The Commonwealth Games Legacy: What Changed in Birmingham?

The Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games opened on 28 July 2022 with a ceremony at Alexander Stadium in Perry Barr that included a mechanical bull, dancers representing Birmingham’s manufacturing heritage, and Duran Duran playing to a global television audience of billions. It was the moment Birmingham performed its own history to the world and, by most accounts, it worked.

The hard legacy question – what does a city of 1.1 million people get from hosting an international multi-sport event that it couldn’t have got any other way? – deserves an honest answer rather than a promotional one.

Alexander Stadium was rebuilt for the Games – expanded to 40,000 capacity for the athletics programme and reduced back to a more manageable 20,000-seat legacy configuration afterwards. The upgraded stadium is now operating as a community and elite athletics venue and the redevelopment of the Perry Barr area – new housing, improved transport links, better public realm – was accelerated by the Games timeline in a way that conventional planning processes would have taken years longer to achieve.

Sandwell Aquatics Centre in West Bromwich was built as a brand new facility specifically for the Games and is now open as a public swimming facility for the West Midlands – an Olympic-standard 50-metre pool that the region genuinely needed and was unlikely to get from any other funding mechanism. This is the clearest and most unambiguous legacy asset: a world-class aquatics facility in one of the most deprived areas of the West Midlands.

The University of Birmingham and the NEC Group venues handled the indoor sports programme and both used the Games to upgrade facilities they retain in the long term. The Village at Perry Barr, housing athletes during the Games, was converted to residential accommodation – 1,400 new homes in a district that had been waiting for regeneration investment for decades.

What didn’t change, or changed less than hoped: the transport infrastructure improvements that were promised for Perry Barr and the Games corridor were partly delivered and partly deferred. The tram extension to Perry Barr was planned and then paused. Some of the promised connectivity improvements remain outstanding. This is consistent with the history of major event legacy promises, but it matters to the communities that were told the Games would transform their area.

The softer legacy is harder to measure but probably more significant than any physical asset. Birmingham was watched, and it performed well. The international coverage was largely positive. The city’s diverse communities – Birmingham’s South Asian, Caribbean, and African communities are all represented in Commonwealth nations – meant the Games had a lived connection to the local population that Manchester 2002 and London 2012 both managed in different ways. For a generation of Birmingham children who watched the opening ceremony, it established that their city is capable of hosting the world. That’s not nothing.