Anyone who thinks they know the city, but has not wandered its streets this millennium, will be surprised at how much it has to offer.
It has trinkets of boutique desirability in its Jewellery Quarter (jewelleryquarter.net), glorious slabs of art in its Museum and Art Gallery (works by British greats like Constable, Turner, Bacon, Hogarth and Gainsborough, and European icons such as Botticelli, Renoir and Rubens; birminghammuseums.org.uk), and a food scene that has developed into one of the country's most diverse.
Witness Purnell's (purnellsrestaurant.com), which wears a Michelin star under the gaze of local boy Glynn Purnell, and serves what is described by the Michelin guide as "dishes with distinct flavours [that] are carefully prepared to a consistently high standard". These include a Brixham cod masala with Indian red lentils, pickled carrots, coconut and coriander - and a slow-cooked neck of Wiltshire lamb with Jerusalem artichoke and watercress.
Art also plays a role in unheralded Walsall, where the New Art Gallery opened in 2000 via a combined ￡21million of National Lottery and European Union funding. Modern and striking, it has helped to regenerate what had become a (relatively) dowdy area of the town centre. That its collection contains masterpieces by Van Gogh, Renoir, Turner and Monet is never mentioned whenever the county is depicted as a cultural wasteland.
But then, regeneration has always been a West Midlands strength. Nowhere more so than in Coventry, which wears the devastating beating it received to the flash and dance of Luftwaffe bombs in the brutalist buildings which replaced its flattened medieval streets.
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Some of these structures are, admittedly, less than easy on the eye, but they stand as a time capsule of the architectural developments of the Fifties and Sixties. And whatever you think of the Gibson Plan which produced them, there is nothing but magic to the reconfiguration of Coventry Cathedral (coventrycathedral.org.uk). The modern church, crafted by Sir Basil Spence and consecrated in 1962, was placed next to the shattered ruins of its 14th century predecessor - the juxtaposition a deliberate, no-words-needed statement on the evils of war. That the Kreuzkirche in Dresden - a city which felt the same indiscriminate rush of violence - contains a cross of nails made from these same ruins speaks of the power of reconciliation. The West Midlands may not be the most picturesque of counties, but it has beauty where you expect it least.