Meet me at Maccies on the ramp, bab.
I first heard that in September 2015, after I’d moved to Birmingham, to study English Language at Aston University on a grant for low-income candidates. A classmate, a lady from Walsall, wanted to eat and messaged me. I searched this place on maps, no results. Hm. While smartphones did everything they do now, I couldn’t find it.
By then, I knew the Bullring – the famous shopping centre – as well as the canals. This, however, was an enigma. Flo, a girl from Dudley (she left the course after a fortnight, having learned that her accent was voted one of the most disliked in the country), chimed in when I asked aloud about this mysterious location.
For those uninitiated: Maccies on the Ramp is a McDonald’s situated on a slope just off New Street, both the 2nd major UK train station and the shopping thoroughfare. That slanted pavement has sworn off gentrification. While boutique cafes and pricey bars gain hegemony, and upscale stores occupy former bargain shops, Birmingham’s still a city proud of its working-class sensibility and aversion to all that’s pompous. Even if the historic rag market’s future is at risk.
I’d hot-foot it daily around the City Centre (Town, if you don’t mind) in curious pursuit of this unfamiliar playground. Landmarks guided me home through unfamiliar webs of streets – the BT Tower stood tall and unloved, the Rotunda’s many cylindrical faces with messy bedrooms in each panel of glass, and the cyber-extraterrestrial modernism of the famous Bullring curved around Moor Street. Curiously, this nondescript tilted walkway caught my attention the most.
This meeting point’s committed to being the centre of something. It was constructed in the 1970s, and while technology means we’ve lost the rigidity of designated times and places, the ramp has remained part of local vernacular – I’d even stretch as far as to say it’s a part of the lore and local micro-culture.
You can be sure: the decade-old new New Street Station bewilders with its umpteen exits, and the seminal Bullring bamboozles with its multiple floors on alternate levels, yet the ramp is steadfastly the reliable, unchanging place to convene – leaving little or no chance to miss it, or get it wrong. It’s typical Brummie no-nonsense sensibility.
The sad truth is the ramp has a mucky reputation, and it’s sometimes valid and deserved. The vulnerability of humankind: adults living with addiction, mostly, congregate there, or slump in the doorways of the hotel. Beggars ask for coins up and down the slope.
I’d see the same group convene at the bottom of it every day. Not always trying to scrounge a quid (it’s irrelevant whose desperation is genuine and whose is a hobby), they’re usually chatting and day-drinking, minding their business. They were harmless. Rain or shine, they’d congregate to drink. They’d chat, laugh, and sometimes fight with each other. It’s odd how people in plain sight can be invisible to many.
It would be dishonest to say that the city isn’t blighted by the struggle of people’s problems, but it’s also right to resist the narrative that it’s not a wonderful place to live. I adored the new Library, with its rooftop gardens and architectural hoops, the canalside expanse that spread out from the centre of Gas Street, and Digbeth’s daytime weekend splendour (I lived cheaply in the area for a few years). There’s magic in the often-derided areas outside of town, too.
When the tram network expanded, rainbows were painted on the pavement at Hurst Street, and Floozie in the Jacuzzi was re-watered, I saw the city spring to life in a way that it didn’t need – but deserved. The general consensus is that Birmingham is grey, lifeless, and dingy. Parts of it certainly, sure as hell are. But I also never saw a German Christmas market until Birmingham’s. Did I buy anything? Did I fuck.
My LGBT+ friends and I celebrated our intersectional lives here: Eid in Sparkbrook, Vaisakhi in Smethwick, Pride in the Gay Village (upscale apartments are threatening the festival’s future), and Caribbean culture in Handsworth. I danced to Northern Soul under rail arches and nosied at graffiti in Digbeth, attended historical talks in the Jewellery Quarter, and laughed along to stand-up comedy in Cherry Red’s Cafe.
I grew to know the city like a local: I worked in Perry Barr, went to house parties in Ladywood, Selly Oak, Aston Brook Green, and Maypole, volunteered in Edgbaston and Bordesley Green, strolled around King’s Heath and Moseley, sunbathed in Cannon Hill, avoided swinging fists in Broad Street, and bartered in Small Health.
We’d end up at the Ramp at the end of most nights before parting ways from the 24-hour McDonald’s. I learned to be streetwise, only for nothing much to ever happen (this is not a lesson in ignorance; I was lucky). There, over many visits, I met two Colombian girls on a Megabus layover, a drunk lawyer in legal trouble, and the fierce, feisty table staff.
We’d debrief on the ramp about fun nights at The Village – a gay pub I fondly remember for pop music, wafts of poppers and farts, and glass on the floor. It was the launchpad for my favourite drag queens who now enjoy glistening careers: Ginny Lemon and Yshee Black.
Comedian Joe Lycett once beautifully said that Birmingham doesn’t have the closed-door exclusivity that London thrives on. Membership clubs and the like. It’s reflective of the city’s original low tolerance of anything pretentious (although that’s rapidly shifting with upscale developments like Centenary Square, and had already started when I arrived – with the Mailbox).
I believe that’s why there’s a love of uncomplicated simplicity – a place which allows a ramp to become part of its lore. No one’s above a place, and no place is not good enough for someone – I see the opposite in London, when people baulk at cheap food, clothes, anything. A friend once invited me to a rum bar with outdoor seating – it was two plastic chairs on the roadside of Suffolk Street Queensway (a carriageway of sorts), ‘you got rum, you got the road, what else d’ya need?’ There’s a no-bullshit-directness that I learned to quickly love.
“The skyline looks different every time I visit,” a lady behind me said the last time I rolled into Moor Street – the cheaper route from the Big Smoke. Birmingham has changed, of course, in the decade since we first met. I cheered when the world’s biggest Primark arrived, and proclaimed its downfall when Gail’s opened.
Brum’s like a human– its soul is the same, but its face and body have changed. The trams are starting to snake out of the centre like tree roots (bringing much-needed connectivity to the city), and skyscrapers are rapidly launching skywards, surging up rent prices with them.
Entire new districts exist in spots where derelict carparks or warehouses were. The lower reaches of the Gay Village – Gooch Street, Kent Street, are safer now. Newbuilds have scared away the cruisers, which made for a dicey walk home; men would try to whistle you over to their parked car with a window open an inch. I got well-versed in telling them where to off. Digbeth now has the hipster daytime charm that Manchester once lauded over it (vinyl shops, and stonebaked pizza, mostly).
Even at a time where the city’s plastered across morale-dipping headlines because the council bankrupted itself, and the same authority’s held up in a union stand-off leaving mountains of rubbish and steroid-sized rats scurrying about, it’s holding onto its pride – just in 2022, it held the Commonwealth Games, transforming the city for an interim.
People do love to complain about Birmingham: a complicated relative; never with, never without. But there’s a sense of adoration that some have for the place too. How could they leave – they’ve everything they’d ever need?
As I visited recently, when it was time to head home after a good trundle about town – a rummage through Digbeth’s clothes racks, a drink on Gas Street’s Victorian pathways, and gawking upwards at the skyward glass (I thought about how history can only be saved, not built) and metal that used to be derelict photography spots. Outside the station, in my last few moments, I watched people crowd on the ramp. On a busy Saturday of shoppers and beggars alike. The trams trilled through non-observant crowds.
The ramp was faithful to its people; unchanged. Shadowed under huge buildings and the rapidly shifting face of a city on the move – even if not always upwards. It was like no time had passed on this very spot. New Street still had chain shops and buskers and stall traders, and long may they continue.
I feel like whether the place prospers or hits rockier times, one thing can be certain – I’ll meet you at Maccies on the Ramp.