Birmingham’s Frankfurt Christmas Market

I don’t do a lot of travel within the UK. I’m not a fan of driving on motorways and while our rail network is reasonably extensive, train travel is expensive, complicated (no one will tell you when various ticket types are valid but will leap on you the second you get it wrong) and notoriously unreliable. Nonetheless, I took the train to Birmingham for a mere £73.79, not much more than the price of a train to London, which delivered me from Southampton Airport to Birmingham New Street in just two and a half hours, complete with reserved seat. I’ll be doing more UK train adventures in 2026, including to Coventry, which is only two hours away and has one of those most fascinating cathedrals in the country.

A selfie in the basement of the library in Birmingham. I'm wearing a black t-shirt with pictures of Iceland on it, assorted bracelets visible on the hand I'm leaning my head on and have my hair tied back.

But today I’m in Birmingham. Literally, as I write. I’m in the music department of the library, looking up through a circular hole in the ground at the Ferris wheel and wispy clouds floating overhead and producing rain that shouldn’t be falling from such clouds while I wait for Catherine to arrive (I came up the day before her) and starting to think about the blog, or perhaps blogs plural, that is/are going to emerge from this weekend. We were actually here for Rock Choir Live’s big Christmas party at the bp pulse arena but by day, we were going to make the most of the Christmas market.

Me and Catherine taking a double selfie in front of a big arrangement of oversized red and gold baubles.

A lot of towns and cities have German-inspired Christmas markets and Birmingham is no exception. Theirs is very specifically inspired by Frankfurt’s Christmas market and as someone who’s been to both… well, Frankfurt’s is a lot bigger and a lot busier and has a lot more stuff to buy but Birmingham has at least got the food – and the mugs – more or less spot on. It took a couple of days to decide whether they’d just bought in a few hundred thousand Frankfurt mugs or whether their own were just so very Frankfurt-inspired that they were verging on plagiarism.

A drinks stall, which is mostly shelves piled with cans of Coca-Cola-owned drinks. Hanging from the underside of the shelf is an excellent selection of the mugs available and there are more stacked in crates under the shelves. Most of the mugs are red but some, mostly the character ones, are black or white.

I had the best part of two days to explore every single stall between Friday lunchtime and Sunday mid-afternoon, which is far more time than you really need to thoroughly cover this market. One thing I very quickly realised was that the staff from one end to the other, no matter what kind of stall they’re on, all have matching fleeces; what took a bit longer to notice was that they were a different colour every day – lime green on Friday, orange on Saturday and yellow on Sunday. I wish I could have spent a week there just to see if they finished off the rainbow by Thursday. The orange and yellow were ok but the lime green wasn’t a particularly good look in a slightly-orange pine cabin.

Three men in the lime-green fleeces of Friday cooking and serving bratwurst, onions and potatoes from a huge grill in a wooden cabin.

I think I’d divide the market into three parts. The main part is the market that runs along New Street, which is all wooden cabins and elaborately carved wooden Christmas-themed set pieces serving mostly German-inspired food but interspersed with stalls where you can buy things, from traditional cuckoo clocks and those beautiful rustic-looking wooden nativity sets to loose crystals and handmade woollen gloves to bath bombs and model superheroes. Perhaps the food and drink stalls got a bit repetitive but let’s be honest, drinking is a huge part of the draw to a German Christmas market, and probably the bit that’s keeping the rest of the market financially afloat, and if you’re drinking all day, you’re going to want some solid food to mop it all up.

A drinks stall with an elaborate carousel thing on top, surrounded by candles at least six feet tall. Underneath are wooden signs for all the drinks available and a very prominent table in the shape of a big red mug.

Drinks come in reusable porcelain mugs or great glass steins, for which you pay a £5 deposit (£7 for the massive steins) and you can either return it to reclaim your deposit or forfeit it to keep the mug or glass as a souvenir. Beer and mulled wine are the most popular choices but there’s also shots, schnapps, hot chocolate with your choice of spirits and/or cream and at least two kinds of non-alcoholic punch, sold as Kinderpunsch (children’s punch) and Autofahrerpunsch (driver’s punch); Catherine and I weren’t sure whether this was the same drink with two different names or not. The internet is bit vague on the subject but it does seem that they’re exactly the same drink.

Having spent Friday and Saturday scouting the mugs, I finished Sunday with a pretty good hot chocolate in a pot-bellied mug. Other options include a boot-shaped mug, a straighter thinner mug, a heart-shaped mug, a penguin mug and a Nutcracker mug but I wanted the closest thing to a mug-shaped mug. Other than size (Birmingham mugs are much smaller than Frankfurt mugs), up close it’s very similar to my Frankfurt mug. As for the contents: hot chocolate is often oily or watery or both but this one was pretty good. 9/10. I’d have another.

