In memory of Edwards No 8.



via LJ Bham

Eastsiders - the story of a family living in an ecologically sustainable Digbeth in 2012.

Jessica runs in through the back door, showers quickly in the ground floor shower room, and almost before the water is in the greywater recycling tank, joins the others at breakfast in the conservatory. The family moved to this new low-energy three-storey house in a development off Curzon Street five years ago, when June got a new job as design engineer in Bordesley Electronics in Adderley Street. Tired of commuting from Bartley Green, they decided to sell their car and move into the city. Eric was already working for a printer’s in Sandy Lane, so it made sense for them to take advantage of June’s relocation allowance and move into Eastside. With the new locally-built trams, and all the facilities they needed within a few minutes walk, they could borrow a car from the Economy Car scheme on the few occasions when they needed to.

When I lived in London one of the coolest things were the Open House days when the great buildings of the city, erected and decorated during the heydays of Empire, were opened to the public. So it's nice to see the idea has been taken and replicated across the country with Heritage Open Days between 6-9 September. Here's the big list for Birmingham:

• A Kings Norton Trail
• Aston Manor Transport Museum
• Back to Backs
• Birmingham Cathedral
• Birmingham Tours Bull Ring Walk
• Birmingham Tours Canal Walk
• Blakesley Hall
• Bull Street Quaker Meeting House
• Civic Sculpture in the City Centre Walk
• Curzon Street Station
• Department of Art
• Guided Walk - Moseley Hall & Village
• Guided Walk - The Lost Farms of Harborne
• Handsworth Old Town Hall
• John Hardman & Co (est 1838) Stained Glass Manufacturers
• Key Hill Cemetery
• Museum Collections Centre
• Museum Collections Centre
• Museum of the Jewellery Quarter - Walking Tours
• New Hall Water Mill
• Newman Brothers' Coffin Fittings Factory
• Old Grammar School and The Saracen’s Head
• Pen Room Museum
• Selly Manor
• Singers Hill Synagogue
• Soho House Museum
• St Andrew's Church
• St Chad’s Cathedral Guided Tour
• St John’s and St Peter’s Church with Ladywood Arc
• St Nicolas’s Church
• St Paul's Church
• The Midlands International Buddhist Association (Birmingham Buddhist Maha Vihara)
• The Museum of the Jewellery Quarter
• Warwickshire Masonic Temple

Follow any of those links for details of when they're open. The news comes via the Birmingham Conversation Trust who are running the Newman Brothers and Curzon Street Station days.

Urban Pie, a new restaurant in the Bull Ring, looks to be doing for pies what the Handmade Burger Company in Brindley Place did for burgers. Tasty!

Digbeth, then and now has some photos of the destruction of the area by Selfridges. I particularly like the third one - looks like a warzone!

The People's Republic of Birmingham does a bit of digging into the £128 million New St Station investment and isn't overly impressed.

All in all, not such a great deal then. It is good that there will be some investment in the station of course, but it is likely in 10 years we will still have a concrete station stuck between a car park and a shopping centre.

I so want to go to this but I'll be stuck in a penguin suit in the ICC. Arses.

Blogroll: Days of Being Mild: "Film, television and gripe." I like the look of this blog - good style, nice coverage.

The Club note that ABBAtoir, a heavy metal Abba covers band, are playing at the Hibnernian in Selly Park on July 21st. Sounds like one of those things that could be terrible or genius but definitely not meh. The vocals on MySpace actually sound kinda 70s punky.

By golly, the Sage Wholefoods Community Garden in Moseley looks very nice.



And I understand they're planning on getting wi-fi installed. If that happens I think I'll be a regular.

via Dubber.

"Birmingham is one of 20 community ownership demonstration areas announced by the Government earlier this month" but what the flip does that even mean?

There's a chance to find out at an open meeting run by the Chamberlain Forum on 26th July at the Moseley CDT Building (next to the post office in Moseley).

Here's hoping against hope that it's fascinating.

The Guardian has a nice little review of Atticus in Bearwood, the honorary suburb of Birmingham once described as "like Moseley without all the tossers".

A sure sign of a neighbourhood on the upward turn is when places like Atticus begin appearing. The Birmingham suburb of Bearwood is definitely moving and its first continental-style cafe/bar was opened last year by Jez Collins and Rob Martinez. Atticus is a smart space with a decor welcoming to all from families to clubbers warming up for a night in the centre. Coffees and speciality teas are available earlier in the day while there's a very serviceable wine selection for later, plus speciality beers, import lagers and single malts. The food is simple but well executed and includes an excellent wild mushroom, cheese and spinach tart. There's also comedy, music and poetry evenings, plus art displays. DJ-wise, catch Viva La Musica! tonight playing global dance while on Friday it's the turn of broken beats, reggae and hip-hop from Foundation Collective.

via Some Random Thoughts

I've always thought there was a market for reviewing the conveniences in pubs and clubs so you'd know what to expect before your bladder filled with beer, so you can imagine my delight when I discovered Birmingham Alive's Pub Toilet Hall of Shame and Fame which has possibly hundreds of the things reviewed by their users. It's worth remembering, however, that the state of the loos is a reflection on the customers as much as the landlords. The staff don't deliberately cover them in shit and piss. They just kinda resent cleaning it up.

myspace.com/kategoes
myspace.com/cheeseonbread

My first thought on seeing this drawing of Birmingham from 1886 by HW Brewer was "Birmingham's on fire".



On seeing the slightly bigger version it's clear it's the factories stretching off into the distance. Incredible.

John Coulthart, from whom I grabbed the image, has more on Brewer.

I actually have in my possession a copy of an etching of "The profpect of Bermingham" from 1640 which a friend drunkenly (as opposed to a friendly drunk) stole of a pub wall years ago. I really should post a scan of it.

