There are many areas across Birmingham that locals say are in urgent need of attention. I'm here in this, for the most part beautiful city today to ask people here which areas they consider to be the grottiest - grottiness of course being something I will leave up to their interpretation.
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00:00 Oh, that's a tough one. So I live in Erdington and there are parts of Erdington High Street
00:09 which are awful. We've got so-called police, urban police, whatever they call themselves,
00:21 going up and down trying to keep it tidy, keep people off it. But there doesn't seem
00:29 to be any respect for where you live. To be honest, I think that every area in Birmingham
00:35 has got a grotty element. I don't think there's bits of Birmingham that are more grotty than
00:40 others. I think that we've got similar issues in lots of areas and it's just these are the
00:47 bits the council needs to sort themselves out with, like homelessness and things like
00:52 this. These are prevalent in the city centre. I live in the city centre. That's got its
00:57 grotty areas too, even though it looks nice to the tourists. So I don't think we should
01:01 be looking at it in terms of this area's grotty, that area's grotty. There's grotty bits everywhere.
01:06 You know what I mean?
01:07 Ladywood. Yeah, he lives in Ladywood. It's a very nice area. It's just a bunch of students
01:14 and it's those people just doing greed all the time, where you have a drug dealer pull
01:19 aside.
01:20 I don't know that I've seen enough of the city to describe it as run down. In fact, when
01:26 I got here, I was talking to my partner and saying, this feels like a city, but not like
01:32 Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, where it feels more jumbled up and grimy. In fact, this has
01:41 actually got sort of an unnatural polish to it, I would say. And if you look at the sort
01:46 of trappings of colonialism, they feel very empowering. But down at the street level,
01:51 I don't see anything as grotty. It just feels human to me and human in a very inclusive
01:58 way.
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