As a music-obsessed teenager growing up in Birmingham, I often wondered how come my dad had a (nearly) original copy of the Velvet Underground’s first album but had never been in a band. This was because Brian Eno had once said that, although only a thousand people bought The Velvet Underground and Nico when it came out in 1967, every one of them went on to form a band.

So why not my dad? He bought it (probably at The Diskery on Hurst Street, then and now Birmingham’s premier record shop), went home to his nan’s house on a decrepit street in Balsall Heath, played it, and went the next day to his clerical job at the council, which he did every day for another 28 years until he took redundancy at the age of 50.

Balsall Heath is a central character in Ian Francis’s book This Way to the Revolution, an invaluable document of how the cultural and political foment of 1968 played out in Britain’s second city. In its preface, Francis, the director of Birmingham’s independent Flatpack Festival, asks: ‘by that point, had the sixties even reached Birmingham?’

Judging by Janet Mendelsohn’s photographs of Balsall Heath, taken in 1967 and 1968, you would be hard-pressed to assert it had even entered the twentieth century. The inner city, and in particular this transient slice of south Birmingham between the centre and the comfy suburbs, was at once a bombed-out wasteland, an urban playground, a site of extreme poverty, and a place of creativity and escape. That it could be all these things at once is a testament to the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the people who lived there.

Mendelsohn and her partner Richard Rogers, both American sociology graduates, arrived in Birmingham in the autumn of 1967 to study at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), which was established at the city’s University in 1964 by the critic and author Richard Hoggart. The couple lived in Edgbaston, in Birmingham’s tiny gilded academic belt, but Mendelsohn chose the largely impoverished Balsall Heath as her photographic beat after befriending a local sex worker. The area then looked like a mouth with half its teeth knocked out.

Val Cook, a young Brummie just married to Frank, an artist, is shown in a photograph by Rogers walking home from the shops with her mother-in-law past a bombed-out site where terraced housing once stood, beyond which you can see two new tower blocks. The sixties—in housing terms, at least—were happening just around the corner, in Highgate and Newtown, where Birmingham council built new estates at volume, eventually furnishing the city with 430 high-rise blocks and the largest social housing portfolio of any local authority in England.

A poster on the one remaining wall advertises a forthcoming gig by ‘Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac’ at Mothers, a rock club above an Erdington furniture shop north-east of the city centre which, for a couple of years at the end of the 1960s, was regarded as the best rock venue in the world. Mothers attracted the major bands of the US counterculture, who would travel over specifically to play there.

My dad was a member of Mothers—I remember seeing his psychedelic pink and orange membership card, which hung about the house like a key that has lost its use—and attended that gig, which took place in June 1968. He’d also have seen Pink Floyd, Captain Beefheart and Country Joe and the Fish at various points that year, as well as the club’s regular DJ, John Peel. What he didn’t do was imbibe the confidence he would have needed to make the leap, as an awkward, undersized Balsall Heath boy, from witnessing a revolution to shaping it, seeing a tribe he might have belonged to, but never found a way to join.

Mothers didn’t last into the 1970s, primarily because university student unions, with their bigger spaces and less skanky dressing rooms, had begun to hoover up the acts that Mothers’ owners could once persuade to play in a room above a shop. But it was also partly down to a curious lack of coordination and collaboration between it and the other countercultural venues that emerged in Birmingham around the same time.

The fledgling Birmingham Arts Lab couldn’t get support from Mothers to hold fundraising events for their own venue, while the Arts Lab was established in the first place because its founders were ‘frustrated by the rules and restrictions’ at yet another newly-opened city arts venue, Edgbaston’s Midlands Arts Centre. The first collapsed a few years after opening, while the MAC centre—still open, much-used, and well-loved—evolved from a flexible space for exclusive use by the under-25s into an established cultural venue not unlike the ICA or Manchester’s Home.

Back in the working-class city, new immigrants from India and Pakistan formed cinema clubs where, according to the writer Abdullah Hussein, men would ‘cry their hearts’ out with longing, having found that ‘the sounds and smells of home, the gentle touch […] just (didn’t) exist here’, in this place where the overwhelming instruction is to grit your teeth and get on with it.

Reading this book upended completely my perception of Birmingham as an exclusively and doggedly working-class city, where lads from Ladywood and Balsall Heath couldn’t get a break if they tried, where cultural life died a death in the face of grinding poverty, and from which, if you wanted something different, you had no choice or no desire but to get away. At the same time, my original perception was confirmed. It has to be said that many of the people featured in this book, instrumental to this extraordinary flowering of cultural life, didn’t stick around. Frank and Val Cook, perhaps inevitably, converted their social mobility into geographical mobility, moving to Kent and later raising a family in the south of France.

The founders of the MAC centre and the Birmingham Arts Lab sought lives and careers elsewhere, while Stuart Hall, having lived in bohemian Moseley with his young family during his tenure at the CCCS, eventually moved back to London – though not before helping to organise the November 1968 occupation of Birmingham University, involving 4,000 students. As the Northfield-born author Nathalie Olah noted in a recent piece for Tribune, ‘the city’s beautiful, funny, imaginative culture often reveals itself at the point where it is too late’: a place ideas and collective strengths are allowed to dissipate under the weight of its own lack of confidence.