Muddy Feetby kate&drew.

Birdies at the Bullring!by crispishfish.

It seems Bearwood has something of a community of bloggers, which is not too surprising as I found it quite the contemplative place when I lived there. Second City Stu(mbler) is a new blog that's looking quite promising covering the history of the place and the local social scene, along with some comics news. One for the blogroll!

Some thoughts on this video for the Snow Hill development in, um, Snow Hill.



Now that's how buildings should be built! It all rises out of the ground like magic and all the bits fly around like pixie pieces into their correct places. None of this messy "building site" stuff. Cool!

Where do they get that music? Is there a download site?

Snow = Now. Clever!

Mummy, what's a signature restaurant?

Phallic buildings are so cool!

Ooh, the music's gone all quiet...Its very exciting, like something's going to happen...

Nope, back to the, um, jazz I guess.

All the people seem to be weighing up the options with their hands. That's good to see. It's obviously going to be a place for rational contemplation of weighty issues.

And the women are checking out each other's shoes.

Okay, we're flying now. Up and up. What a lot of glass.

Ooh, office space porn. Look at all that office space!

And we're out. Night is falling.

Hmm, this building doesn't really look like anything. I can't think what it's nickname will be. The Wedge?

A new city centre destination of international stature, indeed!

ta to B:INS

Question for you. Has Adrian Goldberg ever seen Brass Eye?



Flippancy aside, here's what he's up to

On the Ten4 blog's Why can't Birmingham do it like Manchester? post there's a great long comment from one Jean-Luc Fournier which I think needs to be aired wider afield. So I'm going to reprint a whole chunk of it without permission:

In my view, the answer to the problem is simple: firstly, the West Midlands must be renamed Greater Birmingham, and Greater Birmingham must have a mayor. (Preferably not Mike Whitby or Carl Chinn.) No-one outside the UK knows what or where the West Midlands is. And the same applies to plenty within the UK too. Let Solihull and Wolverhampton et al. whine about being ’subsumed’ all that they like; the fact is, they will benefit more and be heard about more by being part of Greater Birmingham than they do by deluding themselves into thinking they’re separate from their conurbation that no-one’s ever heard of anyway.

Having a mayor just *works*. London, Paris and Berlin all have great mayors at the moment. Ken has done much right, and much wrong - but everyone can agree he busts a gut to promote this place, and it has been a successful effort. Barcelona’s transformation is largely down to its one-time mayor, Pascall Maragual; New York’s to Rudy Giuliani, when he was in office; Athens’s to Dimitris Avramopoulos in the 1990s, and so on.

Birmingham and its mayor must then start to promote themselves properly. At the moment it pitches itself embarrassingly. Its city logo is poor and unmemorable. The 1992 one was much better. Its slogan ‘many worlds one great city’ is so yawn-inducingly common as to beggar belief that no-one realised it’s been used before by city after city after city…

So please, no more mentions of having more miles of canal than Venice. No more ridiculous claims such as “Birmingham is one of Europe’s most sophisticated cities…” (from a tourist brochure circa 1996). No more Mike Whitby seizing upon the Chamberlain Square beach or an extra daily flight to Dubai as ‘proof’ that Birmingham is a ‘global city’ and a player on the world stage. I mean, please. No more fake American tourists trying to persuade Brummies to visit their own museums either…

A simple slogan is needed, and needs to be used in all campaign literature, every single ad, brochure… anything promoting the city. Glasgow had ’smiles better’. Birmingham’s should be: ‘Birmingham is changing’. Imagine it in big letters on a poster in a London Underground station. It conveys both the desired message and the truth, for the city *is* always changing - it never stops. It is not a ridiculous claim. It cannot be laughed at - and a slogan promoting Birmingham must be scoff-proof, after all.

Finally a better understanding of design and how much a city can benefit if good design infuses every part of its being, from its corporate identity to its public transport maps to its street furniture to its buildings to its signage, and so on. Again - sorry to bang on about it and sorry that *everyone* says it - I must refer you to Barcelona, a city that ‘got’ the power of design before any other city did.

That bit about "Greater Birmingham" really resonates with me. I've been spending a bit of time at Light House in Wolverhampton and while it has a unique and special character it's really part of the Birmingham scene. And, needless to say, Birmingham is part of the Wolverhampton scene.

As for the Mayor. Yes, but there should be a clause saying no currently elected politician can stand and it should be a party-free vote. Part of Birmingham's image problem comes from our short-sighted politicians so they should be eradicated from the proceedings.

I should be writing this stuff on the Ten4 blog really. As should you.

Virginby Birmingham Phil.

by stewartbremner.

The Diskery

Beautiful Birmingham is a Flickr pool just for nice photos of Brum. So no rusty old warehouses then.

Deirdre Allen, "Edgbaston's green champion", has some interesting advice and information about rubbish on her blog.

If bags are missed, the first thing to ascertain is if a whole road has been missed or just one house. If it's the whole road, then clearly there's a problem with the depot. If it's just one house, there's probably a reason. In my experience, binmen don't leave containers which are clearly visible just for the fun of it.

They don't, you now. Nothing a binman hates more than some arsehole phoning the depot to complain about them.

Also:

Most councils landfill about 65% of their waste. In Birmingham we currently landfill only about 20%. Most of our household waste goes to the incinerator at Tyseley. The heat produces electricity to light part of our city. Even the remaining ash is not wasted. It is used to fill holes in roads and pavements.

I guess it's a lose-lose situation - to bury or to burn. Good to see the resulting energy is being re-used though.

It's probably because I've been a binman in the past that I find this stuff endlessly fascinating. Someone much wiser than me who's name I can't remember said something along the lines of "you can judge a civilization by how it deals with it's rubbish."