Moseley was rocked over the weekend as Birmingham was forced to initiate its emergency resilience plan in order to prevent a wave of pretension drowning both Kings Heath and Balsall Heath. In a perfect storm of up its own arsedness we’ve seen the opening of Bohemian and the imminent opening of The Village culminating in a previously unseen level of self reverential nonsense.
This should come as no surprise to keen observers of village life. Many people were moved to physical sickness by Bohemian’s plaintive requests for “mixologists”, an employment position which is generally rejected by the Inland Revenue as clearly made up. On the whole we could have accommodated this aberration of taste and reality if it were not for the new Village attempting to reinforce quirky stereotypes and encourage an unacceptable bending of the common understanding of a pub.
As a prominent mover and shaker in Moseley told us “If you go into the new Village and say the word quirky you get a discount, if you call them wankers they call the police. Where’s the justice?”
The wider implications for Birmingham is that this tide of utter pretension could wash over surrounding areas to create an uninhabitable void for years to come. Kings Heath has already dabbled in unsustainable nostalgia and if this were to converge with Moseley’s Bohemian bubble then we could have a similar situation to Dalston in London, circa 2011, where vast numbers of people were cleared from their homes to render areas safe. The City Council, conscious of the potential for peril appear to be poised to make a stand on the edges of Moseley in order to prevent collateral damage from the worst of these excesses.
A spokesperson for Birmingham City Council told us “We’ve tolerated you people in Moseley for too long and this decision to inflict yet more ridiculous business ideas on your residents is not going to stand. Why can’t you be more like Perry Barr? They’re fun aren’t they? At the end of the day what is wrong with you people? You had the Fighting Cocks, do you need more chances to throw your money away for crap service and over priced beer? Anyway, it’s not going to happen, go away and think about better pubs.”
The only reassuring factor is that the Bohemian business model is going to be as flawed as every other attempt to open a pub in the TSB in the last 15 years.