Paradise Circus – Page 20 – A Birmingham Miscellany

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World No. 69: Conference centres

Anyone who regularly travels by train between Birmingham and Coventry will know that the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) is a little like Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree. As the train pulls into Birmingham International station, every train regular is wondering, which land is at the NEC this week? If the carriage is suddenly full of perfume, giggling women and designer handbags, it’s probably the Clothes Show. If it’s wall-to-wall North Face, it’ll be a hiking event (or a Christian rock concert) and if there’s a faint pong of wet dog, you know that it’s the Liberal Democrat conference.

The NEC is the UK’s largest conference centre and it is fitting that it is in Birmingham, home to the world’s first ever purpose-built permanent exhibition hall.

Bingley Hall opened on Broad Street in 1850. Designed by local architect J. A. Chatwin, who also worked on the Houses of Parliament, Bingley Hall must have wowed the Victorian public. Its interior space stretched over an acre and a quarter and held 25,000 people in five rooms. It had ten entrance doors and had used nearly 12,000 feet of 21-inch glass in its construction. Of course, just a year later Birmingham-wannabe London launched the Great Exhibition and the rather showy Crystal Palace left Bingley Hall looking small in comparison. But, the Birmingham venue outlived its metropolitan rival by five decades, before also finally succumbing to a fire in 1984.
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How Birmingham invented romance

Birmingham is the most romantic place in the world. You only have to look at the ‘love locks’ on the bridge from the back of the Mailbox to Gas Street basin to see that. They are all about permanence of affection, put there by young lovers to represent the unending commitment and ties to Capita of our city council.

Canal from Livery Street to Lancaster Street CC: Tim Ellis

Greetings cards were popularised by a man called Cole (underling to our 101 Things Birmingham Gave the World star Sir Rowland Hill, inventor of the stamp and the post) – he pioneered it with Christmas cards, but it was Valentine’s Day cards that were really to benefit from the anonymity of the postal system. So, without Birmingham you would be forced to do your wooing face-to-face with all the intendent problems that creates (for us Brummies mostly the inability to sound sincere or sexy – known as the Mark Williams effect).

So, from poetry, through lovelorn graffiti, to the thrilling heartache of the futile gesture, Birmingham is the home of romance. Here are ten romantic moments — covering every romantic trope — that wouldn’t have got out of the starting blocks without the ‘big heart of England’.

To celebrate our love for you lonely people we’ve halved the price of the eBook version of 101 Things Birmingham Gave the World until Valentine’s Day — the lucky in love can buy the paperback as a delightful gift.

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Birmingham’s Unanswered Questions, No.3: Are wheelie bins a good idea?

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AFC Cadbury’s: how we’ll save chocolate

It’s a perfect storm, and it spells doom for the old Cadbury’s but not for chocolate.

It was inevitable that “they’d” say that Brummie chocolate makers were slow and lazy and needed some shaking up, and so now they have, with Cadbury-Kraft-Monorail or whatever they’re called announcing that they’re getting rid of 200 chocolate makers from Bournville over the next two years. And they’re shoving 100,000 sheets in their pocket on the way out the door.

The day before this we found out that the bastards changed the Creme Egg recipe too, and that’s caused an almighty stink. Turns out we sold the farm and it’s all gone wrong.

Well here’s a thought. There are 200 people leaving Cadbury’s with £100k each. That’s a small battalion of Oompa Loompahs with £2million between them, turfed out onto the street right next to Stirchley, the pop-up food centre of the universe, where the rents are cheap and the confidence is high. If just one of them set up an artisan chocolatier we could be on the way to recovering our heritage. £100k must go a long way in Stirchley. This could really work. Imagine if they teamed up. Real Creme Eggs, real chocolate, owned by Brummies and nearer the pubs. I give you: The Chocolate Quarter.

Down the road in Bournville, they’ll whither on their vine, cutting corners and costs and hiding behind their brand but in Stirchley our rough diamonds will bring the romance back to Milk Tray.

AFC Cadbury: real Roy of the Rovers stuff. But with chocolate.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World No. 68: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Scrambled Creme Egg

Trap one in the gents at my work is always locked. No one ever goes in; no one ever comes out. I call it Willy Wonka’s shithouse. To myself that is – it doesn’t really come up much in conversation.

That, rather than the two films, the West End musical, or the use of ‘Oompa Loompa’ to describe the spray-tan aficionados on Broad Street, is how I know that Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is truly part of our popular consciousness.

Cadbury World, without ever explicitly saying so, plays on the ubiquitous idea of a chocolate factory being an exciting and magical place, staffed by smiling, singing and dancing workers in primary coloured uniforms. The real Cadbury workers will be in hairnets and white coats, worried for their jobs after the Kraft takeover, and unlikely to do much singing as there isn’t a pub for miles. I’ve no idea what is in Cadbury World, the attraction, but chocolate rivers and sweet-laying geese are less likely than a moth-eaten tableau of Mr Cadbury’s Parrot and some large sepia photos of Bournville looking pretty similar to how it does now.

A capitalist bait-and-switch on poor parents looking to fill the long dark half-term of the soul the place may be, but Birmingham has every right to trade on Charlie Bucket and co. For without Birmingham, there’d be no Cadbury’s and without Cadbury’s there’d be no Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in any medium.
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Outfoxed

When Fox News rented a quote on ‘creeping sharia’-like issues from terrorism ‘expert’ Steven Emerson he duly provided by saying, amongst other things, that there are

actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in

Brummies, Brits and other onlookers, following the script of the Twitter-storm, kicked out against the inaccuracies in Emerson’s argument with the most visible content coalescing into the Twitter hashtag #FoxNewsFacts.

