Manchester VS Brum

18-01-2007

Listeners to BBC Radio WM on Friday will be able to hear a live debate between breakfast show presenter Phil Upton and his Mancunian counterpart Terry Christian over which is Britain's true second city. It's like two bald men fighting over a comb I hear you say, but Pete Millington knows which one will win it.

It's not a new debate and one that seems to raise it's head every few years, occasionally on the back of some national contest or other connected to funding for new events or venues

Civic and regional rivalry is no bad thing of course, especially if it encourages a renewed sense of pride amongst citizens. Suddenly we all reach for our local history books to remind ourselves of all the great inventors, authors, musicians and sports personalities who came from our area, the inventions, famous buildings, cultural trends and cult media phenomena

Mr Christian may well come straight off the ropes with Coronation Street, Oasis and Manchester United football club…

Mr Upton will no doubt retort with the likes of J.R.R.Tolkien, The Archers and Duran Duran… etc.

Both cities will no doubt predictably claim to have started the industrial revolution, both will flag up their economic importance, architectural renaissance and cultural significance

Putting our own provincial fervour aside for one moment, Manchester is a fine city and it's people are creative and forward looking, having much in common with Brummies, it is true that there is much happening there and none can doubt the prominent position of the city on a number of fronts

But Birmingham wins the contest for three main reasons:

1. It's central geographical position in the centre of the country, it's strategic location on the national transport network and it's secure site way above the country's rising sea level. Have no doubt that as the atmosphere heats up in the next fifty years and London disappears under the Thames, more and more southerners will relocate to Birmingham which will one day become the capital of Great Britain

2. The mantle of 2nd city has always been based on population and in this respect Birmingham far exceeds Manchester having a population in the city of just under 1 million people compared to just under 400,000 in Manchester. We're twice as big basically.

Mancunians will no doubt lay claim to the two and a half million people who live in the Greater Manchester conurbation, which includes Bolton, Stockport, Rochdale, etc. In which case Brummies can equally include the Greater Birmingham conurbation which takes in the Black Country, Coventry and Solihull, giving an overall population of about 100,000 more than Greater Manchester

It is also worth observing that on a map of Greater Manchester, many high population areas of the region such as Wigan and Bolton are unconnected to the central urban area in much the same way that the South Staffordshire towns of Cannock and Tamworth or north Worcestershire towns of Bromsgrove and Redditch are tenuously linked geographically to Brum and yet provide the functions of being important commuter towns, etc.

Including these urban areas sends the population of Greater Brummagem soaring and on this basis Birmingham continues and will continue to leave Manchester way behind

The difference in culture can be traced back through the industrial revolution, where we see industry right across Greater Manchester dominated by the textile industry for generations whilst industry in the West Midlands has been far more flexible and all-encompassing, the city of a thousand trades where small workshops turned their hand to the production of what ever was in demand

I believe that this difference in mindset is what may be giving Manchester a superficial sense of being more successful than Brummies. No one can deny the brilliance of one or two cultural success stories, in a nutshell, Coronation Street, Man United and the Gallagher brothers…

However…

ferociously competitive specialism with success and wealth staying in the hands of the few is not what makes 2nd cities. Birmingham's success is in it's ability to embrace the cosmopolitan, ever changing nature of the globe, our ability to change, adapt, embrace without the need to flex our muscles and strut our stuff every two or three years like boorish young siblings

If the spirit of Manchester is epitomised by Noel Gallagher, Elsie Tanner and Christiano Ronaldo, the soul of Brum continues to be based on heroes of real substance: Joseph Chamberlain, Matthew Boulton, James Watt and George Cadbury, etc.

Perhaps we should be setting our own sights higher than this perennial wrestling match with precocious little junior from up north…

Perhaps the next debate needs to be with London about the future status of Capital city because in my opinion we need to have our eye on the day that those levies really do break and government has to be rehoused, at which point Manchester is welcome to compete for second city status with it's real peers… Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, and Bristol (all places of higher population).