Light Night, is being held as part of this year’s ArtsFest (which is fast approaching —12th to the 14th of September). While I struggle to see anything particularity arty about “architectural lighting of iconic city centre buildings and iconic landmarks”, it promises to be an interesting evening – especially if they project the painting from the art gallery of penguins onto the Town Hall as they seem to be suggesting: (that’s this one). Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!
While the Council stall and on their reasons for wanting to close Moseley Road baths, locals – in the form of the Friends of Moseley Road Baths – have released their own proposals (PDF). According to The Stirrer, the Council cost saving two pools on the site at £20M – a lot, but only £6M more that the building of a replacement baths (the replacement baths at the Tudor Grange site cost £14M according to FoMRB). The Council’s plans won’t be officially released “until next year” – and in the meantime the baths will continue to deteriorate. They’ve stuck a banner celebrating ’100 years’ of service outside, but I don’t have any great confidence in them wanting to make it 101.
Searching through the council website on an unrelated matter (and no I couldn’t get the www.birmingham.gov.uk/google search to find what I wanted either) I stumbled over a page of ‘Conservation Publications’ which includes this gem (from 1997) ‘Signalling the Sixties’. It’s a brief guide to some of the sixties architecture in Birmingham, and not just in the city centre either. Despite my suspicions that every bit of our late twentieth-century heritage is being wiped out, all the buildings are still around – which maybe indicates that the well deigned, built and maintained are here to stay.
Architecture Week 2007 starts tomorrow and lasts for just over a week, helpfully. There’s a huge amount going on – check out the catalogue on CiB. Personal highlights for me are Tunnel Vision – a trip down the tunnels underneath Brum City Centre, and a walk round neglected buildings in Digbeth. If you don’t share my particular passion for dilapidated and unloved buildings there’s plenty of cleaner stuff going on..
Adrian Goldberg, out of The Stirrer, has done a piece for Radio 4′s You and Yours all about the fight betwixt the council and the bullring over the two (count ‘em) fake beaches we’ll be getting in Brum this summer. It seems to have been treated as a bit of light relief from the Radio 4 lot – but raises a fine point about how it’ll look when we get the inevitable downpours (building site anyone?). Good to hear some Brummie voices on the radio, although Rich Batsford’s falsetto Beach Boys cover wasn’t as welcome as his amusing comments – the most disturbing part was hearing Council Leader Mike Whitby using the phrase ‘chill out’ on a couple of occasions. Cool Maaan. You’ll find a ‘Listen Again’ link here soon enough – it’s about 40 mins into the programme.
I’ve just come back from a launch for the opening festival of The Town Hall, sorry Town Hall (what have modern corporate advertising agencies got against the definite article? That’s going to a- be ignored and b – sound so old in a year, no hang on it already does), and it sounds so good I can’t believe we’ve been without it for ten years. It does SOUND good as well, the acoustics were fantastic – we were treated to a song from Soweto Kinch‘s new album (great, but he looked like it was a bit early for him) and a barnstorming calypso (i think!) from the venerable Andy Hamilton and the Blue Notes. It’s now to be run together with Symphony Hall, which should mean that they can compliment rather than compete, and is certainly showing commitment to a wide variety of music – Guillemots with the CBSO, Handel’s Messiah as arranged by Quincy Jones, tea dances, and of course one man and his organ ;) There’s also a ‘Brum Rocks’ event which pulls together a host of Midlands Rock Royalty, Robert Plant, Tony Iommi, Bev Bevan et al in aid of the Childrens’ Hospital. The opening festival...
