Why Britain’s towns and cities are going bust

Birmingham’s city center is thronged by empty lots with unfinished and unstarted building projects, like this one in the Deritend area. In 1890, an American journalist named Julian Ralph traveled from New York to Birmingham, an industrial powerhouse lying squarely in the center of England, and found it to be “the best-governed city in the…

Birmingham’s going bust. Here’s why everything you’ve heard about that is wrong | James Brackley

Birmingham city council declared itself effectively bankrupt in September last year, but only now are the facts about what really happened beginning to emerge. A series of monumental problems and errors, including the botched implementation of a new IT system, a likely overstated equal pay liability, and a disastrous financial package imposed on the council…