This is by way of a diversion from the meat of my PhD but in writing up my methodology I’ve become distracted by various bibliographic records of the alternative press in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s. Continue reading →

My colleagues Professor Diane Kemp and Bob Calver have started a series of monthly debates at Birmingham City University’s Parkside building with the first focusing on Birmingham and its status, or rather lack of status, as Second City.
Continue reading →

By ‘unsung’ I mean I can’t seem to find these places talked about specifically when Birmingham is marketed. By ‘best’, I mean that I have personally declared them the best based, as you’ll see, largely on sentiment. This list is not in order of bestness.

You can see the locations in the map below (click on the little arrows to zoom to the location. Bigger version). Also a Google Map version.

Harborne Branch Line Walkway.
What feels like a rural abandoned rail line in the centre of a city – marvellous. This starts in the corner of Summerfield Park and much of the recently improved path is in a slight cutting so you don’t really notice the surrounding busy roads (it goes under the Hagley road at one point). As you get closer to Harborne you emerge on an embankment but it’s not until you get to Chad Valley that you realise that you’re above roof top level as you walk over Park Hill Road bridge that would have taken you into Harborne station (long since demolished and replaced with especially dull housing). The line was ripped up in 1963 and the walkway created in 1981.

Alum Rock Road. 
‘The Rock’, as it’s known locally, is where I played my first game of Space Invaders, where I became expert at Pac-Man (I was really, really good), where I drank my first pint. I lived close by and spent much of my early teens in and out of its chip shops, video arcades (though the Pac-Man was actually in a Taxi office), and pubs. In the late 70s/early 80s it had two Tescos, a Boots and a Woolworth’s but in their place now is a vibrant stretch of independent retailers who seem to mostly sell Sarees, food or phones. The road layout and many of the buildings (upper parts at least) remain unchanged since the Victorian era. It remains as astonishingly vibrant now as when I was a lad.

Holder’s Lane Woods.
Running has helped me discover lots of new places. This small wooded area is a diversion off the Rea Valley cycle route and is well worth a look. It’s secluded, boggy and home to a lot of squirrels. The area to its south, off Dogpool lane, was once a housing estate of Pre-fabs, long since gone and, given its location, surprisingly left undeveloped. Once you leave the wood you can drop back on the Rea Valley route or take a right into the wooded area that borders Moor Green allotments.

Lancaster Circus. 
It’s the most elegant part of what’s left of Birmingham’s inner ring road. The A38 sits on concrete stilts above a large open space which is often populated with skateboarders. On one side is the Children’s hospital, now a bit of a rag-bag of old and new buildings; but on the other is the former Central Fire Station which is very grand indeed. The city centre used to have a lot of spaces like Lancaster Circus, isolated and cut off by subways, but none felt this wide open or imposing. We should list it.

Fazeley/Grand/Digbeth canal loop. 
Start where you like but what a great urban 10k(ish) run/walk/cycle this makes. It takes you through the conservation area of Warwick Bar and to the cathedral-like bowels of Spaghetti Junction. Along the way you’ll go through narrow tunnels and get a terrific glimpse into the Birmingham’s industrial present and past. And you’ll see a heron, probably somewhere near Star City. Oh, and I once saw a naked man swimming in the canal near Saltley.

Cofton Park. 
Cofton Park is massive. Hilly and massive. I’ve not participated in my running club’s regular Saturday morning training session there for a while as I’m rather intimidated by it. It sits just past the former Longbridge car plant and is right at the edge of the city. It has a high ridge which is a bugger to run up with tired legs. It’s often used for events (the pope came here once) and there’s no better sight than a  100+ cross-country runners powering over its undulating terrain.

The Cross City rail line. 
50 minutes and 19 miles of urban railway through quiet suburbs and busy industry. You get to see the whole city on the Cross City Line. We should be advertising this as a thing to do: “Hop off at historic Aston.” It could be so much more than a commuter line. In order to stay within the city you have to start/end at Blake st. and Longbridge, but extend your journey to Barnt Green and you’re at the foot of the Lickey Hills. In the days when my life was focused around getting the most value out of an off-peak bus/rail pass I did this journey often and enjoyed it every time.

