SHIRLEY Williams once said that our party conferences were my ‘natural habitat’ but I’ve not been to many recently.

The appeal of earnest debates, fringe sessions in over-heated hotel meeting rooms, hugely over-crowded bars and over-priced accomm-odation fades after half a century.

And the days are long gone when I could sleep on a billiard table in the Scarborough Liberal Club (also long gone), or spend all night in the lounge of the ‘headquarters hotel’ engaged in alcoholic discussions about the future of the universe.

But I went to Birmingham for the Liberal Democrat spring conference at the weekend, and I was pleasantly surprised. The ICC (International Convention Centre) is not the aircraft hanger type of place I had expected on my first visit since it was built 19 years ago.

It’s a super centre for a conference like ours. The main conference hall is terrific and all the other rooms and spaces seem to work very well indeed. Whoever designed it did a very good job, which is not always the case with modern buildings in this country.

Apart from a brief visit to speak to a meeting of young planners (!) a few weeks ago I've not been to Birmingham for many years. I remembered a city that had lost its reason to exist as the centre of one of the greatest manufacturing regions in England.

It felt to be a grumpy place with some rather dreadful modern developments, with a city centre ringed by nasty dual carriageways where people were forced underground into concrete subways.

The roads are still there but the city has turned into a vibrant metropolis with a real feeling of success and vigour.

A real plus in the past 20 years has been the way many of the large regional capitals have regained their sense of economic and social purpose. (I could add that many of them are now run by Liberal Democrats, though exactly where the causes and effects lie, I’m not sure).

And I’ve never found so many friendly people in a big city. I don’t know why Birmingham accents have such a bad name. I’ve rarely found so many friendly and helpful people, obviously multi-racial and at the same time fundamentally Brummagen in a way I could only admire.