24

The Evening Mail ran an article about how to spend 24 hours in Birmingham, a few months ago. It sounded fun, so we sent Harry Vale to check out their recommendations. Eventually, after we got him to ask John Chillcot and Pete Townshend for some advice on deadlines, he submitted this. It was worth the wait, a gonzo journalist Jack Bauer, pissed off and hungry in the rain. In the meantime, the Mail took the times off the article, so he was also performing something of a public service in checking out the logistics. Thanks to everywhere he visited for looking after him.

I couldn’t wait to delve into Paradise Circus’ Scrooge McDuck-esque expenses vault and spend all their money following the Mail’s itinerary to the letter. I’d be a tourist in my own city, rediscovering the hidden gems (that haven’t been bulldozed or cordoned off), discovering other gems that weren’t hidden but I just hadn’t heard of them, and gems I’d heard were a bit shit but I’d go anyway, because the Mail told me to.

CC: Elliott Brown
CC: Elliott Brown

I picked a humid, wet day to do this, which is just how I like my 24 hour adventures to be. I nudge the missus into giving me a lift, but she rolls back over, murmuring something about a “kidney infection” (the oldest trick in the book), so I jump in a minicab and mentally calculate how much this is going to cost as we slowly slip through the Hagley Road traffic. My taxi drops me off at Broad Street and I head to Marmalade, to try their eggs Benedict. The Mail suggested I get there for 8am, but I am slightly late. Luckily, it doesn’t matter, because the Mail are stupid and the place doesn’t open until 9.30am. This has thrown my whole day out of whack, because they’re sending me to the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter at 9am.

Guess what doesn’t open at 9am? If you said the largest municipal library in Europe, you’d be right. If you also said the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter, you’d also be right. Now I don’t know what I’m doing, I feel like I have to work to plan, I need to stick to the schedule. The Birmingham Mail promised me 24 hours in Birmingham and now I’m standing in the rain, confused and hungry. I head to the nearest pub, grab possibly the worst coffee in the world (it looks like the stuff that Papa Shango cursed Ultimate Warrior with) and try and work out an alternate plan.

So my new plan: go back at 9.30am, ram breakfast down my throat as fast as possible, then jump in a cab to the Jewellery Quarter. I’ll spend as much time as I can there, then bus it to the Botanical Gardens at 10.30am, my next scheduled stop.

Guess what’s not open at 10.30am?

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Hate the German market? Buy a candle and shut the fuck up

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People complaining about people complaining that Christmas gets earlier every year gets earlier every year doesn’t it? And as well they might, it seems the only thing stopping the lights going up as soon as the kids go back to school is Halloween.

One of the biggest proponents of this christmas creep in Birmingham is the Frankfurt Market, known locally as the ‘German Market’ the ‘Christmas market’ or just ‘the market’ by most of Birmingham who seem to unwilling to split hairs at that point but will delight in telling you that most of the people that work there are “Polish anyway”. The Market has been a fixture of Birmingham since 2001 and time was you couldn’t say a word against it without being labelled as a grinch the equivalent of a 60ft mecha-Scrooge with orphan-killing eye lasers. Of course I publicly coated it off every chance I could get.

Stuck for a present? Why not try the new Birmingham: It’s Not Shit the book, or 101 Things Birmingham Gave the World.

But recently people have started grumbling, the odd bad sausage here, the occasional commuter gripe there. So taking advantage of Twitter’s new ‘poll’ function I asked the public.

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The scallop line: the true boundary of Greater Birmingham

It’s going to be fun to stay in the WMCA. The West Midlands Combined Authority that is. It would be called Greater Birmingham if those from the Black Country could see beyond their mounds of faggots, scratchings and closed heavy industry. Sorry to piss on their chips (we know they’d rather have mushy peas) but we’re going to call it Greater Birmingham anyway.

But a bigger problem is where it covers. At the moment it’s just a portmanteau of councils who are taken in by Tory devolution rhetoric, but there is a real Greater Birmingham and we can find it. Language and culture are more effective indicators of statehood than anything as gauche as economics, or the whims of business leaders. 

Defining the boundary of Greater Birmingham is too important to leave to our ‘betters’, who are useless (and will farm it out to Capita, who will fuck it up). The People’s’ Republic can only be defined by the people. But who are those people? Where do we draw the lines?

Paradise Circus can settle this easier, quicker and cheaper than Capita with a few simple questions about chip shop dialect. Half a million only, and we’ll chuck in a free website. 

Our methodology is that Birmingham’s influence, our Greater Birmingham orbit, extends to our shared cultural and culinary heritage: to wit. 

“Where do you get potato in batter if you ask for scallops at the chippy?”

So we asked. And amongst other things* we got this:
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Green eggs and Birming-ham

Yeah I’ve been here a while. And now I’ve got kids: brummie kids. And so I guess that makes me a brummie dad.

I was so proud the first time my eldest counted to FOIVE. Just the other day I took the kids to Sutton Park and they wanted a game of HOIDE and seek.