Cole Valley Cycle route. 
Glebe Farm used to be the place to go on a Sunday to play/watch Gaelic sports. As the adults did so, us kids would go wandering off along the nearby River Cole. The river could be crossed quite easily and we would spend hours playing on its banks up to the limit of the bridge on Cole Hall lane. Beyond there lay the hinterland of Shard End. When the day’s sport was over we’d often walk as a family back along the Cole to Stechford. There was no cycle path then as there is now but a worn path took us the mile or so back to the 14 bus route and home. You can continue along the Cole as far as Small Heath and it makes up on of Birmingham’s fantastic green, cyclable, corridors.

Hodge Hill Common. 
Birmingham like any city still has a few ‘commons’. I can’t remember what the deal is; can I keep sheep on there? Whatever way, I include Hodge Hill for sentimental reasons and for its refreshingly unkept nature. If I ever drive past it it always looks like it need a good mow. Maybe you’re simply not allowed to mow a meadow – I really don’t know. I used to walk past it and over it in my youth as we sometimes ventured to Castle Bromwich to see family friends. Even then I thought it was an odd but endearingly scruffy patch with a row of ‘too posh for Hodge Hill’ house on one side of it.

Duddeston. 
Is this area still called Duddeston? It may be Nechells. I’m sure we actually used to refer to it as Vauxhall as the station was once called that. Confusingly, the rather lovely local library is called ‘Bloomsbury’. This area is framed by the railway on one side and dual carriageways on the others and is home to Birmingham’s first tower block, built in the 1950s and still standing today. The community centre there was where I learnt Judo and the whole area always felt quite modern to me. The blocks are really imposing and in my young eyes this felt like a perfectly sensible way to reorganise cities. Nearby Alum Rock had tightly-packed terraces whilst Duddeston had, seemingly, space.

A list, decided by me, of the 10 best blogs by people based in Birmingham (as of now – May 2013). Sometimes they talk about Birmingham, sometimes not. In order of bestness.

1. But She’s a Girl
“In respects other than my interests, I am resolutely female […] I don’t find farting amusing”. Geek, film buff, Kate Bush fan, collector of fountain pens. This is simply the most useful blog I read as it veers from advice on which RSS reader to read in the post-Google Reader era to useful reviews of cheap speakers. But it also covers the personal and domestic in a refreshing, witty tone. In all, it’s quite rambling and unexpected, with a tendency to use footnotes of which I approve. The author moved to Birmingham in 2004 and has been blogging ever since.

2. Birmingham Central
Planning porn. Tons of detail about the endless changes to Birmingham’s landscape. It rarely editorialises which is refreshing, instead presenting plenty of pics and distilling details from submitted planning documents. It’s the work of Simon Felton who is partly doing a really good job of saving us from having to trawl the Skyscraper City forum for useful Birmingham stuff, and partly making sense of a city which changes so fast it’s difficult to keep up. Blogging since 2008. To note: the Urban Buildings blog does a great job in a similar vein whilst UrbanPivot covers a wider strategic view of the city.

3. B31 Voices
I’ve written about B31’s extraordinariness before. My point in that post was that B31 was more than a so-called ‘hyperlocal’ blog, it was a powerful, citizen-led network of knowledge that offers a genuine challenge to ‘official’ knowledge. It’s the ‘networked public sphere‘ (PDF) in action. Run by Sas and Marty Taylor it covers news and events in a big chunk of South Birmingham – the poorer bits. They write a dozen or more stories a week and have excellent links with the Birmingham Mail who increasingly rely on them as their ‘beat’ reporting duo.

4. Two Brides to Two Mummies
“Mum, I’m bisexual, I’m in love with the blonde lady in Casualty”. Regularly updated since January 2012 to chart the progress towards the civil partnership of two women (due in July 2013). It’s the detail and honesty that’s refreshing and of course what makes it unlike any other wedding planning blog is that in this instance the personal is also political. ‘Straight’ couples don’t have ‘coming out‘ stories or detail the ways in which they won’t in fact be married at all. The charming, bubbly protagonists just want to be wed – if only we lived in a country sensible enough to let that happen.

