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Brum's a lost city
Sep 18 2002
By Staff Reporter, Evening Mail
Birmingham where are you?
The country's second city has attracted global attention with the G8 summit of world leaders, the Eurovision song contest, Motor Show, and top sporting events such as the Davis Cup and the World Indoor Athletics Championships.
But despite its rich industrial heritage and a population of more than a million people, many people south of Watford don't even know where Birmingham is.
Unbelievably, some southerners placed the city in the Lake District in the north of England, some put it close to Bristol, while others tried to claim it as their own by thinking it was near Luton Airport.
The findings were based on a survey of 1,037 people living in London and the South East, which was commissioned by officials in Bradford ( southerners please note, that's in Yorkshire) as part of their bid for the European Capital of Culture.
They were asked to place nine cities - Bradford, Belfast, Birmingham, Glasgow, Hull, Inverness, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle - within 25 miles of their correct position on a blank map. One in five (19 per cent) missed the target with all nine, while fewer than half placed Birmingham correctly. Bradford could not draw any comfort either, with only 16 per cent locating it successfully.
A spokesman for the pollsters said: "The geographical fog thickens with cities further north. By the time southerners reached Scotland, the majority were completely lost."
In fact, some of those asked put Liverpool, Hull, Newcastle and Bradford in southern Scotland.
