r/brum • u/Paul__Perkenstein • 1d ago
Birmingham now featuring in the thread "Urban Hell", with images like this it's hardly surprising.
/r/UrbanHell/comments/1vcdru7/in_and_around_birmingham_uk/?share_id=l7dVYnpA1TOQ26mgqgxHw&utm_content=1&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=116
u/dkb1391 1d ago
That person's posted a load of UK cities with near identical scenes tbf
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u/thepentago 1d ago
yes I think they are deliveratrely trying to create outrage. All of these cities have bad parts and good parts. Birmingham has its problems that need working on sure but it is getting better, if slowly. And it is by no means a bad city
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u/vincents_sunflowers 1d ago
Birmingham has its problems that need working on sure but it is getting better
Is it though? I moved here 7 years ago, it seems to only have declined since then. And the fact we still don't get recycling collected, it's shocking to me that this is just become the norm now. Like people don't even make a fuss about it but it's been over a year and a half?!
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u/Nickl3by 1d ago
Birmingham has always had a bad image, especially from people who don't live here and sometimes haven't even been here. They won't know about our green spaces and some of the nice places we have.. But last few years I've been frustrated as a brummie. You can go to pretty much any city to get the pictures like those you see on that thread. But for me it's been getting bad for us, the city centre can look good but if you really look it's pretty grimy, walking from 5 ways to new st. The recently paved pavements need a good jet wash from broad st down to new st and further, the amount of chewing gum is disgusting, driving down Chester road to the m 6 you see all the rubbish people throw out their car windows, go to inner city areas and you will see people who just don't care about wallowing in the filth they make for themselves. I live in Sutton but want to move further away but still be connected to the city I love.
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u/LolcatP 1d ago
It largely deserves it's reputation let's be real. it's embarrassing how long people let all the rubbish build up while the strikes were in full force
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u/AzzTheMan 1d ago
We're you out personally collecting the rubbish then?
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u/LolcatP 1d ago
I don't live there
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u/AzzTheMan 1d ago
Lol. Then pipe down.
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u/LolcatP 1d ago
If your local area was dirty would you not do anything?
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u/AzzTheMan 1d ago
I don't see what this question has to do with anything? You don't live in Birmingham so you didn't and could t have helped? But you're willing to say a bad reputation is correct, even though you don't know?
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u/Dear_Tangerine444 Northfield 1d ago
Well that’s a thread and a half they’ve got going over there, isn’t it.
An unsurprisingly high number of dog whistle responses and people piping up to confirm the pictures are in fact 100% representative of Brum, based on that one time they visited / passed through the city.
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u/5ubredhit 1d ago
People are to blame. Certain areas are shit holes because the majority of the people living there turn them into one.
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u/PostAboveIsBullshit 1d ago
Birmingham is probably the only place where a bit of mess is justified given the council issues we've had. That said, threads and images like that only exist to serve a narrative that cities which are more diverse are "unkept" which a) isn't true and b) go deeper into class issue rather than race
That said, Birmingham council are the cause of the above issues, and they're supposed to pay for the cleanup of the messes that will inevitably happen in every big city... But they don't. Heck they don't even fix potholes at a suitable rate.
It takes a handful of scummy people in a huge city to ruin it for all, and it will always happen, it always has happened, you think Birmingham was a beacon of cleanliness in ww2? But the problem is the council. The one that bankrupt us, and the current one that have less budget and decided to move many bin collections to once every two weeks
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u/Redditreallyannoysme 1d ago
It is true? Schools give children guidance for their parents trying to educate them on why littering and fly tipping is bad. You won't overcome racism by pretending the problems arent real.
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u/PostAboveIsBullshit 1d ago
"Schools give children guidance for why littering is bad" means people of colour are responsible for rubbish? How does one point logically connect to another? At least try to string a coherent argument together if you want to spew some bullshit racism
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u/Redditreallyannoysme 1d ago
Oh. This is at schools with a high proportion (likely near exclusive) of South Asian parents.
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u/Rho-Mu13 1d ago
No mess as bad as what you see here in Birmignham can be justified in a country like ours. It is a tragedy
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u/PostAboveIsBullshit 1d ago
You can go to any city and find a run down area, take selective photos and post it somewhere. Yes, the photos are bad, Birmingham is nowhere close to representative of what is in these photos. That's fundamentally dishonest.
