About Brum

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have already noticed unmarked black gantries appearing in several areas of Birmingham over the past week or so. Some have already gone up in Digbeth, and from informal discussion with contractors installing the gantries today it appears that there are at least 10 more to go. Today (Monday), two gantries were erected at the top of Broad Street (the Five Ways end), one overlooking each direction of traffic. These gantries will shortly be outfitted with ANPR cameras – so for all you Vehicle Excise Duty, car insurance evaders and generally Naughty People, Broad Street and Digbeth high street (amongst other areas) are soon to officially become No Go Zones.

Update, August 2009: these gantries are now fitted with ANPR cameras – the reason you might not see them is because they are really small! If you look at the gantries closely, there’s one or two ‘lumps’ on each one – those are the cameras. Your travel in and out of the city, including dates, times and durations of journeys, are now being logged by Central Government. Enjoy.

According to sources at Birmingham City Council, the cameras themselves are not under their management or jurisdiction as West Midlands Police undertake day-to-day operational responsibility (with much of the central gantries set to be operated from of their Steelhouse Lane station). However, Birmingham City Council’s CCTV department can supervise and control the CCTV cameras being fitted alongside some of the gantries. 

Personally, I am in two minds to the introduction of ANPR to the city centre (as I am sure many others are)… Read the rest of this entry »

I’m currently upgrading About Brum to the latest stable Wordpress – I’ve left it too long without updating and it was becoming dangerously obsolete, so I took the plunge a little earlier today.

There will be some temporary ugliness but fortunately the WP coders have made upgrading to a new point release wonderfully simple – one click to update the database, step-by-step instructions that cover even non-standard installations, and just about all of my pre-existing settings, plus all my previous posts and categories have been carried over without a problem.

The last thing to be  completed is a transition to a new theme; I should have this finished by this evening so please bear with the temporary ugliness or occasionally distorted page layout as I tweak the final design.

Cheers!
Christopher