Clocking Off

29th Jan 2010

Is our city still Birm­ing­ham, or has it become Lit­tle Amer­ica? asks Laura Hewitt

MY course has just fin­ished a group pho­tog­ra­phy project with the title ‘Land­scapes of Amer­i­can­i­sa­tion.’ The remit was to demon­strate visu­ally how Birm­ing­ham has been affected by Amer­i­can culture.

There are hun­dreds of exam­ples once you start think­ing. Fast food is the obvi­ous one, with chains rang­ing from the less salu­bri­ous out­lets of KFC to everyone’s favourite dough­nut shop in Sel­f­ridges, Krispy Kremes. Not to men­tion the infa­mous issue of Starbucks.

A size­able por­tion of shops in the city are Amer­i­can. Walk around the Bull Ring in your mind and there’s Apple, Gap, even a Dis­ney store. Star City in the north­east of Birm­ing­ham is an enter­tain­ment com­plex mod­elled with a con­sumerist enter­tain­ment agenda, with activ­i­ties for a fam­ily audi­ence includ­ing cin­ema, casino and fast food.

Is this a good thing? Finan­cially it is; the UK econ­omy is buoyed by Amer­i­can busi­ness con­cepts. Most of us have a lik­ing for at least one mate­r­ial object to have come out of the States, whether it is the iPhone, Face­book, or a Grande Latte from Star­bucks; hence their suc­cess. But what has it done to the ‘British­ness’ of our city? Are we los­ing the indi­vid­u­al­ism and char­ac­ter that ties us to fig­ures such as Beorma, Peter de Berming­ham and Joseph Chamberlain?

I don’t think so. There is still plenty that makes Birm­ing­ham the great city it is. The Amer­i­can influ­ences are incor­po­rated within our his­tory and land­scape. The Bull Ring wasn’t named Some­thing Mall or Mart, but orig­i­nates from the area within the Corn Cheap­ing mar­ket that was used for bull-baiting, with the ring tying the bulls in place before slaugh­ter. Shops such as Deben­hams, Sel­f­ridges and Top­shop are located side-by-side with their Amer­i­can coun­ter­part brands.

But why should we see Amer­i­can­i­sa­tion neg­a­tively? I may be biased, hav­ing dis­cov­ered in my degree a fas­ci­nat­ing range of beliefs, pol­i­tics and lit­er­a­ture ema­nat­ing from across the pond that pre­vi­ously I would not have thought to explore (and explore I intend to do; this sum­mer I am going to Cal­i­for­nia, for instance). Not every­thing Amer­i­cana speaks is of high cul­ture and pro­gres­sion, but there is a cul­ture nev­er­the­less that has had the power to influ­ence coun­tries and peo­ples across the world. Glob­al­i­sa­tion may have impacted neg­a­tively upon some strata of soci­ety, and not for one minute do I con­done the abuse of devel­op­ing coun­tries in the man­u­fac­tur­ing of West­ern goods, but it has facil­i­tated a dia­logue and com­mu­ni­ca­tion between many nations result­ing in a largely ben­e­fi­cial cul­tural exchange.

How­ever, one aspect of Amer­i­can­i­sa­tion that should gen­er­ally be avoided, in my opin­ion, is that of the Eng­lish lan­guage. There is a dif­fer­ence between British Eng­lish and Amer­i­can Eng­lish. It is no bad thing, so long as they remain sep­a­rate. Hence films remain films and not movies, a shop is def­i­nitely a shop and not a store, and a hol­i­day is (hope­fully) not a vaca­tion. Cal­i­for­nia should be fan­tas­tic. But how dif­fer­ent it will be from Birm­ing­ham remains to be seen.