The best park in Birmingham – maybe
It occurs to me that I rarely write about local stuff. Which is a shame really as I live in a fairly pleasant part of Brum – not many people get to live within sniffing distance of a chocolate factory. But as nice as Bournville is, the best park in the area is Cotteridge Park. It has something that Bournville’s other open spaces lack – community.
Friends of Cotteridge Park are the very active group that look after the interests of the park. They were set up to stop the planned de-commissioning of the park for housing in the late 90s. There’s a bit of history on their website (including the fact that apparently during the war the park was used to store barrage balloons) but to give you a flavour of the work they’ve done:
- Redeveloped some derelict land into an orchard
- Hold a fantastic free summer music/arts festival – CoCoMAD (clip of The Destroyers in 2007)
- Organise a Christmas tree recycling point
- Built a fantastic natural amphitheatre in the park for open air concerts
- Lobbied for and got a skate park, new playground equipment and re-surfacing of the dilapidated tennis and basketball courts
- Run a toy bank and volleyball games during the summer
- Do tons of traditional fund-raising with quiz nights etc.,
- Build Wigloos!
And of course they won the battle to save the park in the first place. Their most recent plans are for a funky shelter building.
The park is next to the cross-city rail line between Bournville and Kings Norton and has a good mix of open land and wooded areas, as well as the orchard of course. It’s on a decent slope which, for a runner, makes it good for short hill sprints along the paths but there is a flat area which I think may have been a bowls green at one point but which is now ideal for impromptu five-a-side. The play area is great for most ages and the skate park attracts a good selection of motley teens – all of them unnervingly polite when faced with a six year old trying to do wheelies on her scooter.
It’s a great park – am chuffed to live in walking distance of it.
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Pic: Pete Asthon
Come walk the city with me
I love walking. So does my Mom, even at 78 years old. I recall once walking with her and my siblings from home in Alum Rock to the city centre some time in the mid 1970s (was there a bus strike? more likely she just thought it would be good for us). My clear memory is getting to Masshouse Circus and instead of using the underpasses she made us go over the huge traffic island there. There was my mom and us three kids avoiding the busy traffic at each exit to the island until we made safe ground at Tescos (now Argos). We’d do longer walks around the city as we grew up but none stick in the mind like this one.
The city’s a tad easier to walk nowadays and I love walking it. Today I walked 4.16 miles around the city from New street station to a meeting in Aston Science Park, to the Custard Factory, back to the City centre and then on to the arse end of the Jewellery Quarter where my workplace is. I finished a bit annoyed at how it’s too often the simple things we’re getting wrong in the city, things that stop this walk being one for the tourist brochures despite the obvious historic interest along the way. I started at 8.45am and was back at work by 2.45pm. Here’s what I found:
- From New st. to Science Park is a great straight mile that has benefited from the removal of underpasses at Bull street and Old Square. A lovely walk past the law courts and Aston Uni campus. Easy-peasy.
- Who would think to use the canal from Science Park to Digbeth? A lovely towpath route but the entrance on the Science Park is obscured and poorly signposted. It is easily the simplest route. I passed only one other person.
- The canal there is a bit intimidating due to poor tunnel lighting and the ongoing presence of loitering single men around Curzon street tunnel. Maybe a bit of a cottaging scene going on there? Of course it also lacks other people, maybe because no-one knows it’s there.
- The new Yumm deli at the Custard Factory is a welcome addition. reasonably priced, cheery staff. Still love Rooty’s though but the love has spread now.
- From Custard Factory to the city centre is NOT a pleasant walk. Was it lunchtime at the college? Does that explain the slightly intimidating youths? The ones who decided to do that come-right-up-in-your-face thing to me that youths sometime do? I’ve never liked it, still don’t. Too many side-roads including one where the traffic can come from the other side of the dual carriageway unexpectedly, and that fucking bus stop outside Digbeth Cold Storage where the path narrows. Why does this area need a dual carriageway? Why do we still love roads so much after all this time. Give us space on the pavement, please.
- From Bull Ring shopping centre to the library is great, I like the second half of New street as it rises into the impressive Victoria Square and then to the library. The mall bit in the middle of the library still seems like an oddity though, to say the least.
- But to get to Summer Row and to work from here – would you know how to do it? The weird exit to the right just after Nandos? Past the stagnant pool, down a red staircase (where do wheelchair users go?) and through the only underpass on the walk or across busy roads to avoid the underpass and onto another dual carriageway (although passing the very fine Birmingham Orthodox Cathedral),
Actually, in hindsight this is a great walk, spoilt only by poor signposting, a lack of thought about what make safe spaces and a continuing desire to prioritise the car. Above all, there seems a determination to keep the canals, the Custard Factory and Summer Row disconnected from the city centre experience. I’m not convinced that changing the road layout to prioritise pedestrians, stopping bus passengers being herded to the margins and installing better lighting on some canal tunnels need a Big City Plan to make them happen. It just needs those who make the decisions to come walk with us. To understand how good these routes are but understand the fine detail of what prevents them being great routes that we can promote with pride.
