You’ll never see the back streets in the same way I do. They change, things change fast round here, but even if they don’t your connection will not be the same. I won’t be able to show you the old…
Subterranean, homesick, Blues (although we don’t think he goes down much)
We sent Danny Smith down the re-opened Costermongers, Brum’s finest underground alternative drinking hole near a market, because he was going anyway. The weather today isn’t really weather just an unremarkable middle ground between everything. Spring is the ultimate liminal…
#Savetheflapper save our souls
“I curse any nights sleep in these flats to be ruined by the ghosts of a thousand lost nights of noise and lights and friends.”
13 things you’ll only know if you grew up at my parents’ house in Coleraine Road, Great Barr, B42
We all remember being alive in the past. Sometimes we remember shops that were in the same place as a different shop is now, or that bus tickets were slightly different. And we all grew up in our own local…
Tagged with: My mum and dad
Goodbye Pavilions*
Really, nobody gives a fuck. Today it’s a empty space, a ghost town, but has it really been anything more? Does anybody have any fond memories of the place? Devoid of shops you can see the artless early nineties post-modern…
Number 11: satire and the skewing of the spectacle
Number 11 by Jonathan Coe is now out in paperback, like many of his works there’s Birmingham in the prose. If you’ve watched a football match recently, you’ll have noticed that it looked not like football should: but something more…
Signing off
Danny Smith has been writing for us, in all our forms, for as long as we can remember. He’s a blue-haired gonzo with a habit of going misty-eyed over cute kids, and having a red mist descend when seeing how privilege…
The football train: Villa v Chelsea, 2nd April 2016
Just after 3pm today, at Aston, despondent football fans shuffled onto my train. Barely anyone spoke, or would look at one another. It was as though they’d been caught stepping out of Taboo Cinema Club by their kid’s headteacher. All…
Pier Review: an exclusive extract
Longtime Paradise Circus-ers Jon Bounds and Danny Smith visited every surviving pleasure pier in England and Wales, in two weeks. And then wrote a book about it: Pier Review. Brum’s own Catherine O’Flynn says, “Humour, nostalgia and a certain landlocked…
Birmingham was the crucible of the Industrial Revolution, but it gave the World so much more…
Order 101 Things Birmingham Gave the World: the Book now
"irreverent, informative and laugh-out-loud hilarious"
"one of the funniest books I have read in quite a while"
"the industrial language was uncalled for"
"Good if you finish Viz before the next edition is out"
Top
Danny Smith: The A38 killed my dog
Like a bad penny, licked and then pushed quickly into a chip shop slot machine, Danny Smith returns to Birmingham. Delighted to have him back, we wanted him to stay in Northfield, its streets his alma mater and tell us all…