About Brum

Corny I know, but appropriate… Just now (about 1am), Birmingham (and much of the Midlands and Central England) had a little earthquake! It only lasted about ten seconds here, but was strong enough to make my speakers rock on their stands and my radiator make a noise… Amusingly, we all initially blamed each other in our house

Through quickly jumping onto Facebook, fast proving to be the quickest way to gauge opinion and feedback from your friends around the country, it seems that this was felt as far afield as Sheffield, Manchester, right down to Northampton (although Bristol didn’t apparently feel it, according to one of my friends). A friend who lives in Milton Keynes says that it was much more severe, shaking the house quite violently – he heard things moving around and falling over in the loft.

The BBC hasn’t even published a full article about this yet – proof positive that citizen journalism is good at a few things! [01:18: BBC News 24 reports that it was felt as far afield as Darlington, Cheshire, Northampton and parts of London]. However, they do have much more comprehensive info on the 2002 Dudley earthquake (5 on the Richter scale!) here and here – and Wikipedia has an article about it. MadJad, a Dudley area resident, has a little minisite dedicated to it. There was also a much stronger earthquake in Kent last year.

Yay for unexpected exciting things!

Edit: my housemate’s just sent me a link to the USGS site, where there’s a much more detailed technical writeup of the quake: it was apparently 4.7 on the Richster scale at its epicentre! Here’s the initial stats:

Earthquake Details

There’s even a map showing the epicentre (somewhere near Lincoln!) from the USGS site – click here to load it in Google Maps. Take three minutes and report your experiences back to the USGS while you’re at it.

[02:44: The Sun, in its usual restrained manner, has taken the time to carefully and objectively report on the night's events. I won't spoil it for you, but it's really worth a read. I liked the bit with smoke and flames.]

Birmingham’s a bit of a higgledy-piggledy place when it comes to architecture. You have brash, modern buildings parked opposite 1980s ‘oddities’, which themselves are next to to clean lines and glass frontage of Starbucks and office buildings… And on top of that, you have the old, OLD buildings that were in Birmingham long before anybody else decided to move in and build the latest multi-storey hotel with a weird leopard-skin cover down one side (if you’ve seen the SAS Radisson, you’ll know what I’m on about).

This photo, taken by Bill Phillips, quite neatly sums it all up:

Image credit: Bill Phillips

I know from personal experience just how hard it is to take good shots in the centre of Brum, the contrast between light and shade around there is so extreme that if you have a less-than-great camera, you end up with half a screen of barely visible image and an overexposed remainder.

If you’re wondering where the above shot was taken, get off the bus at Colmore Row, walk to the left (heading away from Snowhill railway station), cross the road, then turn right 90°… Bingo.

Seen any other nice shots of Brum? I’d love to see them, so leave your links in the Comments.

In typical style, I’m fashionably late writing about this. Just like I was to the actual event. Note to self: update satnav maps (I drove straight to Brum from work via a route I don’t normally travel via – the bloody thing tried to take me the wrong way around two separate one-way systems, one in Wolverhampton and another one in Brum!) Anyway, I got there, and I wasn’t to worry, because people were there way after I said my goodbyes and headed home.

If you didn’t turn up on Monday night at the Dragon Inn, you missed out – around 30 bloggers and creative types descended on the pub for an evening of spontaneous conversation, anecdotes and other small issues… things like the future of blogging in and about the West Midlands, and how to promote the region outside of the clique of Birmingham bloggers (paraphrased from Podnosh’s Nick Booth, or Mr. Nosh as I think I might call him from now on).

Read the rest of this entry »

Unless something dire happens to obstruct my attendance, you can find me (along with a bunch of other friendly locals) at the second Brum Bloggers Meetup. I’ll give you fair warning now… It’s nestled just at the top end of the Gaybourhood (as my lesbian housemate calls it, and the name just happens to have caught on in our house, so that’s our name for Hurst Street). Whenever she nips down to The Fox on Hurst Street, I like to say that she’s ‘got a thirst for Hurst’, but I get odd stares and I suddenly feel the need to leave the room. You decide on that one.

To be fair, The Dragon Inn is actually nestled in The Arcadian Centre, so it’s almost separate – to get to the Arcadian car park, you just drive down (up?) Hurst Street and the entrance is there. Parking costs, according to the company which runs it, are about £1-£1.20 an hour, so put aside a fiver for parking if you’re driving there (like I’ll have to).

Now, for the brave, here are the event details:

Name: Brum bloggers Meetup 2
Tagline: or the first Birmingham Social Media Cafe?
Host: Birmingham Bloggers UK

Type: Meetings – Club/Group Meeting
Date: Monday, February 18, 2008
Time: 7:00pm – 9:00pm

Location: The Dragon Inn

Address:
Hurst Street
B5 4TD
Birmingham

Map: View

See you there!