Capturing Birmingham's hidden beauty... Part 2
Birmingham as a city adopts, welcomes and embraces it’s inhabitants regardless of culture and creed and I believe that this is also true of it’s fabric. The less desirable, unattractive underdog buildings are embraced as icons and cherished as testament to the warmth of the city’s
There is no doubt that making Birmingham look beautiful is a challenge. With the right light and the right editing, it is possible. Over the past 12 months I have witnessed a ‘baby-boom’ of talented photographers taking to the streets to capture the hidden beauty of bleak-Birmingham and produce images that Birmingham City Councils marketing department must be salivating at.
You only have to search ‘Birmingham’ on Instagram and within a few scrolls of a digit, you will find striking images of the city’s once loathed buildings bathed in hipster filters and fresh life breathed into their concrete lungs. Popular pages such as ‘IgersBirmingham’ and ‘Hiddenbrum’ and many other social media outlets have created intrigue and mystery around the city and have forced people to look at the boxy beauties with new eyes.
Birmingham seems to have reached a tipping point. It may finally be on the brink of shedding it’s ‘ugly-duckling’ image. With redevelopment-a-plenty in the city centre headed by the Grand Central/New Street Station, Paradise Forum development and big plans down the line for HS2, the City may be coming of age with a bright future to look forward to. Riding the crest of this wave will be the photographers, bloggers, former Londonites and all-round hipsters that have seen Birmingham’s true beauty.
Capturing Birmingham's hidden beauty... Part 1
Back in 2008, Birmingham was voted the UK’s ugliest City. This reputation has hung around the city’s neck for years and has become a long standing joke that everybody (apart from its residents) has had a good laugh at. However, Birmingham, much like myself, has been on a journey in that time and is fast becoming a desirable, metropolitan and dare-I-say, trendy place to live.
In fact, a recent study has shown that many ‘twenty-somethings’ have fled from the capital to the UK’s second city. Figures from the Office for National Statistics show nearly one in ten people in their 30s who left the city between June 2012 and June 2013 fled to Birmingham. Arecord 58,220 within the 30-39 age bracket leaving London 5,480 moved to the ‘ugly duckling’.
Being a photographer in the ‘UK’s ugliest City’ certainly has its challenges. The stark, Brutalist architecture of the 60’s and 70’s can still easily be found throughout the City Centre. As a former Industrial hub, the city has previously shed its skin and looked to the future and adorned itself striking architecture.
The bold, blocky structures such as Birmingham Library and the infamous New Street Station Signal Box are the main offenders in what can be coined as Birmingham’s ‘Grey’ period. A lot of the City’s buildings have been demolished to make way for the kind of stereotypical, glass fronted modern buildings that can be found in every major city in the world.
In my own photographic journey, trying to capture a more beautiful side to Brum’s urban landscape, I have unearthed a strange contradiction to the scornful comments about the bleak wasteland that is Birmingham’s architecture and found that there is some serious love for the former ‘ugliest city’.... Part 2 coming soon....