Birmingham Really Does Have More Canals Than Venice
Put that line in tonight's Commonwealth Games closing ceremony
The 2022 Commonwealth Games comes to an end in Birmingham today.
I didn’t watch the opening ceremony but I read that it contained some of the references you’d expect to the city: its industrial heritage that began in earnest in the 19th century, its musical talent such as Black Sabbath and Duran Duran and the Bullring.
It also made reference to the various waves of immigration to Birmingham, including to the Irish workers who migrated to the English Midlands to dig the canals that were to import and export materials and products from this growing industrial centre.
More on that in a moment.
England’s Second City debate
I have a connection to both Birmingham and Manchester, the two traditional contenders for England’s (and maybe Britain’s) second city.
My father’s side of the family come from the Birmingham area and I lived in Manchester for four years. If my father had cared for football I would probably have grown up supporting Aston Villa.
The impression I got when I lived in Manchester was that Mancunians were more self-consciously proud of their city and identity than were Brummies about Birmingham. This found its expression in football, where Manchester United and more recently City have dominated English football since the 1990s and in the music scene with the likes of the Smiths, the Stone Roses and Oasis playing up their Mancunian roots.
Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before, featuring Morrissey and his friends biking around Manchester and Salford. This is from the album Strangeways, Here We Come; a Mancunian in-joke:
I’m less familiar with the culture of Birmingham, but from what I do know it feels to me that Brummie pride exists but it’s more hesitant, more reserved, more ironic than their northern rival.
Even in Peaky Blinders, which has done more for the city’s profile than anything else I can think of in recent years, Tommy Shelby and the gang don’t play up where they are from too much. The show is set in Birmingham, unlike say The Wire which is about Baltimore, its institutions and systems and how the players move within them.
One of these ironic boasts is that Birmingham ‘has more canals than Venice’.
I first heard that line some years ago and it stuck with me. It’s laced with such irony. The canals of Venice evoke images of gondolas, ice cream and romantic getaways whereas the canals of Birmingham evoke images of barges full of coal and burly men smashing hot anvils with hammers.
The Canals of Birmingham and Venice
So is it true? Does Birmingham really have more canals than Venice?
To answer that question first of all we have to define what is and isn’t Birmingham and Venice.
For Birmingham this is easy: there is a local authority called Birmingham, so we will use that.
For Venice, this is slightly harder. I’ve never been to Venice and had little idea of its geography when I started this research. The Metropolitan City of Venice includes the historic city of Venice, islands such as Murano and Burano plus a large area on the Italian mainland.
The historic city of Venice is divided into six sestieri (the Italian word comes from sesto, meaning ‘sixth’). We will use these six districts as our definition of Venice.
Here is a map of Birmingham with its canal network highlighted:
And here is a map of Venice with its canal network highlighted:
The reverse S-shaped line running through the middle of the city is of course the Grand Canal. There are myriad other ones throughout the rest of the old city.
The scores are in
Venice’s canal network shown here totals 30.7mi (49.3km) in length.
Birmingham’s network is 35.7mi (57.5km) in length: the clear winner!
Perhaps the Commonwealth Games organisers have a nod to the city’s waterways planned for the closing ceremony. I hope they do. You might not necessarily want to honeymoon along the Digbeth Branch Canal, but it’s a reminder of the time when Birmingham really was the Workshop of the World.