This is an open invite to all: in power, at the fringes of it or with a desire to influence it. Come walk with me, any time you like, I’ll show you the city I think you never take the time to see. And if she’s free, I’ll ask my mom along as well.
Birmingham in Super 8
I love Super 8 film and have a small collection of reels shot in Ireland in the 1970s (by my late father) and the late 1980s/early 1990s (by me). I’ve now gone and retrieved the whole series of 50ft cans from my mother’s house to start the process of digitising them. I had previously copied them to VHS by filming a projected image but inevitably the colour saturation suffered – the very thing that gives Super 8 its ‘glow’ (see discussion of Super 8 used for a wedding video). I do also have a couple of reels of black and white stock that even at the time (early 1990s) was extremely difficult to get hold off. I now plan to send a miscellaneous reel to these guys to get a HD transfer. I can’t wait to see the results.
Given my footage is largely non-Birmingham based I thought in the meantime I’d do a quick search to see what Super 8 stuff was online that was filmed in around the city. There’s disappointingly little except for a nice piece shot at the Moseley Folk Festival in 2007 and a piece onThe Optophonic Lunaphone about a new instrument used by the Modified Toy Orchestra. There’s a strange short film called The Bouncy Bride of Frankenstein (b/w horror film shot in someone’s Birmingham back garden) but I did manage to find the nostalgia I was seeking with a film of Kings Heath in 1960 (actually shot on single 8):
And despite rumours of its death Super 8 as a format is very much alive. There’s even proper serious industry events about it and a wonderful, simple, yet incredibly challenging, stripped back movie-making initiative called Straight 8. Best of all, in Birmingham we have the fantastic 7 Inch Cinema who are big fans of the format and often put on dedicated Super 8 events.
More to follow on this as my own transfer results come through.
Pic: Hollywords
Paula Radcliffe to run 2009 Birmingham Half marathon
…according to Monday’s Guardian anyway:
“November 2009: Three marathons in a year might be tough but will she resist the temptation of being back in New York? She might opt for the world half marathon the month before in Birmingham as well”
In fact I’d mentioned this as a possibility to a couple of people recently and there is some logic in thinking she’ll come to Brum. This year she would have gone to the world half marathon championship as preparation for running the New York Marathon which she won in style on Sunday. However, as the halves were in Brazil she opted for the 10 mile Great South Run instead.
So next year, if she decides to run New York again, I reckon the Guardian have it spot on and she’ll come to next year’s world halves in Birmingham in October as well. Now that would be just great, both for the city as a whole and for us runners who would have the privilege of running in the same race as her in our home town. The thought of Paula legging it past the Bartons Arms and avoiding bolshy Sunday shoppers at the back of Rackhams fills me with glee. Bring it on!
(pic by matt semel)
Birmingham – The Uncreative City
After writing a couple of months ago about Creative Republic I thought it about time I went along to an event. So last night I showed up at the Michael Wolff Masterclass in the so-new-the-paint’s-still-wet Fazeley Studios in Digbeth. Wolff himself had to pull out at the last minute which was a shame but in his place we had Stef Lewandowski taking us through a presentation he entitled ‘Birmingham Ambient Creativity Audit’.
This basically involved Stef roaming the centre as if he was a fresh-face tourist, trying to orientate himself and look for signs of our cultural life. In short, after taking 500+ photos, he didn’t find much bar the very occasional fly-poster. What he did find was poor sign-posting, an excess of cars, a lack of hang-out spaces and a derelict ice-rink. It was a useful and entertaining snapshot of Birmingham, the uncreative creative city. One of Stef’s key points was about how Birmingham doesn’t look like a creative place despite the fact that creative and cultural industries make up such a significant chunk of the city’s economy (almost 9% of GVA or 5% of the economy – bigger than financial services but smaller than Law and business services).
That’s the key point for me. We’ve become a shopping city and a conference city, but can’t quite work out, in planning terms at least, how to be a creative city. I made a point during the evening about what Stef’s city tour might have felt like in the 1980s, a time when we were nothing more than a motor city, when we simply didn’t have the volume of creative industries activity we do now (2004 stats show 50% of all creative firms had started up in the previous ten years). In 2008 Stef was hoping to see more ‘indie’ culture as he walked around. He left ‘indie’ a little undefined but for me its more than shops or flyposters, its about people on the streets. Back in the 1980s hanging out in the city was a much more straightforward activity than it is now (Stef makes a point about the prevalence of CCTV and alcohol restricted areas). Then, the messiness of post-war planning left lots of curious, unwatched spaces – underpassses, undeveloped sites, old train stations – in which one could engage with friends in your own subcultural group (my own being ‘plastic punk‘ – into the music but too scared of upsetting his mum by ripping his jeans or dying his hair). Birmingham centre may be a lot better planned than it used to be but in that we’ve lost the diversity we used to see on the streets – a diversity of both people and places. A diversity that made us look like more of an ‘indie’ place.
