A once neglected street in the north-west of Birmingham has become, over the past three weeks, the centre of national attention. No one in James Turner Street will ever be quite the same again.

I imagined that my work on Peaky Blinders would have brought the media to my door, but Channel 4’s Benefits Street has certainly capped that. I guess that anyone with a foot in Birmingham’s history will have had the same experience.

I felt particularly sorry for the archivist at King Edward’s. A rumour got around that the street had originally been named after a master at the school, the perfect juxtaposition of an educated, hard-working Victorian with its work-shy 21st-century occupants.

“I can’t rule it out, but it seems very unlikely,” was her balanced response to the barrage of questions.

This was all the confirmation the press needed to run the story across the planet. “I wish I could bury my head,” Alison told me.

What I’ve mostly been asked to provide is a snap-shot of what James Turner Street was like before it was famous. And it’s a picture that resists simple characterisation. The road had its skilled metal workers, as well as its unskilled or semi-skilled labourers too.

And, like any street in Birmingham, this bit of Winson Green would have ridden the troughs and peaks of the local economy, a very different place in the Hungry Thirties from the full-employment days of the early 50s.

So, is there a good story anywhere in this Birmingham tale of joblessness, benefits and fractured families?

Here’s mine. What struck me from the couple of Benefits Street I’ve caught is a real sense of a street that knows itself. Getting to know your neighbours is the one advantage of being home during the day.

I could point to plenty of other roads, places of affluence and full employment, where residents pass like ghosts in the night, on their way to the car in the morning, on their way into the house in the evening. Who knows what each other does?

Perhaps these are the real benefits of Benefits Street, not the ones that come as cash.

* Dr Chris Upton is Reader in Public History at Newman University Birmingham