Do you view everything within the West Midlands county (like the Black Country) as Birmingham? Is everything within Greater London all London to you? Etc. How do you view England’s urban areas?

12 comments

1. No. I view Coventry (which is in the West Midlands County) as it’s own thing entirely. But as for places within the West Midlands Conurbation (I.e Wolverhampton, Walsall, Solihull & Dudley), they just feel like an extension of Birmingham, regardless if they are their own Unitary Authorities outright, similar to Watford or Slough for London

2. It depends where. For instance a lot of people count Leeds and Bradford as the same city, but imo they are completely different in every aspect, and share nothing apart from being close to each other. But for somewhere like Manchester a lot of its satellite towns including Salford, Hyde, Stockport, Sale ect all feel like part of the same city.

3. I know that Wolverhampton, Dudley, Solihull, etc. are all distinct places with long histories, but (Coventry aside) the West Midlands does feel like one great big urban area as there’s not much distance or green space between its various parts. Greater London and (to a lesser extent) Greater Manchester are similar.

   West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, and Merseyside feel less like one urban area because there’s that bit more separation between the towns and cities within them. Liverpool and Birkenhead are separated by the Mersey, Newcastle and Sunderland by the Tyne and the Wear, Leeds and Huddersfield are a fair distance apart – you get the idea.

4. West Midlands, not really? But if I’m honest unless I know about it being terribly different (e.g. Coventry), I’ll probably think it’s Brum because I’m fairly inexperienced in the region.

   Greater London I absolutely see as all London, I’ve been there and I don’t think it’s really all too different throughout, some places just outside like Epsom are to me too imo.

   Greater Manchester I mostly see as Manchester, but not Wigan for example.

   Merseyside I honestly do all see as Liverpool, but I’m not exactly too familiar with it.

   Bristol definitely is all Bristol, and I’d go as far to say that parts of Gloucestershire and Somerset should be part of it

5. I think in this country (with notable exceptions) we do a huge disservice to our cities. We still talk of garden cities and suburbia like we are some agrarian nation when in reality we are denser than South Korea.

   Cities and towns are cultural bodies, with identity and personality. However now certain cities can dominate and form the centres to urban areas, and we should learn to live with the fact some urban towns, although distinct culturally from their major nearby city, are in fact part of a greater puzzle without loss.

   Take London or Greater Manchester. They feel to be our most successful urban areas but the places within them do not feel like they have lost their identity and can still be prosperous despite being within a ‘Greater’ area.

   Take Newcastle. It sits as the heart of a larger ‘city’ called Tyneside. It has its own metro system, port, airport, shopping centre et al and forms the largest ‘place’ in the north east region, as its economic heart. But Newcastle is organisationally seperate from Gateshead and non places called north and south Tyneside. Therefore it can’t act and feel like the major nigh on million people sized place it is. Gateshead is trying to build a regional conference exhibition and arena centre on the Quays, but it is struggling as it’s technically a 200K town, not the south bank at the heart of a 850K major European scale city. It has every means to expand further, vast tracts of deindustrialised land sits waiting for homes and people to live close to the centre, with public transport or cycling walking distance to its city centre.

   I don’t know enough to say that this is the case for Birmingham and the Black Country, but I’d suspect if it were organised as a larger singular place, the size of Milan or Munich it would and could be more prosperous.

6. West Midlands one hundred percent not. Coventry is a completely separate city which is arguably more culturally tied with Leicester than Wolverhampton. Black country v different from say Balsall Common. + brownhills is more like Cannock or even NW Leics/SW Notts than the resrt of the west midlands county’

7. I’m black Country born and bread never ever call me a brummie, yes some parts of the black Country have a Birmingham post code but lots of it like dudley walsall and wolverhampton are not apart of brum at all

8. Living in the Black Country we are 100% not part of Birmingham and very grateful for it imho. Wolverhampton is a city in its own right, even without a cathedral ! But also part of a huge urban sprawl where towns and citys have spread. Wolves has a LOT of countryside to north and west permiinters.

9. The Black Country is mainly a collection of small places with individual identities. The cities of Birmingham and Wolverhampton anchor it at either end, but stop it properly coalescing to either. Except Smethwick of course. Smethwick should be part of Birmingham.

10. I tend to view London and Manchester as “anything inside their respective orbital motorways”. If it’s inside the M60 it’s Manchester (don’t come at me with all that Salford/Trafford nonsense), if it’s inside the M25/A282 it’s London.

    Conversely, anything *outside* that boundary is “not London” or “not Manchester”.

11. I’m from the Black Country, and I’m really being honest here, if we were made part of a greater Birmingham you’d see a Black Country guerrilla war.

    We really hate Birmingham. Of the top ten most deprived areas in Britain five are in the Black Country. Birmingham saps the investment. And it’s killing us.

12. I’m from the Black Country, and I’m really being honest here, if we were made part of a greater Birmingham you’d see a Black Country guerrilla war.

    We really hate Birmingham. Of the top ten most deprived areas in Britain five are in the Black Country. Birmingham saps the investment. And it’s killing us.

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