Whilst I didn’t join in it was nice to see my Twitter streams alive like this as it’s felt like a long time since my particular network had come together in play. You see I’ve felt for a long time that Twitter is different these days (that is: it’s a bit boring these days) but for a few hours last night it could have been 2009 again: Twitter could be fun again. Nobody was selling me anything or live tweeting their way through TV shows I wanted to watch later; everybody was sharing, creating, and pushing back at the folly of an auld enemy.

But then feelings of doubt came to me.

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Danny Smith: Disappearing World

This week, Danny writes a eulogy for Birmingham’s last independent bookshop.

Some things, like grotty flats, go with a bang: a big showy controlled demolition surrounded by smug men in yellow jackets who pretend that playing with explosives doesn’t give them trouser tents. Some things, like the Central Library, go with a fight: even if all that fight actually consists of is an echo chamber of social media, people showing each other photographs of what was and what could have been. And some things, like dear Readers World, slip off in the night like a pensioner on the morphine train to oblivion: creaky middle finger raised in rigor mortis.

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Deep Impact

Brum’s Twitterati have been tying themselves in a tizzy asking the question “So what the heck is an Impact Hub and why is it so epically awesome?”. Normal people probably don’t care, but might find the answers interesting anyway.

We sent Danny Smith out to get us pictures of the Spider-Man, but he came back with this.

Before Christmas a Kickstarter began and the link got passed around with some curiosity. The copy seemed to be all buzz words and no clear explanation. The question “What is an Impact Hub?” was on everybody’s lips. Not in a good way. Fans of the English language were in varying degrees bemused and angry at its obtuseness (shut up – that’s a word). This, coupled with the truly huge goal set, its relentlessly upbeat nature, and its seemingly discounting of all the hard work that already goes on in the city popping up in people’s various social media streams generated more bad feeling culminating in a few posts where this bad feeling was thrown about.

I went down to meet Immy, the author of the Kickstarter, to have a chat and look around their new space (it’s nice). Immy is small and passionate and when she gesticulates small bells tinkle from the bangles on her wrists.

Various things were said during the interview that were ‘off the record’ but none of these were to protect her or the Impact Hub, they were in general explaining when various people and organisations had screwed over her and the project as a whole.

IMMY: It’s been a real steep learning curve for us, from the moment we did go more public and found out how unprepared we were for what was going to come. There’s a portion that have been really supportive and really great but then, psychologically you think more about the gap, about the people that are saying “what’s going on?” and I think it overtakes that. For me it’s a big learning curve because we put it out there like “wow we’ve been doing this for two years” and we were a little “wow look at the amount of talented people”.

ME: Cards on the table I was going to write a column that was a take-down of the language, which is pretty impenetrable, and also I wanted to poke fun at how excited you were at everything.

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15 brummies whose best work is already behind them in 2015

Babu collects the Brummie of the Year in 2005 and then stops being interesting

Everyone else is doing a ’15 for 2015′ listicle so why can’t we? Here’s the 15 best brummies who have really let themselves go.

Paradise Circus
Not funny anymore: 2014’s satirical cartoon review of the year about wheelie bins did not hit the heights of the one about wheelie bins from earlier in the year.

David Harewood
Axed from Homeland, now likes London for a living.

Jasper Carrott
Bring back that sitcom with the disabled kid, or go home, Jasper.

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101 Things Birmingham Gave The World No. 67: Roxy Music

The world of Roxy Music is distant and fantastic: dream homes, smoky nightclubs, crunching gravel drives. Only occasionally is it specific (Acapulco, Havana, Quaglino’s of Mayfair) but it’s always exclusive territory. By being unspecific, Roxy could be anywhere and everywhere… the point was that they were somewhere you weren’t. A decade later, Duran Duran used the same trick: pop fans were transported far from the grey lagoons of Birmingham, Leeds or Newcastle.

Aged 15, I entered these Transtopias after opening the gateway of Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure LP and goggling at the gothic, befeathered form of Eno grooving with a guitar, first L-R in a five-strong line up of guitar wielding band-mates. His flamboyant costume also made an impression on the young Morrissey: catching sight of Eno’s jacket hanging from a tour bus parked behind the Manchester Apollo in 1973 brought the unattainable to the banal. Morrissey states the encounter began his route to pop stardom.

After two albums touring timeless, placeless locations, Eno was ejected from the Roxy into his own universe of Faraway Beaches, icecaps, kitchenettes and driveways. The closest you get to a geo-fix is ‘just up from Wales’.

How to anchor any of these icy, opulent, extraordinary locations in Birmingham?

The answer lies with Carol McNicoll: Birmingham born ceramicist, former Old Rep wardrobe department and later girlfriend of Brian Eno. Her stint in the Rep’s costume department qualified her as designer for Eno and Andy MacKay’s stage wear in the earliest Roxy line up. She is credited with design supervision on Eno’s solo LP Here Come the Warm Jets. The sleeve zooms in through a psychedelic array of household bric-a-brac, overflowing ashtrays, Carol’s own vases and general flea market tat, visually alluding to the songs and lyrics contained within.

Carol is now long established as a ceramicist and she exhibits her work internationally. BM&G features her work in its C20 pottery collection and the V&A have her Eno costume filed next to classic Ziggy Stardust outfits. She regularly returns to Birmingham to visit family (as does Brian) and will be in conversation with me about her pots, costumes and Birmingham years at BCU Parkside on Fri 13 Feb.

https://carolmcnicoll.eventbrite.co.uk