Last bin day, we went out to see if the bags had been collected outside PC towers and instead found a package addressed to us. It contained the master tape for a song with more hooks than we have different…
Category: art
Satan over Birmingham
A dark force is at work in industrial Birmingham. The evidence is there before us in our streets, in our museums, in the halls of power, our entertainment venues, our dark mills. Yes the devil himself pervades the fabric of…
Into the Blue
With cover by 101 Things Birmingham Gave the World artist Mark Murphy, Peter Bourne’s new novel is an ambitious and very real book. We’re happy to share an excerpt. Set against defining 1980s events like the Falklands War and the…
Posted in art
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…
A Literary Map of Birmingham
Flushed with the success of our 101 Things Birmingham Gave the World Kickstarter, for which we thank you all, we’re thinking of expanding into other types of merchandise. Impressed by Anna Burles’s Literary London Map, we’ve taken stock of all of…
Super Prix
Remembering the Super Prix is a fiction within a fiction. Going to my Nan’s flat, 180 Elizabeth Fry House, just to hear the roar and grumble of the cars from her balcony. A simulcast of first and second-hand experiences. Being…
Birmingham Airport to Coach Station in pixel-width strips
I’ve been playing around with slit-scan photography lately and at the tail end of a long and boring coach journey I thought I’d try recording the journey into Birmingham as a slit-scan. The app I was using was limited to…
The Paradise Circus Official Guide to the Quarters of Birmingham
Struggle to identify the areas, suburbs, Quarters, Triangles or Miles in Birmingham? Struggle no longer with our official infographic: Click to embiggen.
King Kong, Sex and The Americas
Discovery is subjective. When Europeans discovered the Americas, they didn’t let indigenous races spoil their narrative: that continent was discovered and it would stay discovered, damn it. They say that every generation of teenagers thinks it’s invented sex. The moment…
What happened next?
For a time, this was an allowable method of attempting to staunch the flow of disappearances. But it soon extended much further than one shelf of the ‘D’ sequence. In fact within a year everything was gone. This is the…
Birmingham was the crucible of the Industrial Revolution, but it gave the World so much more…
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"the industrial language was uncalled for"
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