Birmingham is a shithole. Not all of it, and not for all of the time, but it is. If that makes you roll your eyes or feel offended, I hope I can show you what I mean.

Now, I'm lucky enough to be mates with a man called Jon Bounds who started the website Birmingham: It's Not Shit back in 2002. From the original homepage as it was in 2003:

Brum doesn't need any logos or marketing men to prove it's not shit: We've got Jasper Carrot & HP Sauce, curry & concrete, the iron man & heavy metal, all you lot and everything that makes life worth living.

Jon would go on to run that site for a decade, and the way Birmingham was talked about on the Internet changed as the web became a bigger stage filled with people who didn't share the same inside jokes.

But you don't have to be part of the media elite to know that the way the city is talked about outside these walls hasn't changed much... and it doesn't feel great. But maybe it's age or the shift in the kind of work I do now, but I really couldn't give a toss what people think about Birmingham.

Because when we talk about Birmingham "blowing its own trumpet", we show we're looking through the wrong end of the telescope entirely.

I described Birmingham as a shithole, and it is. It's under-funded, its infrastructure is knackered, we have to go out of town to see bigger bands because we don't have the right-size venues. And it feels likeno-one cares.

There's a track called Let's Clean Up the Ghetto by the Philadelphia International All-Stars that popped on the radio a few weeks ago, that sparked a lot of thinking for me.

I was in New York City a few months ago and the garbage and the trashmen were on strike. I'm tellin', the maintenance people of the city what they were tryin' to do, they were tryin' to get a little more money, you know, get a little raise in pay. But at that particular time the city was broke.

That incredibly on-the-nose quote is Lou Rawls' opening monologue from the song. What the track goes on to say is that there's no use waiting for "City Hall" to sort shit out; we have to take matters into our own hands. It's about caring enough to want to do something.

When I said it feels like no-one cares, I meant it, but I know that's not the whole story. Plenty of us do care. And this isn't a post about civil action or the so-called third sector subbing in for the public sector. It's mostly a reiteration of my earlier point that when we talk about Birmingham, we're too often looking outwards when we should be looking inwards.

Because the things I see growing out of this pile of shit are beautiful. There are sewing circles and community gardens and walking tours and comedy festivals and outrageously good vegan pizza and protests against the far right and improvised Shakespeare and album launches and black history and bingo and film retrospectives and events to honour the potato.

In the intervening years since Jon wrote about what makes Birmingham not shit, we've seen a lot of marketing hype, a lot of hashtag-brum, and the same blight of blandening we see on our high streets. And when we try and compete with other cities at that game, we lose.

Because Birmingham has no great mainstream cultural claim. When Liverpool offers up the Beatles, we answer with UB40. When Manchester shows us an Oasis, we raise them an Ocean Colour Scene. When Stratford presents Shakespeare, we trot out Tolkien, who was neither born here, nor died here, nor wrote any of his books here.

All of these are fine contributions to a national culture – to say nothing of the global subcultures they've created – but let's stop pretending they warrant the "second city" status we seem to cling on to so doggedly. Let's instead focus on what makes Birmingham – and continues to make it – a shithole flecked with gold.

This is issue 0.1 of the Gambol, and in it I'm hoping to draw my own map of the city, to dot some lines between here and there. And as Birmingham's digital handyman, to see where the cracks appear that keep Brummies from knowing about the cool shit that happens here, and the people that make life in the West Midlands – the Best Midlands™ – worth living.