5. Mark Steadman
I’m drawn to Mark’s blog partly because he’s a former student that I taught briefly in the early noughties – I like to see former students getting on and doing okay, I’m fatherly like that. The main reason though is that Mark is my barometer for Birmingham’s tech scene. If Mark is buoyed up and working on one of his many side projects then I always presume the scene around him is in a good way too. His blog switches from the personal to the professional, sometimes discussing his journey into entrepreneurship and sometimes declaring he’s giving it all up (an April Fool it turns out…). Like a few of the blogs I enjoy I’m never sure what’s coming next.

6. SmokeandUmami
Having been lauded by The Observer’s food critic (and TV person) Jay Rayner, this blog hardly needs further endorsement. I like that it veers from restaurant reviews to cake recipes. It’s run by a ‘bioinformatician’ based at University of Birmingham with a thing for barbecued ribs. The restaurants he chooses to eat at are the places I might end up going to – kebab houses, chip shops, a decent place to get a fry-up. Also worth a read is Brummie Tummy.

7. The Hearing Aid
At one level just a whole load of gig/music reviews but given there’s been over a 1000 of them since 2006, all by one person, this is obviously a whole lot more. I’m not even a big gig-goer myself yet I find this a must-read. Birmingham seems to be a good place for seeing half-decent bands in small suburban pubs. Wish I could see that said in more glitzy City brochures and websites. Similar stuff with multiple authors and nice pics at Gig Junkies.

8. Bread and Circus
This was tweeted in my direction when I mentioned I was creating this list. It turns out it was in my RSS Reader anyway but its miscellaneousness means I sometimes mistake it for being multiple blogs rather than one. Surely everyone needs a blog in their feed reader that is generally just nice to look at? It’s curation of art, music, food, travel feels hip without being hipster. In a similar space but just focused on design is cmykern (who once attacked my allotment with an industrial-strength strimmer, for which I am forever grateful).

9. The Iron Room
“You always find surprises in the archives”. The blog of the Archive and Heritage department of Birmingham Central Library Library of Birmingham. Likes others in this list it’s the unexpected that delights. I imagine (wrongly) the authors work in a crowded, unkept office where they occasionally trip over an uncatalogued box of photos and documents of Birmingham’s history. And in that way they choose what goes on the blog this week. However they decide it’s genuinely enriching to get an ongoing glimpse into Birmingham’s past. See also ‘Mapping Birmingham’s Georgian and Regency Streets‘ for more history goodies.

10. Paradise Circus
It’s a bit self-consciously writerly at times (though by that I also mean writerly in the Barthesian sense) and seems to have only male writers at present but Paradise Circus is at least attempting to curate a view of Birmingham that is a long way from the corporate gloss the city’s image has been subject to in recent times. It’s at its best when it’s most straightforward – Craig Hamilton’s seemingly throwaway anecdote about an encounter with a Hollywood star at Birmingham New Street station being a good example.

This article about Birmingham (that’s getting tweeted a lot this morning) is shit. economist.com/news/britain/2…

— Dave Harte (@daveharte) November 9, 2012

So folk in my network keep tweeting this article from The Economist which is about Birmingham’s economic woes. Us Brummies love to agonise about our city’s failings so it’s had wide retweetage with one person (I won’t link) even laboriously tweeting sections from it.

I immediately took a dislike to the article due to the way the journalist starts by gazing of the train window and using the dereliction they witness to shape the reader’s view of the city. Of course one can’t blame the journalist for that; the fault is journalism itself. But that’s for another post.

Anyway, I love an excuse to go find the evidence on which claims about our great city are made so I went hunting for the documents and spreadsheets that are the basis for the article’s claims.

As you might expect from The Economist, almost every claim made in the article can be backed up (though I’m pleased that I could pull them up on the nerdy train facts). I’ve tried to confine myself to instances where statistics are cited.

So here’s the evidence for The Economist article in case you ever need it (as embedded google doc below or on a separate page).

I hope you find this useful. When I start on these things I can’t help but carry on digging for the facts. I guess now the question is, given the City is in a relatively poor state, what are we going to do about it?