Most People Live in Places in West Bromwich

“… amid the Ridley Scott images of world cities, the writing about skyscraper fortresses, the Baudrillard visions of hyperspace…most people actually still live in places like Harlesden or West Brom.”(Doreen Massey, 1994:21).

My first visit to West Bromwich took place some time in 2004, when I went to watch a performance in the town’s library. I remember the library well. It had the same scratchy carpet, stuffy, central-heated atmosphere and municipal smell (a mixture of disinfectant, aging paper and human bodies) as every other local authority library I had visited.  But unlike the 1960′s modernist buildings that housed most public libraries I’ve known, this was an ostentatious Victorian edifice.  In particular, I remember the green-tiled entrance hall, smooth like the inside of a shell.

If the library was distinctive, the town centre was not.  It consisted of a 1960’s style semi-indoor shopping centre, housing the type of ubiquitous, ‘downmarket’ shops which often find themselves pushed towards the margins when towns are regenerated or ‘smartened up’: Poundlands, Greggs and all sorts of charity shops and pawnbrokers.  I remember thinking that I could be in Preston or Burnley or Gateshead.  Yet, it was the generic town centre, rather than the memorable municipal library that sparked my interest in West Bromwich and suggested it as the focus for my research. 

For me, it is West Brom’s ‘everyday-ness’ that makes it interesting.  In a world of tourism and place-marketing, West Bromwich is most certainly not ‘a destination’.  It is a historic place, yet its history hasn’t been repackaged as ‘heritage’; despite the opening of the Public in 2008 it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a ‘cultural hub’; and it is definitely not a retail Mecca.  In fact, there is almost no reason to visit the town.

At the same time, West Bromwich is a visibly globalized place.  If the effects of global capital can be understood as a spectrum, with the burnished skyline of Canary Wharf at one end, and a sprawling Mumbai slum at the other, then West Bromwich is somewhere in the middle.  Polish food shops, Sikh health centers and multi-lingual Police warning signs tell of migration and the volatile nature of capital, (which never stays in one place for long), whilst hoardings conceal urban clearances, soon to be occupied with the latest local premises of a multi-national corporation, one which, incidentally, began with a shipment of tea – that most English and ordinary of drinks.

West Bromwich is a place where encounters with the rest of the world are both frequent and mundane. No melting ice caps, trading-floor dramas or sweatshop deaths here, simply the monotonous practices of everyday life that happen in the type of place where most people still live.  And it is this familiar sense of boredom, I think, that makes West Bromwich fascinating.