I’m reading Owen Hatherley’s LRB review (3 November 2022; archived) of Richard Vinen’s Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain (“The unofficial title of ‘second city’ has changed hands many times. York, Norwich, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool have all taken a turn. Since the First World War, Birmingham has generally been considered the UK’s second city”), and I have a question about this passage:
Birmingham became prominent because of its industrial power, but its history is very different from that of the ‘industrial North’. It sits in the middle of England but it is not ‘Middle England’; it is one of the most multicultural places on earth, but it is not exotic. The upshot is that this economically and demographically important place is relatively culturally obscure.
I looked up “Middle England” in Wikipedia and was told that it is “a socio-political term which generally refers to middle class or lower-middle class people in England who hold traditional conservative or right-wing views”; is that what it means here? How do my UK readers understand the term? (I think of Birmingham mainly as the etymon of brummagem; we discussed its accent a decade ago.)
Recent Comments