What I’d do to level up my home town of Wolverhampton
Sathnam Sanghera, who now lives in London, returns to Wolverhampton to ask the experts what the city needs to catch up
Acouple of years ago I interviewed Nick Jones, the entrepreneur behind Soho House, the chain of exclusive members’ clubs. The guy is a straight-up business genius, but I don’t think he had been briefed about our meeting and, looking back, I gave him a hard time. When I wasn’t making things awkward by bringing up the lack of racial diversity of the club’s members then (“We have a very multicultured view of our membership,” came the nervous reply), I was asking why Soho House wasn’t opening more clubs outside London, like in Birmingham. “I love Birmingham,” he said, sounding a little panicked. “I know you’re trying to catch me out.” What about my home city of Wolverhampton then? “I think it might be challenging to make it work there, but I’d be willing to give it a go.”
The response made me laugh at the time, and it’s still funny years later. I love Wolvo, so much so that I tweet about it every other day, mention it in features every other week, visit around twice a month and have madeit a theme in three books, but the idea that a swanky branch of Soho House would open there is as ludicrous as the idea that Wolverhampton Wanderers would move Molineux Stadium to Islington.
Indeed, it has been no surprise whatsoever that the government has made Wolverhampton, which backed Brexit and is home to two constituencies that turned blue at the last election, the focus of its levelling-up agenda, with the city being visited in recent months by politicians including Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and Robert Jenrick, who was born in Wolverhampton and educated at the same Wolverhampton school as me, but nevertheless kicked off a tour of UK towns, to promote the new Town of the Year competition, in a place that actually became a city in 2001.
There is a larger gap between London and Wolverhampton than there is between London and Paris, and observing the economic and cultural differences is the closest thing I have to a hobby. What are the differences? Well, first of all, there’s the public transport. From my home in London, there are buses every three or four minutes to take me anywhere I want to go in the capital for just £1.65. In Wolverhampton, I recently spent 40 minutes on a weekday morning waiting to get a bus into town, and when it did arrive, it cost £2.40 and travelled so slowly that it would have almost been quicker to walk. Then there’s property prices: a single parking space in London recently went on the market for £350,000, a price for which you could purchase three terraced houses in inner-city areas of Wolverhampton.
When it comes to retail, Wolverhampton and London are different planets. The popular shops that are not available in the city centre, by which I mean the area within the ring road, include Reiss, Zara, Waitrose, Gail’s, Pizza Express, Whole Foods, Pret, WH Smith and Leon. Suffering from a wardrobe malfunction before a book event, I recently walked around the city centre for an hour and was presented with a total of seven blazers to choose from, between four shops. In London, there would be thousands of options within a Tube ride to Oxford Street. In London, there have been several high-profile campaigns to stop supermarkets such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s from opening outlets on swish high streets, whereas in Wolverhampton, there have been several campaigns to get these supermarkets to open branches. In London, there are, within a 20-minute walk of my home, more than two dozen coffee shops. In Wolverhampton city centre, we’ve had to do without a Starbucks for several years (the only one being inaccessible, inside the University of Wolverhampton), there is no Caffè Nero, and for at least a decade I’ve resorted to McDonald’s for caffeine fixes when at my parents’.
Even in the internet age, it’s possible to buy many print publications on the average London high street, but I recently spent half an hour walking around Wolverhampton city centre on a Saturday morning to find a copy of The Times – obtaining one eventually near the station. (I spent the same amount of time trying to find a toilet, when the one in Costa turned out to be broken.) My local London high street has two empty shop units, and one of those is already under offer. Walking around the very centre of Wolverhampton, I stopped counting empty shops after 13 premises, including Beatties, the department store that was once at the heart of life here. On one of the many boarded-up spaces, a blackboard inviting locals to express views on what they want to see moving in included the responses “Weed store”, “Chipotle” and “Good shops”.
The official city statistics, available on WV Insight, a council website, extend the tale of woe: the city apparently “has one of the highest unemployment rates in England”; it suffers from “an amount of recorded crime above the English average” and “has seen increasing levels of deprivation in recent years”. “Life expectancy for both men and women… is lower than the English average,” and “child obesity is still high compared with the English average”.
People sometimes ask why Times writers – mainly Caitlin Moran and I – bang on about Wolverhampton so much. All I can say is that you would bang on too if you had moved, like us, from one of the least affluent parts of Britain (of the 316 local authorities in England, excluding the Isles of Scilly, Wolverhampton is ranked the 11th most income-deprived) to one of the most affluent. The town was actually not that bad in the Nineties: it had vibrant nightlife and briefly a branch of Gap. But switching between the two, as I have been for more than 25 years, gives me whiplash, and frankly I’m not sure why the more general divide between London and not-London does not make front-page headlines on a daily basis.
Leaving aside the profound cultural differences, such as the relative popularity of pies, the relative tendency for passengers to talk to bus drivers, the relative probability of getting scraps on your fish and chips, the relative acknowledgment between drivers and pedestrians at zebra crossings, the relative amount of clothing worn to go clubbing, and the relative chance of getting gravy on your chips, the economic contrasts are stark.
