Birmingham - The Rough Guide by Si Vinny Birmingham is the motorway service station that people sometimes stop at when travelling between London & Manchester. In the seventies it re-christened itself 'The Second City'; an unfortunate and hollow advertising slogan based purely upon its demographic size. It was and still is a city renowned and ridiculed as ugly. National perception states that it is ugly to look at and furthermore that its inhabitants, 'The Brummies' are ugly to listen to too. The word most commonly associated with the dialect spoken by The Brummies is 'thick'. For a city boasting more canals than Venice and more trees than Paris, it was on all levels unable to compete with the thriving metropolises of London, Manchester and Leeds. A more appropriate slogan would perhaps have been 'The Fifth or Sixth City'. If you require a stereotype, then this is all the information that you will need.