Birmingham: Does It Live Up to the Reputation? Yes.

I had heard the jokes and the nicknames before I arrived. The question was whether Birmingham would feel exaggerated in person, or worse. For me, it was worse: I could not wait to leave. That is not a verdict on everyone who lives or works there, but on what it felt like to move through the centre for a couple of days: tense, loud, and frayed at the edges, with a few bright spots that did not outweigh the rest.

The Bull Ring area throws everything at you at once. St Martin in the Bull Ring rises out of the retail canyon like a piece of another century, while glass facades and chain restaurants crowd in on every side. On one wall a huge mural carried a suicide-prevention message from Campaign Against Living Miserably, stark against the lunchtime crowds. It was one of the few moments that felt honestly anchored in the real human cost of living hard in a city, right next to people carrying takeaway bags and delivery packs through a canyon of brands.

There were things I did like. Some of the street art was genuinely good: an underpass near Edgbaston turned into a long run of painted brick, with bold faces and figures that felt more like a gallery someone forgot to fence off than tidy civic decoration. It was scruffy, but the colour and line work had energy.

Elsewhere, a massive black-and-white wall piece showed a surreal creature part owl, part serpent, with tiny human figures clinging to branches and hands reaching out of rippling water. The wall behind it was peeling back to bare brick; the whole scene felt like a dream pressed onto decay. I stopped for the art, even while the setting still felt rough.

What stuck with me most on the street was not the art but the infrastructure. From a distance I assumed I was seeing another row of old-style telephone kiosks. Up close, several were clearly labelled defibrillator cabinets: tall grey units on the pavement, heart-and-lightning iconography, a handset on the side, a screen glowing with unrelated imagery. I had never seen public access to AEDs presented quite like that, and it coloured how I read the rest of the walk: this was a place where cardiac emergencies on the street were common enough to bake the hardware into the streetscape. Paired with scaffolding, barriers, and the general noise of the centre, it left me on edge rather than reassured.

I ended up at New Street station, where the mechanical Raging Bull from the Commonwealth Games still dominates the concourse: metal plates, pistons, and a ring through the nose, all polished under the station skylights. It is an impressive piece of civic sculpture in a space that finally felt clean and controlled. Part of me wished more of the city outside had felt that deliberate and safe.

So yes: for me, Birmingham lived up to the reputation. There were murals worth seeing and a historic church that deserved a quieter frame than the mall could give it, but overall the centre felt unsafe and undesirable as somewhere I would want to live. I took the train out glad to have limited my time there.