The Birmingham Dispatch

22/11/2025

It's the cult classic that inspired greats like Robert Eggers and Danny Boyle. What's behind the revival of Penda's Fen?

How an experimental British 1970s television play pioneered a folk horror revival

21/11/2025

Join us on 18 December at Temper and Brown in the Jewellery Quarter, for an evening of not so trivial knowledge! Hosted by Dispatch editor Kate Knowles, teams will be going head to head on the likes of current affairs, music and — of course — Birmingham itself. 

Tickets are on sale now at £3 for The Dispatch's paying supporters (use the code we've sent in previous editions) and £4 for free subscribers and non-members; we’d love to see some new faces mixing with the familiar ones!

Minimum teams of two and maximum six; the winners will receive £100 in cash. There will also be plenty of time for mingling after the main business of the evening has wrapped up. Plus, Temper and Brown serves a delicious Caribbean menu for attendees to choose from if they wish. ☃️

Link to tix in bio - see you there!

20/11/2025

Cllr Ray Goodwin admires both Cuban rebels and sensible leadership. Can he lead a ‘quiet revolution’ in Castle Vale?

Cllr Ray Goodwin admires both Cuban rebels and sensible leadership. Can he lead a ‘quiet revolution’ in Castle Vale?

08/11/2025

One recent Wednesday evening, a senior Mill Media editor was settling into a stiff-backed seat at London’s Bishopsgate Institute, ready for a bit of mid-week stimulation of the mind. On the agenda was a talk about Soho’s illegal mid-century p**nographic trade in honour of the launch of a new archive at the Institute. Titled ‘Under the Counter’, the collection featured rare amateur adult films made between 1960 and 1980 in the backrooms of Soho’s bookshops and beyond.

Now, my editor’s no prude. She’d expected a few raunchy clips or stills might be shown; the talk was marked 18+, after all. But it started at 7pm and promised a focus on the people behind the trade and its economics. So she was totally unprepared for when the lights dimmed and the talk’s host, a bouncy Brummie called Dr Oliver Carter, who had collated the Under the Counter archive, introduced “the first of four films”. These turned out to be four, full-length, hardcore p**nographic movies, unleashed on an, at least partly, unsuspecting audience.

Carter, it turns out, has built up a sizable collection of illicit, under the counter 20th century p**n, the likes of which has never been compiled before in the UK. And he’s done it all in the name of research, as one of a cluster of Birmingham academics who have made a — sometimes overshadowed — city centre university, a leading institution for p**n studies in the UK.

When my editor recounted this story, my interest was piqued. Who knew mild-mannered Birmingham City University (BCU) was home to such a spicy discipline? I wanted to understand exactly how the institution had come to be a national leader in adult material. And what does p**n studies actually entail?

Read the full story at the link in our bio.

06/11/2025

Two years ago, government-appointed commissioners ordered the fire sale of hundreds-of-millions of Birmingham City Council’s assets to keep its budgets afloat. Ever since the council went bust, its land and buildings have been sold off at breakneck speed — with little scrutiny. 

And now, with time running out for the council to meet its eye-watering targets, fresh concerns are emerging surrounding botched community takeovers of youth centres and green spaces being chopped up into parcels and flogged off.

For the first time, we can see the full picture of the council’s asset sale programme. Data acquired by The Dispatch under freedom of information laws lays bare which assets have been sold since the council went bankrupt in September 2023. Over the last two years, a whopping 1,000 assets have been flogged for a total of nearly £230m. 

The three biggest sales between September 2023 and September 2025 include: Bordesley Park (£50m) bought by Birmingham City FC, for which the council had received an offer of £30m more two years earlier; a 114-acre chunk of the Peddimore Estate in Sutton for £48m, acquired by insulation giant Rockwool, who plan to build a manufacturing facility; and a purpose-built office building on Woodcock Street in central Birmingham sold to Aston University for £25m.

Despite these huge sales, the council is still about £500m short of the target set by the commissioners for March 2026. The council, which will also need to potentially find another £250m the following year (2027) to balance the books, said this September that it was “expediting the pace” of disposals after falling behind schedule.

Read the full story at the link in our bio.

25/10/2025

Sunset Boulevard, Wednesday 30 September, 1981. A quartet of skinny youths – two men, two women – have just spilled off the stage at legendary music venue, Whiskey A Go Go, and into a backstage dressing room.

Outside, a hungry crowd clamours for more. The long journey from Birmingham has been worth it for Au Pairs; their brand of frantic post-punk has gone down a storm with The Whisky’s patrons. Now, exhaustion mingles with adrenaline as they take stock of their reception.

In strides The Whisky’s manager, a paragon of all-American enthusiasm: “Yeah! Great show guys, next one in about 45 minutes.”

The band members stop dabbing the sweat from their faces, look round at each other and burst out laughing. As usual, they’d left everything they had on that stage; there was no way they were going to do that again. As the manager rages, they slip out together, unfazed, into the balmy LA night.

