Birmingham Accommodation by Area: Which Part of the City Suits You

Birmingham accommodation is best chosen by district, because the centre is small enough that everything within it is close and the differences between areas are about character instead of distance.

Seven districts cover almost every sensible option, and two of those seven are not, strictly speaking, in the city at all.

The NEC and the airport share a station at Birmingham International, in Solihull, several miles east of the centre. Staying there is correct for an exhibition or an early departure and wrong for anything else, because the city itself is a train journey away in place of a walk from the door.

Edgbaston is the other case, and a gentler one. It lies south-west and outside the A4540 ring road, which puts it beyond the Clean Air Zone but also away from the centre's restaurants and theatres.

Its accommodation is limited, and most visitors coming for the cricket stay in town instead.

Since walking times across the centre barely differ, the more useful axis is how loud an area is after dark. Broad Street is the busiest, the Jewellery Quarter and the business core around Colmore Row the quietest, and Southside sits somewhere in between, going quiet once the theatres have emptied.

The business core has one further advantage that suits an early start: it empties entirely in the evening, because almost nobody lives there. That makes it dull for a night out and genuinely restful, and it happens to be the closest of all seven districts to the station as well.

Rates here follow the events calendar instead of the season, and the effect is sharpest closest to Broad Street. A weekend combining a fixture at Villa Park, a run at the Hippodrome and a large NEC exhibition lifts prices right across the whole of the centre at the same time.

Because those calendars publish months ahead, the distortion is predictable enough to use. Shifting a visit by a single week to avoid a large exhibition frequently moves the rate further than changing district or grade would, and it widens the choice of rooms still available at the same time as it does so.

Every district in the table above except the last two sits inside the A4540 Middleway, which is also the Clean Air Zone boundary.

A non-compliant vehicle pays ten pounds a day to be there, on top of whatever the hotel itself charges you separately for the use of a parking space overnight.

That makes Edgbaston and the NEC the two options where driving is straightforward, and both come with a cost of their own: neither puts the city within walking distance.

For most visits the honest arrangement is to leave the car behind altogether and take the train in to New Street.

None of the seven has a genuinely quiet street with restaurants on it and the station two minutes away, because that combination does not exist here.

The Jewellery Quarter comes closest, trading twenty minutes of walking for calm, and the business core trades its restaurants for near silence after six.

Knowing which of those two compromises you would rather make settles the question faster than reading room descriptions will.

The centre is small enough that the walk is never the real cost; what differs between these districts is simply what is happening outside the window at around eleven o'clock at night.