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.
Back in December, Carl contacted National Express to see if a much-needed cashpoint would be installed in the new Birmingham Coach Station. They answered that ‘there are plans for a cash machine to go in early 2010′, which made Digbeth residents very happy.
A few days ago I was reminded about the awaited coach station cashpoint by promoter of all things Brum Pixie Sixer, so I emailed National Express asking if there were still plans for one and when it might be installed. I received a reply saying they thought it would be ‘coming soon’, but they’d check things out and get back.
Unfortunately their investigations established that it won’t be coming as soon as many of us might like. A lovely lady wrote to me explaining that she had ‘Had a chat with our man in charge of the cash machine. He informs me that banks aren’t installing new points at the moment because of the economic climate.’ Oh dear. It seems we must wait for the banks to recover from the credit crunch before they treat the coach station (and Digbeth) to a cashpoint. Until then, we’ll need to keep paying that extra £1.50 or get cashback with that.
However, as Dave Harte commented yesterday, ‘As much as we’ve all moaned about lack of signposting and cashpoints perhaps having neither is your greatest asset’ in preserving the ‘industrial/arts balance’ of the area. So it could be a cloud with a silver lining.
Is yours one of the most expensive car insurance postcodes? | moneysupermarket.com – Our very own Investigative Journalist Carl does it again and discovers that Digbeth dwellers who fall into the B12 postcode may be paying through the nose for car insurance. According to Moneysupermarket, Birmingham B12 is the seventh most expensive place in the UK for car insurance. In fact Birmingham overall seems to be pretty pricey – B8, B10 and B11 postcodes also made it into the top ten. Anyone know why?
After having a very long, marathon sleeping session I think I’ve just about recovered from my 12-hour New Year sit-in in the new Birmingham Coach Station. It was a great night and surprisingly good fun – I cannot recommend enough that everyone spends a little time watching the world go by in the nearest coach or train station, to experience where you live as a traveler. You’ll see a truly different side to your area and get to talk to some very interesting people passing through it, who all have their own stories to tell.
Midge passes through before going to a Sheldon house party
I’ll be writing up some of the stories I got to hear here under the heading NYE Express, a title thought up by Midge, who kindly popped by to see me with a little something to see me through the night. He wasn’t the only one:
Ben Mabbett was at the station waiting for me when I arrived with a little bottle of bubbly in a brown paper bag, which was ever so thoughtful.
On the morning of New Year’s Eve I was on BBC Radio WM chatting to Daz Hale – you can listen again here for one week (I’m at the tail-end of the show, roughly 2:18 in).
Roughly twenty-two hours later I was back in Radio WM studio chatting to Brett Birks about the experience. The programme is not available to listen again but Alan Colson took a sneaky audioboo:
I managed to collect quite a few stories during the night. Watch this space for future NYE Express posts to read all about them.
Okay, after all that serious Big City Plan bus stuff it’s time for a spot of fun. You may remember a little while ago I linked to the above photo by Snow Blind, commenting that hunting the rest down could be a good, graffiti art Where’s Wally? So here we have it – a public Google Map. Please insert tags of the stickers’ whereabouts at your leisure, inserting photos if you have them or just their names if you don’t. These are:
Photo Walk 22/01/09 – The lovely Carl, aka Snow Blind, takes a walk round Digbeth and these are the results. This one’s my favourite because it suggests what could be fun, hunting game:
These posters are all over Digbeth, and this is the only place they are all together (that I’ve found) I will now make it my mission to find all four of them around Digbeth.
