Consultation is dead, big plans are deader | Pete Ashton – It seems the sad, neglected Curzon Street Station is to get a new lease of life as a high-speed rail link to London. No-one really knew about this until Gordon Brown came and pointed it out to us yesterday (literally, going by the above picture). Pete Ashton shows us how this will work in his neat little diagram:
Pete goes on to explains why, although this may be bad news for BCU, it may be a good thing for Digbeth (a Brummie Southwark?).
He also asks what’s happening to the planned Connaught Square development on Bradford Street/Rea Street, that has failed to materialise into anything more than a sorry pile of rubble. Carl has been keeping an eye on the Skyscrapercity forum thread about this and…er…no-one seems to know, really. The building site looks and acts like Digbeth’s very own Limbo.
martin mullaney > Grants for new niche festivals in Birmingham – Councillor Martin Mullaney announces the Emerging Festivals Fund – which will award grants of £500 to £4,999 for small local festivals. The deadline for applications is 4th February 2010. What do you think – is there a festival you’d like to see happen in Digbeth that could be eligible? Could the Digbeth O’Lympics get even bigger this year with some money behind it? Perhaps, although it may need to cut back on sporting events that use Martin Mullaney’s face as a target.
There will be three presentations – from Environmental Health, Licensing, and the planning department – and the chance to quiz Council officers about future policy. Although publicans are the main target group of the evening, it is open to anyone who cares about the area. In an email to local residents, Spotted Dog landlord John Tighe has said:
This looks like it could be an important meeting. We do not want to let the Council get away with ticking a box saying that they’ve consulted everyone about noise issues, by hosting a meeting that no-one attends.
The meeting is being held by Regulatory Services at the Council House, Rooms 3 & 4, at 18:00pm on 24th November 2009. Anyone who wishes to attend should register in advance with Sophie.Mackay@birmingham.gov.uk. If you’d like to ask a question but can’t attend comment it and John Tighe will make sure it is asked.
Digbeth Residents’ Group Meeting – 7pm Monday 2nd November @ Paragon Hotel | My Digbeth – Birmingham City Ward Councillor Yvonne Mosquito will be at the Residents’ Association meeting tonight to answer questions and queries. You may also notice this is a link rather than a post, which is a quite exciting development from Residents’ Association Chair Adam Crossley:
…maintaining a consistent email list is becoming a bit of a nightmare. Therefore I have installed Wordpress at http://www.mydigbeth.co.uk. If you would like to be included in further emails please register at the site. This will allow us to manage the list more easily, and also you can unsubscribe at any time.
It will now also be easier to publish your own content on the site, so if you have an event etc and you want to add it then email me after you have registered and I will give you editor permissions.
So get joining and, if you have something you’d like to announce, get publishing!
The September Digbeth Residents Association meeting was on Monday. The minutes are below. Andy Sheppard, the Neighbourhood Manager for Highgate, Digbeth and St Andrews, was there to say hello. I’ll let him introduce himself:
I have recently been employed by Birmingham City Council as the Neighbourhood Manager for Highgate, Digbeth and St Andrews. Put at its simplest my role is to enable residents to engage with service providers to improve the quality of life in the area and to improve the provision of services. I also want to encourage community cohesion and good neighbourliness.
I am currently visiting as many resident groups and service providers in the area as I can to listen to people’s priorities so that I can draw up an Action Plan to show how we can all help make Highgate, Digbeth and St Andrews better places to live and work in. I would be interested to hear from anyone with ideas on how we can all help do this. I have heard many complaints about a lack of information about what is happening in the area and I do all that I can to remedy this.
If you would like to speak to Andy Sheppard you can email him at andy.sheppard@birmingham.gov.uk, call him on 0121 675 6942 or write to him at Birmingham City Council, 2nd Flr New Aston House, Alma Street Newtown B19 2RL.
The Sunday before last I was walking along Milk Street, watching a man trying not to get run over by a car reversing out of Barfly’s car park, when I almost lost my foot down this hole. I was pretty shocked it was so exposed, it seemed to be a broken ankle and a No Win No Fee case waiting to happen.
So I reported it to the brilliant Fix My Street site – writing a few words describing the problem to accompany the photo and adding a tag to the map so Birmingham City Council could tell exactly where it was when Fix My Street forwarded the details to them.
Admitedly, Birmingham City Council may have already been aware of the problem, but I was pretty impressed to find the hole cordoned off a few hours after reporting it.
And I was even more impressed to find the hole completely fixed a couple of days later.
Thank you Birmingham City Council. And thank you Fix My Street – your one stop shop for reporting fly tipping, graffitti, broken paving slabs and the like.
I’ve been contacted by a lovely lady called Helen from Ikon Eastside, who are planning to stage a public event based around the Big City Plan’s proposals for Eastside around October time.
To do this they would like to hear from you, to get a sense of what you feel are meaningful or pertinent topics to discuss. Ikon Eastside are keen bring in as many people who actually live and work in the area, as opposed to just the policy makers, and talk around things that matter to you that will make for some lively debate. So please – get commenting if there are there any issues that you’d like to see talked about. Suggestions so far have included the the digital district thing and growth of a ‘creative quarter’ – it could be something around this or something completely different!
Is there anything you’d lie to discuss, present, or say, or do at such an event? If so, let us know, Ikon Eastside are very open to ideas. As it stands, Helen thinks the evening is set to take this course:
…I’ve found some old tv news footage of Digbeth from 1956-1978, about 20 mins worth, so I’m thinking to show that first then move into conversation. The footage chronicles the changing face of the area and includes the opening of the bus station, people going on holiday from Moor St Station, the closure of the Typhoo Tea Factory, National Front marches and the last days of the old Woodman Inn before demolition in 1965. It’s super interesting – for instance, did you know there was once such a thing as the Digbeth Tripe House?
No, I didn’t know. That’s quite fascinating, I do like a nice bit of tripe.
Anyway, comment your thoughts and hopefully we can give Ikon Eastside some subjects to get their teeth into!
There has been something of a heated debate around proposed plans to change the use of an apartment block building on Cheapside into a tourist hostel. Some feel that an influx of tourists and possible amenities with them could be beneficial to Digbeth, whilst some residents feel it will create extra noise, traffic and trouble from visitors with no real affinity with the area. There also seems to be some speculation that, should the tourist hostel enterprise fail, it may then be used as temporary/emergency accommodation, although what the basis for this speculation is remains unclear.
Digbeth residents living on or nearby Cheapside will have received the above letter from Birmingham City Council Planning Department, inviting them to comment on a planning application to change the use of a newly built apartment block on the Cheapside/Alcester Street crossroads. The four-storey building was intended to be a residential building containing 20 luxury apartments with 12 car park places and a retail unit on the ground floor.
However, the original developers went into liquidation and the building has been sold on to Journeys Group, who want to change it into a tourist hostel ‘to provide short stay overnight ‘tourist type’ accommodation comprising of 53 no. total bedrooms (256 bedspaces) with en suite facilities and dormitories with shared facilities’.
There is some quite vocal local opposition to this drastic change of use for the building. Paul Sankey of PS Graphics (just opposite the building) has sent an email to local residents and business-people rallying for support in contesting the application:
The change of use has to go through Planning and will be vigorously opposed by all tenants and property owners around here as these details are staggering. We have little tourists to the city and already have a good range of cheap Hotel accommodation including The Paragon within 100yds of this site. l can imagine that as they start off, suddenly we will have many very undesirable characters turning Digbeth into a place not to live or work in. This is exactly the type of use for a new building we all should be opposing.