In the last 20 years we’ve done everything that big, growing mature cities should do: we shut the underpasses, we gentrified the canals, we realigned the roads but we also privatised what were public spaces (Bullring was mentioned as an example of that), we priced out independent retail (we’re about to lose that great rabbit warren of youth culture and independent retail, Oasis Markets), we approved uninspiring architecture. I’m beginning to wonder if we’ve probably done everything you’re not supposed to do to plan a creative city landscape.
I think the idea of last night was that we’re essentially gearing up for more formal feedback to the Big City Plan in the autumn. Which is a good thing of course because consultation matters if we’re to take on Stef’s points and make his next city tour a much more rewarding experience.
Even though I had to dash off before the final feedback this was a useful night that gave me and others there plenty of food for thought. Well done to Stef and Creative Republic for pulling together something so useful rather than just canceling.
Floods, leaks and dodgy bulls
I’d hate to be the kind of blogger who has a bad day then proceeds to tell the world about it – my rubbish day is as nothing compared to the rest of the world’s proper rubbish days. Let alone those for whom every day is pretty rubbish.
But I tell you what – today (so far, its 8pm) has been fairly rubbish. An Ill-advised trip to town from which it took 90 minutes to get home through cancelled trains, stuck buses, and flooded rivers blocking roads.
Took some phone pics in Bournville after the taxi we’d resorted to couldn’t go any further of which this one is the only nicely dramatic one:
When we got home we found the roof had leaked which is annoying but if you want to see some proper dramatic pics then go take a look at Josh Hart’s pics. He lives near the river Rea in Selly Park which burst its banks.
However, the most extraordinary sight I saw all day though was the bull statue outside the Bullring in Birmingham. I knew they’d painted in silver (why I don’t know and don’t care) but look up close and it’s possibly the worst paint job known to man. I think it was best left alone….
I hope to finish my rubbish day by watching a rubbish film, Cloverfield. It really couldn’t get any worse could it?
A two pence bus fare for the digital age
I have a new job. I’m off (on long-term secondment actually) to work for Digital Birmingham as their Economic Development Manager. As part of my interview I had to do five minutes on how I would put Birmingham on the digital map. It was five minutes without PowerPoint so I wrote a speech which I thought I’d reproduce here (and no, I don’t quite answer the question but I do talk about buses a lot and yes, I added the embedded links afterwards):
“Birmingham feels strangely exciting at the moment. I say strangely because as someone who’s lived here all of his life, ‘exciting’ is a status that Birmingham has only occasionally reached the giddy heights of. But there is one time when I remember Birmingham reached a frenzy, when an event affected everyone in the city. No, I’m not talking about the double whammy of the G8 and the Eurovision in 1998 but rather, about the now almost legendary decision by the city council in the early 1980s to introduce 2 pence bus fares for under 16s. What halcyon days they were. That long-held dream of going all the way round on the number 11 bus could now be made a reality. The question of what to do on a weekend now had a simple answer – get on a bus and stay on it, see where it took you. It was a decision that mobilised a generation of idle youth. It took us to town and back every Saturday and left us plenty of change for space invaders and a cup of tea in the café on the sixth floor of Lewis’s.
In his article on youth culture from 1981, Gary Clarke actually makes reference to Birmingham’s 2p bus fares. He notes it caused uproar amongst the population, everyone was talking about it. He describes the moral panic caused by this mobilisation. To quote him: “Birmingham youths have created new meaning from the conventional activities of shopping and public transport”. But what’s this got to do with Digital you’re asking? The quote’s interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I don’t think I’ve ever read a better summation of how I spent my teenage years. Secondly, I suspect that is how we’ll be talking 20 years down the line about the digital tools we’re seeing now. That is, as conventional activities.
Actually you’re probably thinking what’s all this got to do with buses? Well, the most exciting blogger in Birmingham right now is a Bus Driver. TWMDriver has his own blog as well as a Twitter account where you can leave him a question about life on the buses. Also, Jon Bounds, author of the Birmingham Its Not Shit blog, wants us all to spend the 11th of the 11th this year on the 11 route, leaving at 11am. He wants an army of Brummie bloggers out there, talking about it, recording it, photographing it. Why? Because it’s there I suppose and because blogging connects you to people and once in a while can actually mobilise them to do something they may not have thought about doing otherwise.
