At school, that term, or at least that week, the obsession was small rubber balls, an inch across and patterned with a muted tie-dye, with a thin piece of elastic through them which was tied to a plastic ring. The…
Category: culture
The Wall in the Head
Christopher Bealand’s new novel is out this week, it’s ‘a black comedy about love, loss, the death of dreams, failure, bad TV, bad jokes, brutalist buildings. And Birmingham.’ And we have an extract so you can see that for yourself……
Non-uniform day
School uniforms are odd, especially for teenagers. You take the group that are producing the largest smells and the greatest number of secretions and you develop a system where they wear the same clothes every day. Shirts for two days,…
From a man to his son, on missing his home town
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…
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
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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…