A selfie in front of a three-storey wooden chalet made into a giant advent calendar. I'm holding a small red round-bellied mug which is full of hot chocolate.

As for food, it comes in two varieties: the kind you buy as presents and the kind you buy to eat there and then. The former category includes gingerbread biscuits, Germanic cookies, stalls of nuts of all kinds, twists of sweets, chocolate-coated fruit skewers, domed chocolate-coated marshmallows and candy floss.

A bag of ten assorted small gingerbread biscuits, all iced in different colours and tied up with a gold bow.

For eating right there, there’s your traditional Bratwurst, German grilled sausage, slabs of roasted meat, Berliners (aka doughnuts but call them Berliners and suddenly they’re German), pretzels of the sweet, salty and filled varieties, crepes in sweet or savoury, waffles and churros, both smothered in Nutella. Even I, a difficult person with ARFID, feasted on salty pretzels and cheese-filled crepes over the weekend.

Catherine (left) and I, in front of a giant Christmas tree, holding up our pretzels. Hers is filled with brie and cranberry and mine is just salt.

The gourmandising continues at the second part, at Victoria Square, which is all food and drink! As well as repeats of what’s in the main market, you get a few extras here, notably huge chunks of baguette covered in cheese and garlic and whatever else you might want to top cheesy garlic bread with, and 50cm Frankfurters, in case an ordinary Bratwurst just wasn’t enough for you. This is also where you’ll find Feuerzangenbowle, a kind of mulled wine served in a pot-bellied mug with a flaming lump of rum-soaked sugarloaf perched on top. Although down in the streets, there are tables to lean on (often shaped like Christmas trees or oversized mugs), there are a lot more places to eat up here, many of them under cover in case of rain – and it rained on and off all weekend, so I took shelter here more than once.

Slabs of bread covered with a thick layer of grated cheese and some with sausage or herbs piled on too. On top of the counter is a net of large bulbs of garlic, in case you weren't clear that this is garlic cheesy bread and not plain cheesy bread.

The third place is in Cathedral Square, and this is separate from the main Frankfurt market. There’s a lot more shopping here, mostly from small crafters, so if you’re after buying a ceramic mug or a hand-printed baby vest and getting to meet its maker, this is the market for you. I will always linger by glass ornaments and there was the usual cheese company with their heavy colourful wax-coated cheese truckles and samples (a tiny sample of Cheshire Cheese Co’s Black Bob extra mature cheddar goes very well with a warm salt-encrusted pretzel).

A view down one of the "streets" of mostly hand-crafted wares at the market in the Cathedral Square.

The food is very different here. Do you want a potato that’s been turned into the ultimate curly fry with an electric drill, something more Asian and spicy than the Northern European carb-fest down in the Frankfurt market, a slab of heavy school-style cake with custard, giant marshmallows you can cook over a fire, carvery, wood-fired pizza or “posh street food”? Noodles, fried chicken or the only coffee I remember seeing in the entire market?

A firepit with a fair-sized log in the centre of it. People are toasting marshmallows on skewers over it, only because there are flames coming up around the log, they're mostly just burning the marshmallows (as a Guide leader, I have strong opinions on the correct toasting of marshmallows).

Rather than wooden cabins, bars over here are housed in shining steel caravans, a helter skelter and even a pop-up pub called the Pigeon in the Park that almost looks too much like a real (albeit miniature) pub to be absolutely certain that this is going back into a box after Christmas. In fact, that was one of Catherine’s questions: where is all this stored for the other ten months of the year?

The Pigeon in the Park, a pop-up miniature but realistic pub painted a not very festive shade of teal blue.

The final festivities – apart from the Christmas lights everywhere – are the Ferris wheel and pop-up ice rink in Centenary Square, outside the library. I’m slightly surprised the ice rink is indoors, having only ever seen them open-air but given how many times it rained in the three days I was there, that’s probably not a bad idea. I didn’t skate – I was mostly too tired, either by the early Friday morning or the late Saturday night or by walking 18 miles of city streets in three days. I also knew that I’d booked a trip to the iconic ice rink outside Somerset House in London the next week, so my annual Christmas skating trip was already in the diary. It looked quite utilitarian, not particularly decorative and not particularly festive.

The ice rink and ferris wheel as seen from the terrace on about the fourth floor of the library, along with some of Birmingham's less decorative tall buildings.

I did see some bits of Birmingham that wasn’t the market – a couple of trips into the Bull Ring (it’s just a big shopping centre), St Martin in the Bullring (which has some very interesting stained glass) and the Cathedral (which has some breathtaking stained glass) plus quite a while in the library, which is definitely worth a visit but I don’t think I saw or learned enough to justify a separate blog post on the rest of the city. Maybe next time. Because having realised it’s only two and a half hours away by train (plus an hour to Southampton Airport), I’ll definitely be doing some more UK weekends away next year.