And I think that’s what I feel is exciting at the moment. There’s seems to be a developing, lively social media ‘scene’ going on and some of us have cottoned on to the fact that it’s cheap bus fare time out there in the digital age. More than cheap actually, most of the tools are free. But, what drove us onto the buses in the 1980s wasn’t just the reduction in fares. That facilitated the pre-existing desire we had to discover, to meet, to share. To spend afternoons in Virgin records flicking through magazines we were never going to buy. Digital technologies aren’t the driver of change – they’re an enabler of change.
So what excites me about this social media landscape is how it seems to be bringing citizens together and connecting them on a whole range of topics. I’d agree that at first glance it seems to be a social space partly occupied by a few ‘usual suspects’ in the creative industries. Yet if you dig deeper, you’ll find a rich seem of bloggers talking about where they live (Vale Mail), their work (a blog dedicated to Night Working in the City), or their interests (myself and others wittering on about our allotments). There are opinion leaders out there of course and what I think Digital Birmingham should be is one of them.
Using my Birmingham Post blog I’ve already written about how those with influence can make use of Social Media to start a genuine debate about the city – to develop, if you like, a Birmingham Digital School of Thought. There is a lot of influence to be gained in this city by being part of the digital discussion. Bloggers have a developing cultural capital that planners and decision-makers are beginning to take notice of. Power comes from what you’re saying as well as what you’re doing – it comes from being a part of the discussion.
We’re potentially heading for an economic downturn and if digital technologies can help us through the worst of the impact of such a downturn – by creating ‘digital’ jobs in the creative industries or in medical technologies or in serious games – then we need to speak up now to ensure those with the money, as well as the power, are listening to us and heed our guidance. What growth there is in the economy is in those and other hi-tech industries – the evidence is out there, let’s ensure we understand it and that it influences change.
So for Digital Birmingham its about exerting your influence by contributing to the debate. Be someone, or something, with a view, a position, a take on things. Digital isn’t a box to tick or a target to reach, it’s not a league table…. It’s a bus. The driver, as I’ve mentioned, is already part of the action. I believe Digital Birmingham can be a powerful body to exert the kind of influence that will mobilise our citizens to get on the Digital bus, stay on it and, as we did on the number 11, go round and round just for the hell of it. Birmingham needs a 2p fare for the Digital age and Digital Birmingham could be the body to make that happen.”
Job starts in September. Nicely evocative bus pic by Pete Asthon
Kevin Spacey has nothing to say about Birmingham
Pic by rivier50
Just going through some of the unread feed items on my google reader today and I came across this one from Film Birmingham about a new competition for short films (old competition now as it’s closed for entries). It quotes Kevin Spacey as getting excited about Birmingham’s emerging film talent:
“I am delighted to be joining the judging panel for Virgin Media Shorts. This competition will provide a terrific opportunity for emerging talent in Birmingham to find a shop window for their work and it’s great that Virgin Media is supporting British film in this way…..I’m sure that we’re going to see some great short films from Birmingham and I’m excited for the judging process to begin”
Wow – Kevin Spacey has taken the time to say something exciting about Birmingham! Why didn’t I hear about this before? If I was a Birmingham Evening Mail reader I would have actually as they picked up on the press release and did a short article on it. So in doing a bit of research on the competition (it’s a national rather than a regional one) to find out why Kevin had gotten so excited about Birmingham I then came across the original press release from Virgin Media complete with quote from Mr Spacey:
“I am delighted to be joining the judging panel for Virgin Media Shorts. This competition will provide a terrific opportunity for emerging talent to find a shop window for their work and it’s great that Virgin Media is supporting British film in this way…..I’m sure that we’re going to see some great short films and I’m excited for the judging process to begin”
That’s right, there’s no mention of Birmingham at all. In order to localise this story someone has simply put words in Spacey’s mouth. I googled around and couldn’t find the same sentence used for Manchester, Bristol, Newcastle etc. So was it only the offices of Film Birmingham who changed this press release? I know Birmingham wants to big itself up but surely we don’t have to make stuff up?
So unless I’m told otherwise (and please do tell me otherwise) I’m going on the basis that Kevin Spacey has nothing to say about Birmingham’s emerging film talent. Maybe we should invite him up here, show him some films and ask him in person.
(Just to note that my annoyance at this comes from my increasing grouchiness about stuff as I hit 40 on Sunday. It’s all I can do to stop myself writing another blog post about how you can’t buy a Guardian in the Custard Factory newsagents after 11am as they only ever order about five copies – doing so would sound just a bit too middle-aged though.)