At the height of their powers, Au Pairs were a united front.

Read the full story at the link in our bio.

22/10/2025

Recently released council accounts show Birmingham had hundreds of millions it could have used instead of going bankrupt & issuing extreme cuts, say 35 accountant researchers.

They're demanding an inquiry. Read the full story, in The Dispatch.

New analysis by accounting experts has found that the council’s financial health was much better than reported when it raised the alarm back in 2023

20/10/2025

Monday Briefing out now, incl:
⚽️Will Starmer overturn Maaccabi fan ban?
🇬🇧Flagger challenges local to boxing match in Stirchley
🎭The return of Margaret Thatcher - on stage

Plus, ripped bunting and boxing fight challenge made at Stirchley anti-flag demo

19/10/2025

Birmingham in 1806 was a remarkably different place to the million-strong city of today — its population a mere 70,000. The last bull had been baited in the Bull Ring eight years prior and the recently completed canal to Warwick had opened new trade routes to the city. Like every other major metropolis, crime was apparently rife. “Robberies and burglaries were of frequent occurrence… Predatory bands scoured the roads in every direction, and did not hesitate to attack the equipages of travellers,” wrote historian Robert K Dent in 1880. The inhabitants of Birmingham were at the mercy of the night. There were no public street lights and instead communities relied on lit braziers, lanterns and surveillance by peace officers.

One such watchman was 46-year-old Robert Twyford, who lived with his wife and five children on Whittall Street in the city centre. The exact date is contested but, one midnight in early July 1806, Twyford was stationed in Snow Hill. In modern Birmingham, 12am echoes with the hum of stumbling students and the whine of cars on the Queensway. In 1806, the night air would have been filled with the sound of late-night carriages and the whinnies of stabled horses. Watchmen were commonly armed with a wooden staff for defence and a lantern to cut through the dark.

According to one newspaper at the time, as Twyford patrolled, he was “informed that some suspicious characters were lurking about his round”. As he rounded the corner of Bath Street and Great Charles Street he came across a gang of men. As he approached, one of them fired a shot.

The lead ball entered Twyford’s left breast, travelling through his lungs and lodging in his right shoulder. He collapsed; the group fled.  Six weeks later, a man was hanged. 

Read the full story at the link in our bio.

06/10/2025

Monday Briefing, out now incl:
🚗Small JLR suppliers on brink of collapse
🛍️Selfridges suffering
👋Corbyn's Your Party launches in Brum - + Labour cllrs jump ship
+ more

Plus, Corbyn's Your Party launches in Brum

04/10/2025

"I've been called knuckle dragging scum. I’ve been called, this week, a nonce,” says the shaken looking man, before he is briefly cut off. GB News presenter Martin Daubney interjects to apologise for any potential offence caused, then allows his guest to continue. “I’ve been called all sorts of names, been put under the spotlight and all I’m doing is what I think is right,” says Ryan Bridge.

It is Friday 26 September and Bridge is on Daubney’s show to talk about his previous night spent flag raising in Stirchley. Wearing a navy suit, his long silver hair tied back in a bun, the 45-year-old director of a no-win-no-fee accident claims management company says he was baffled by the hostility. The evening began well enough with a “carnival atmosphere” as his 20-strong crew affixed Union flags to lampposts along the Pershore Road. Many a car honked in support; the Nepalese owner of a takeaway joined in with his own Union bunting.

The problems arose, Bridge tells Daubney, when they tried to enter some of the drinking spots along the street and ‘white, middle class liberals in pop-up bars’ began making rude hand gestures at them and calling them “far-right”.

“This is nothing to do with far-right movements,” Bridge insists. His friend Elliott Stanley, sombre-faced and sitting next to him on the GB News sofa, nods in agreement. At the start of the segment, Daubney introduced the pair as the “co-founders and company directors of Raise the Colours”. They’re on the show to set the record straight. “We are normal, working class Birmingham businessmen,” says Bridge, who owns a £600,000 house in Bromsgrove, firmly.

Flags stories dominated the news cycle in September. Since we published our first news story and a follow-up feature in August, we’ve been focusing on other matters.

But in recent weeks there has been a detectable shift. Flags in south Birmingham have migrated upwards, from primarily low-income neighbourhoods like Weoley Castle, into areas with larger middle-class populations, like Selly Oak. In this new terrain, the flaggers are facing more objections and sometimes confrontations.

Read the full story at the link in our bio.

30/09/2025

Last year, a Birmingham man named Fahan Khan was found guilty of supplying crack co***ne and he**in by a court in Ayslebury.

But Khan, of Floyer Road in Small Heath, wasn’t there to hear his sentence. He was judged in absentia, having fled the UK for Pakistan during a police investigation.

And it’s in Pakistan that his brother, Small Heath Labour councillor, Saqib Khan, has been photographed — apparently attending his fugitive brother’s wedding. What’s going on? 

Read the full story at the link in our bio.