The government’s levelling-up white paper conceded that the “UK has larger geographical differences than many other developed countries on multiple measures, including productivity, pay, educational attainment and health”. It went on, “Pay in the top region for earnings (London at £823 per week) is 1.5 times greater than the lowest region (the North East at £550 per week),” adding that “geography is a key factor affecting equality of opportunity and social mobility”. Look further and you’ll find that while in Barnsley 15 per cent of disadvantaged 18-year-olds go to university, in London nearly half of them do. That average life expectancy for men in Blackpool is about 74 years; in Westminster it is nearly 85 years. That the ratio between GDP per person in Britain’s richest places and its poorest is 4.8:1 – the largest of any Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development country.
As The Economist put it recently, “Britain is highly geographically unequal… It is as if America’s Rust Belt or the former East Germany were home to half the population.”
What should be done? Well, no shortage of plans have been presented in recent decades, and the current government is wielding its own 12-point strategy, to be fulfilled by 2030. The points range from improving healthy life expectancy to extending high-speed broadband. And there have been countless criticisms of the efforts, from the claim that no new money is being allocated, to the complaint that Boris Johnson just does not have the mastery of policy detail necessary to sort things out, to detailed analysis from Bloomberg News that stated, “More than two years on, in a period dominated by the coronavirus pandemic, most of the places that lagged behind London and the southeast of England when Johnson came to power have seen little sign of better times. In fact… they’re more likely to be falling further behind.”
But when it comes to improving my home city and other places like it, any effort is better than no effort at all, and I welcome any sincere attempt to stop the rot. And rather than whine from a distance, I spent several weeks this spring talking to people in Wolverhampton about what they think should be done.
I solicited the opinions of three of Wolverhampton’s MPs (Labour’s Pat McFadden, and Jane Stevenson and Stuart Anderson of the Conservatives). I approached Mark Andrews, who has been senior feature writer at Wolverhampton’s Express & Star for 27 years for his view. I visited a regeneration site at Springfield Brewery (next to which I grew up and attended school) and spent a morning talking to staff and pupils at the deeply impressive Thomas Telford UTC secondary school. I called my oldest friend in the world (Steve, whom I met at nursery, who still lives on the street he grew up on); I met the University of Wolverhampton’s pro-vice-chancellor and the professor of brownfield research and innovation at the new National Brownfield Institute in the city, and I got in touch with the office of the mayor of the West Midlands.
At the end of it all, I was left with the impression that there are five main things that Wolverhampton, and dozens of struggling towns and cities like it, desperately need, the first and foremost of which is a solution to calamitous public transport woes. So many of Wolverhampton’s problems come down to the issues with buses, trams and trains. The city is held back in part by poor connections to London: it can, absurdly, take longer by train to get to Wolverhampton from London (114 miles in 2 hours, 15 minutes) than it takes to get from York to London (174 miles in 2 hours, 4 minutes). If people have such a bad view of Wolverhampton, it’s partly because the train takes them through areas of maximum industrial destruction, and the station, which will always have a special place in my heart as the venue for my first date (there was nowhere for teenagers to go before the arrival of coffee shops), is on the wrong side of the ring road. If the roads are clogged up, and residents’ shopping decisions all come down to questions of parking, it’s partly because the buses are so bad that cars are the only option.
More generally, it’s a devastating fact that, according to figures from the think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research, the government spends six times more per person on transport in London than the north, and that many towns and cities outside London have struggled to recover from Margaret Thatcher’s “reforms”. Deregulation in the Eighties meant operators could pick which routes to run and how much to charge, and bus use outside London collapsed, fares soared, services became unreliable and did not link in a coherent way to train and tram systems.
Exempted from these, London has been able to design routes across its own bus, train and Tube networks in recent decades. Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme earlier this month, Oliver Coppard, the recently elected mayor of South Yorkshire, complained that the train from Sheffield to Manchester takes the same time it took in 1954. It’s a story that is all too familiar to towns and cities across the nation.
The second thing that needs emergency attention: empty shops. You can have a thriving manufacturing sector, like Wolverhampton has; you can have a successful football team, like Wolverhampton does; you can have vibrant, sylvan suburbs, like Wolverhampton does. But if too many of the shops in the city centre are boarded up, the city will feel demoralised.
The exponential growth of the University of Wolverhampton is heartening, the Grand Theatre is revived after Covid, Wolverhampton’s Civic Hall will return as a great venue for gigs after its renovation, the new bus station, built just over a decade ago, is more attractive than the old one, and the new Department of Housing, Communities and Local Government offices, introduced after the government declared Wolverhampton would become that ministry’s second headquarters, will make the city centre feel more vibrant. But the woeful state of Queen Square, and the area around it, drags the whole city down. City centres like these need to be revived at any cost, and, mercifully, the government seems to get it.
Levelling-up measures to revive England’s high streets will reportedly include giving councils powers to take control of buildings for the benefit of their communities. Landlords will have to make shops that have been vacant for more than a year available to prospective tenants, with local authorities able to bring empty premises back into use and instigate rental auctions of vacant commercial properties. Charities, entrepreneurs, religious groups and community organisations must have ideas on how to use these spaces, and even their worst ideas will surely be better than rows of boarded-up outlets.
