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.
01:58 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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