Coventry leaves City Region
Please try not to laugh because this is very serious. Coventry has left the City Region of Birmingham, Coventry & the Black Country.
Since Telford & Wrekin parted company with the city region, it’s become more and more irrelevant as its focus narrows to providing the same Birmingham-centric services as the plethora of regional quangos infesting the euroregion. In other words, a pointless duplication.
They had to change their name from Birmingham, Black Country & Coventry City Region after West Midlands NO! registered the name to the City Region of Birmingham, Coventry & the City Region. They can’t call themselves the City Region of Birmingham, Coventry & the Black Country now that Coventry is no longer part of it so I wonder what they’ll call their quango now … has anyone though about Greater Birmingham?
Anyway, I’m sure the City Region’s unelected leader, Dr Simon Murphy, will appreciate any helpful suggestions you might have. His email address is simon.murphy@birmingham.gov.uk and his phone number is 0121 464 8168. Let him have your suggestions, I’m sure he’ll appreciate them.
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There have been so many letters over the years about the name of our conurbation or City Region so I’d like to stick my oar in too!
February 22nd, 2010 at 7:13 pmThe fact is our “city” of urban sprawl contains many townships and suburbs and irrespective of their official local authorities (in brackets), Walsall (WS), West Bromwich (SW), Dudley (D), Halesowen (D), Rubery (BG), Solihull (SH) and Sutton Coldfield (B) are all equi-distant from the city centre and to look at these places on a map suggests they are “unofficial” suburbs of Birmingham. I appreciate Stourbridge and Wolverhampton are further out than Dudley, but they intrinsically link to Birmingham through the chain of never-ending urbanity. I would note that Coventry is no way joined to our conurbation and should be re-instated back into a new Warwickshire.
Although the term “Greater Birmingham” is frowned upon with suspicion by Black Country folk the City Region name has to include a geographical clue for a global public, rather than the confusing and continuing use of the term “West Midlands”.
In 1974 it was decided to use this name because we live in an area that is West of the East Midlands, but the decision was flawed because the counties of Hereford, Worcester and Shropshire being further West than our conurbation, were never in the equation. Using this theory the true geographical name of our conurbation should really be called “Central Midlands”, but that would sound pathetic to describe a “city” of 2.5 million.
Another confusion of the term “West Midlands” is that the local media keep using it to describe the rural region and the urban area to suit their particular story which could be stopped overnight by using “Greater Birmingham” instead for the latter.
To add to this nonsense, I know of a golf course in Warwickshire called West Midlands Golf Course, a hospital in Cradley Heath called West Midlands Hospital, and of course the West Midlands Safari Park. The naming of these facilities all emit a vagueness and offer no information for visitors to help pinpoint them.
So to conclude, we can’t have a region of 5.5 million people having the same name as an urban conurbation of 2.5 million citizens. Therefore the City Region must have a collective title and the dominant city being Birmingham must be at the centre of the name. People from Ashkabad to Zanzibar won’t have a clue where West Midlands or Sandwell is but after a quick glance at a UK map will find a great big dot slap bang in the middle of the country labelled Birmingham.