Priority three: stop bashing London. It has become fashionable within government to attack the capital, an attitude doubtless accelerated by the Conservative Party’s recent poor electoral performance in London. But levelling London down will not level up other towns and cities. The white paper admits that “despite London being an economic powerhouse, it contains significant pockets of high deprivation”, and when it comes to productivity, there are profound differences in different parts of London. This country, and its struggling cities and towns, need a booming capital – it’s just that they need to be better linked to it and be more like it. They need to be more like London in terms of the culture they offer visitors and residents; they need public transport systems that mimic London’s success; they need some of its appeal to tourists; and they need local talent to stay. Almost everyone I knew in Wolverhampton who ended up with good exam results left town, and it is striking that the majority of people I met this year who were involved in regenerating the city didn’t actually live in it. They don’t need to be named and shamed for it – I can’t talk, I’m not based in Wolvo. We just need to find ways to persuade them to come back.
Necessity four: a long-term, non-party-political plan for regeneration devised and implemented by local leaders. Let’s face it, every initiative for the regions in our lifetime has been painfully short-term. The white paper focuses on 2030, which is at least two general elections away, by which stage Sir Boris Johnson will once again be cheerfully holidaying with Russian oligarchs. Every government I remember has had a shot at levelling up and not been around long enough to be held accountable. It will take a generation to improve these towns and cities, and the task should be planned in such terms. Furthermore, party politics need to be taken out of the enterprise. I have no doubt all Wolverhampton’s MPs have a sincere desire to see the town improve, but rather than working together, they invest significant amounts of energy criticising what one another’s government did or did not do for the city.
As it happens, Andy Street, the West Midlands mayor, provides an illustration of how to work together: he may be a Conservative, but this didn’t stop him recently touring a factory with Labour’s Sadiq Khan, and he does not seem to be someone who enjoys the inanity of party politics. Though on top of all this, the non-party-political local politicians with a long-term plan need to be given power. In terms of the ability to raise taxes, Britain is the most centralised among G7 nations. Decision- making is also concentrated in London, with the Treasury having the ultimate say on most infrastructure spending. The government suggests more devolution, a promise routinely made but almost never fulfilled. It is absolutely essential for these towns and cities that central government and national politicians fight their instincts and give up key powers.
Which brings me to the final change that we need to see: demoralised towns and cities need to talk themselves up. I’m thinking here mainly of Wolverhampton and the West Midlands. And among West Midlanders, I’m thinking mainly of myself. For there is no getting over the fact that, as a young man, I took a brickbat to my home town. It pains me to recall, but among other things, I seem to have described it in print as “the arse of the Black Country, in itself the bumcrack of the West Midlands”.
In my defence, you often have to reject things to work out how much they mean to you (it applies to places as much as parents), I had intense personal reasons to escape as a young man, and there is a culture in the West Midlands of telling self-deprecating stories about your home town. When a corpse was discovered in a kebab shop at the end of the street I grew up on, and the story went viral across the planet, I was sent the link to it by dozens of amused residents of Wolverhampton. When the city was named one of the worst places on earth to live by Lonely Planet, alongside San Salvador and Detroit, I was texted the news by tens of people, most of them from Wolverhampton. People from Wales and the north may big up their home towns, but West Midlanders tell war stories. It’s part of what makes the people so bloody charming. But I have come to realise that this self-deprecation is part of what holds us back.
So let me start the fightback by bringing you the news that while Wolverhampton may not have a Pizza Express or Pret, it does, unlike most towns, still have an HMV. Starbucks may just be re-opening in the city centre after a painful absence, but there’s long been a Toni & Guy in town, and you can find most designer labels at Flanells in the Mander Centre. The art gallery in town is atmospheric and handsome, packed with interesting exhibits and home to a shiny new restaurant. Wolverhampton Literature Festival is one of the best around. St Peter’s Collegiate Church is glorious. The industrial heritage, from the offices of the Express & Star, which outsold some national newspapers at its height, to the Sunbeam motorcycle factory, is sensational.
The city’s racial diversity was hard won. One-time local MP Enoch Powell brought the town the wrong kind of attention, but it was one of the first places in Britain to experience mass immigration and I would argue that the racial harmony of the city has proved Powell wrong. The range and cheapness of Indian food on offer is staggering. The city is relentlessly friendly, as Katie, a London friend, who came to Wolverhampton for a gig, put it to me in a text: “I’ve made seven new friends. And the whole weekend has cost about as much as breakfast would do at Soho House.”
Also, in Wolverhampton we still have a thriving bookshop, a branch of Waterstones. It’s where I went to buy the first book anyone in my household had ever owned, after I won a book voucher as a prize at my primary school. My father, who has never been able to read or write, took me, and when I spotted my own book, Empireland, on display in its window the other day, I might have cried.
Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera has been awarded a Book of the Year award at the National Book Awards