But it’s not all fun being a brummie dad. The other night I was reading the boys a bedtime story. It was an old favourite by Dr Seuss, but it came out all wrong:

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No sad songs, an interview with Stephen Duffy

The excuse for talking to Stephen Duffy is the release of the first Lilac Time album in ten years, but that really is just an excuse: we could listen to him forever. Paradise Circus is more named after the Lilac Time album  of that name than even the traffic island. That said, No Sad Songs is a wonderful collection that you should head out and pick up right now.

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“Yes, we have always been guilty of self mythologising,” Stephen Duffy tells me, so allow me to build my own. I’m talking to him not sitting on the grass near Nick Drake’s grave, nor in a dappled Digbeth pub where our words would be lit with dusty spikes of light though the stained glass, but over the phone. He’s at home in Cornwall, I’m in an almost quiet enough corner of a conference centre in London that will from now be forever Birmingham.

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Wondering stars

In an old episode of BBC science programme The Infinite Monkey Cage the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson described how as a young boy growing up in New York City he never saw the stars in the night sky; in a city, when you look up you just see more city. When he eventually saw the wonder of the stars it was in the New York planetarium. That was where he found his love of science, and that was how his life’s work in cosmology began.

Tyson is quite the poetic scientist, and I found his story captivating. The city exists, he seems to suggest, only between its highest penthouses and the ground below them — all the sky above is lost.

Of course New York is a very different cityscape to Birmingham, but there’s something in what he tells us about wonder, about knowledge and enquiry, that is relevant to us.

Our skyline thrusts ever upwards, fuelled by the speculative construction of inner city apartments. Meanwhile the social housing of the past is being brought back to the ground. The clear message here is that the vista of the city is a reward for success, in the starkest capitalist terms. This tells us that only winners are now allowed to look down upon the mighty work of Birmingham. Perhaps they are able to see the sky from up there too. Perhaps they can wonder at the wandering stars; for them they are reserved.

What Birmingham lacks in height it makes up for in light. The modern city, even a modestly risen one like ours, still beats back at the night sky with a haze of halogen. Part of the deal with cities is that, though they may rob you of nature’s riches, they give back to you what you need for an enriched life. They do this through civic works, as New York did for Tyson when it gave him the wonder of stars through the planetarium.

In BMAG today they exhibit a model of one of many master plans for what is now Centenary Square. The classical architecture of Baskerville House and the Hall of Memory are mirrored by sympathetically designed buildings. The Hall of Memory’s twin is a planetarium. In that square today you will find the new Library of Birmingham.

A library, like a planetarium, is a place of wonders, a place to enrich our lives and light the sparks of promise in us all. A library can unlock the mysteries of the sky above us, too.

The deal is the city takes the natural world from us but gives it back to us in some way so we too can wander through it and wonder; the building itself isn’t the wondrous thing.

The library at night is lit up like a galaxy of the stars it obliterates from view. Tonight perhaps it’s lit in a regal purple? Look upon it and despair and wonder what’s inside.

The Craft City Line

We’ve been out drinking for about six hours, we’ve lost a lot of people and one of us is bleeding. In a few minutes one of us is going to try to pick a row with a train driver. I am cool hunting in the suburbs of Birmingham, and it’s going poorly.

train

Here are two things that are hot right now: craft beer, and Birmingham.

So hot are these two things that when The Guardian ran yet another piece a piece on how Birmingham is cool now, craft beer formed a central part of its thesis:

“Two years ago, you struggled to get a pint of real ale, let alone craft beer, in most of Birmingham. Now, from Colmore Row, down John Bright Street, to Digbeth, the city centre is awash in the stuff. It’s as if a phalanx of hipsters, fleeing London’s housing market, have swept up the West Coast mainline to alight at New Street.”

Now that’s not true (we’ve had real and craft beer for at least two and a half years*) but it doesn’t mean it’s not interesting. If craft beer is a measure of how cool a place is, then just how cool is Birmingham? And what would be a fair test?

I’ve got an idea.
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Danny Smith: Disappearing World

This week, Danny writes a eulogy for Birmingham’s last independent bookshop.

Some things, like grotty flats, go with a bang: a big showy controlled demolition surrounded by smug men in yellow jackets who pretend that playing with explosives doesn’t give them trouser tents. Some things, like the Central Library, go with a fight: even if all that fight actually consists of is an echo chamber of social media, people showing each other photographs of what was and what could have been. And some things, like dear Readers World, slip off in the night like a pensioner on the morphine train to oblivion: creaky middle finger raised in rigor mortis.

“THIS SHOP  IS NOW CLOSED  NOT OPEN EVER DO NOT BANG ON THE WINDOW OR DOORS”

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The longest German Market planning email thread in Europe

Due to the unique way that Service Birmingham’s email security systems are funded, this correspondence about the Council’s festive plans has somehow been CC’d to us. It’s just nice to see that they actually plan things.

From: Albert.bore@bham.gov.uk

To: Jurgen.Beckenbauer@germanmarket.de

Re: Das Markt

1st October 2014 11:01

Dear Jurgen,

I hope this finds you well. I’m conscious that it’s October and that we will shortly need to begin the process of planning for this year’s German Market. So we can get the ball rolling at our end I’d like to hear some your ideas for new product lines for 2014 that reflect changes in local and national culture and events.

As you know, the council are facing a dire financial situation so I’d be particularly pleased to hear of ways you plan to boost revenue this year.

Kind regards,

Albert

 

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