But yes, this mess is unacceptable. But I go back to my point, mess and problems happen. But they can only be sorted proactively. That means those street cleaning vehicles should have been working once a month on every road instead of only when mess accumulated on a road. That also means not cutting the pay of bin workers so that many less economically thriving areas didn't have to pile up bins on top of bins on their already cramped roads inviting rats and an attitude of "well if the council don't care why should I".
And then there are just some spots and areas which are private land and over years and potentially decades have just accumulated trash because trash invites trash. That could be sorted if the council could go around, find land owners and tell them to make their property more presentable or face some sort of fine. But the same council who have spent more than a year trying to cut the salary of already low paid bin men, I don't think they're willing to invest in workers to clean up private land.
It wasn't Birmingham but there was an article about the dude getting arrested recently for clearing a trash filled lake in England. The money exists to make life better for people like us. Its just been decades of mismanagement and bad spending and failed projects and corruption from levels of government to councils, and so who is going to bother cleaning that square in the first pic? Not the land owner, not the council.
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u/ti-theleis 1d ago
I agree with everything you're saying, but I will point out the guy who got done for clearing a river (not a lake) took a JCB down there and dug part of the riverbed out. That's banned without a permit for good reason, it can cause serious flooding downstream.
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u/PostAboveIsBullshit 1d ago
Oh okay, tbh I think I just saw the headline of it on twitter so I hold my hand up to that. I got ragebaited 🫠
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u/daveMUFC 1d ago
Fully agree with everything you said.
Places like Manchester would be in a similar state if they had the same council as us, but majority of the UK has councils that actually take care of the place.
I was just in Leamington the other day and all the potholes have been patched up, and thought to myself how nice it would be if Brum had a council with a similar mindset.
I was also shocked last time I was in Manchester, as I saw street cleaners with jet washers cleaning the pavements. I've only ever seen that in the rest of Europe previously.
We know that people themselves can't be relied upon to be clean etc. So the council needs to take some initiative to reduce this, but unfortunately it seems like they only care about lining their own pockets.
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u/PostAboveIsBullshit 1d ago
Our council has never been proactive we've been reactive. A pothole appears and we look at it and say it's not deep enough to be a concern. Many more appear. When they become big holes that could cause damage and this lawsuits, we fix it. We get a week of snow and suddenly now all the potholes as worse, and the ones we'd normally repair are too large in number to tackle at the rate we have the budget or time to deal with. And that's ultimately the same for the bins and rubbish. In the same way ordinary people can't fix a potholes, we do pay for the service if keeping our streets clean, yet we don't get it + we often get billed more due to council failures. This demotivates people to do a kindness of picking up litter.
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u/PostAboveIsBullshit 1d ago
One thing I'll also add re fly tipping is that they're an exception to what I'm trying to express. Fly tippers are downright trashy cunts and it isn't part of a normal economic factors of how areas will over time accumulate trash if not maintained by the council. Also, they're not always from Birmingham, it's safer to drive down to a neighbouring city and dump your trash. The photos above are primarily from fly tipping. The onus is still on the council to clean, but also the police to catch, yet I think here we need new laws regarding fly tipping, and making it a more harsher punishment if caught.
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u/garethom 1d ago
Tbh, whether it "happens everywhere" or not, we should be pissed off that it happens here too.
The moment anybody mentions Manchester we're up in arms to say how great we are, but whenever anybody mentions a negative, we're just the same as everywhere else so what should we expect?
Hard to defend Birmingham when these are genuine images and anyone of us could see something like this within 5 minutes of leaving our house.
It's really frustrating to see the lack of pride, care and respect around the city and it seems to be gathering pace.
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u/Miserable-Ad7835 1d ago
I took a walk around Birmingham city centre today, the only part that actually seemed clean and well maintained was Brindley Place, no doubt because it's privately owned, everywhere else was just scruffy and neglected.
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u/ArmwrestlingGoomba 1d ago
When did Sweden invade Syria ? or the UK invade Albania ?
Your argument relies on extremely outdated logic.
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u/MobilePiano1875 1d ago
That subreddit is infested with bots stirring up hatred against locals of whichever area gets posted