Of course, if it is all a bit much for you and you do you fancy a nap tomorrow, I suggest that at midday you hang around Victoria Square in the vicinity of the fountains (by the floozy in the jacuzzi). Why? …Well, why not?

Along with other events surrounding the date, the Town Hall’s actual 175th birthday – the 4th of October – is marked with what the Stirrer describes as “a free, fun packed day of music and dance for all the family and a truly carnival atmosphere.” And if it’s free, where’s the harm in popping along? I’ll most certainly be going to the Handel concert regardless – I love the Messiah. I was also lucky enough to be able to sing Handel’s Messiah in a choir (at the Royal Albert Hall no less!) a few years ago, and it was truly exhilarating. It’s almost as fun to just sit and watch! The concert’s scheduled to begin at 7pm, and tickets are available (either online or via 0121 780 3333) from the Town Hall Box Office priced between £5 and £40. But act fast, they’re almost completely sold out!

This year’s candidates are:

• Acorn Hospice
• Kidney Kids Appeal
• Birmingham YMCA
• The Conservation Trust
• SIFA Fireside Day Centre in Digbeth
• St Mary’s Hospice in Selly Oak

There’s more info on each of these charities on the Brum Twestival site.

Having had a good friend who died from advanced stage lung cancer spend his last weeks at the BSMH, I’m especially grateful to them for the wonderful care, attention and compassion they give to their residents and their families on a daily basis. They’re entirely funded by donations and the odd benefactor; to lose St. Mary’s Hospice - or indeed, any other Hospice – would be a tragic thing to happen and would drastically decrease the availability of quality palliative care in the West Midlands. Besides that, it would put an even greater strain on the NHS to provide the same level of extraordinary care.

So, please support your local Hospice – and indeed, support all of your local charities. If you can’t afford to donate to all of them at once, set up a rota system or donate to a number in turn, changing every couple of months. What’s £10 or £20 a month? It’s not much to you, but to them it means the world. Thank you

See you at the Twestival in September!

For some background info, including more on the culprits who set up the inaugural TLABD, head on over to TalkLikeABrummieDay.co.uk. There’s a section on the accent and even a quick ‘n dirty dictionary to help you get started. If you’re struggling to get started, whoohoo’s had an English <-> Brummie translation service up on the web for a good few years now. There are other translators and dictionaries up on the web too, but if I gave you all the links that’d take half the fun out of finding them now, wouldn’t it?

If you fancy giving it a go, don’t forget to RSVP to the Facebook group too so we can see the trend spreading!

Marketing and promotion aside, they do raise some very valid points. In all my driving around the city, I’ve noticed that there is some truly hideous driving going on (from myself included) – lots of leaden right feet and late braking abounds in the City centre. Hopefully I’ll learn something useful from this to take away and help improve my driving skills.

I wonder how we can make all road users in Brum adopt slightly more sensible driving styles? It might help a bit with the awful congestion too…

This is the final day the BP guys are in Brum, moving on to reading at the end of this month. AutoCar’s already blogged about what they’re doing, and hopefully I’ll see some familiar faces when I head down to meet them.

Amongst others, the lineup includes:

• Soweto Kinch, Birmingham saxophonist and rapper
• Linton Kwesi Johnson
• Bashy
• Andy Hamilton
• Cleveland Watkiss

Click on the flyer to the left to see the full lineup. Not a bad list of artists for a concert taking place under one of Brum’s flyovers! LIke last year, it’s free to go, and it’s a lovely day outside today… So why not? Just head over to Hockley Circus, B18. The concert starts at 12:30 and ends at 21:00.

For those who were unaware, the Public Consultation for the planned £193m Birmingham Library  is halfway complete (it’s been running from the 20th of April and will end on the 22nd of May).

This is the last opportunity the general public will have to voice their opinions - you can contribute yours, so get going – there’s more info on the BCC web site. Likewise, they’re also running focus groups which you can participate in.

As local residents, it’s your Council Tax money they’re spending, so why not have your say?

Some blurb from the BCC web site;

Mike Whitby, Leader of Birmingham City Council, has unveiled the design concepts for the new Library of Birmingham by the acclaimed Dutch architects Mecanoo.

The Library of Birmingham will be situated on Centenary Square between the Birmingham Repertory Theatre (The REP) and Baskerville House. The project will make a huge contribution to the regeneration of the city, creating 250 new jobs including 25 apprenticeships.

The library building will be joined to The REP at ground and mezzanine levels and will share the foyer, bars, restaurants and a new 300 seat theatre.

What bothers me the most (aside from the astounding cost, and the fact that this redevelopment isn’t really necessary) is that they’re going to be using the entire plot of land currently used as a car park – granted the multi-storey behind Baskerville House will still be there, but it’s always full in the daytime with commuters’ vehicles. When this Library is built, parking your car in the centre of Birmingham will become just that little bit more difficult.

Worst of all, as part of the redevelopment of the surrounding area, all but a few circles of grass will be removed and paved over wholesale – what happens to the water table, and why are the few remaining patches of green space in the middle of our city to be so neglected? There’s a lot to be said for being able to relax during your lunch breaks while sitting on a nice patch of grass in the warmer months.

The one good thing about this redevelopment taking place is that archaeologists from the UoB have unearthed some interesting finds just below the car park tarmac, including a “canal arm and factory remains.” From the site;

A previous desk-based assessment showed that the site was formerly within the vicinity of John Baskerville’s house in the 18th century, a canal, and was the later location of the Union Brassworks in the early-19th century, and Winfields Brass Works, one of the largest brassworks in Birmingham during the mid to late-19th century.

There’s a more detailed writeup (old link, obsolete) (with more photos and a video of an animated above- and below-ground virtual tour) on the University’s Archeology and Anthropology web site.

Related reading:

Library of Birmingham promotional web site
UoB: Cambridge Street, Birmingham
BCC: Concept designs for Brum Library
Birmingham Mail: first look at new Birmingham Library
BCC: BigCityPlan - The Core

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)… My car is comprehensively insured, fully taxed and I hold a full UK driving licence. Any reasonable road user expects every other driver and car owner to behave in a similarly responsible manner – so I am incredibly angry when I find that someone is either driving whilst uninsured, untaxed or without a valid driving licence.

Now, while the ANPR system is excellent for catching those who are breaking the law, I am not sure that the introduction of yet more automated monitoring is a good idea. The tricky question is, where does one draw the line with camera-based monitoring systems? I have heard the gradual ingress and creep of CCTV and monitoring systems described as ‘death by a thousand cuts’; The Guardian recently published a fascinating piece on this topic, and it’s available to read online (and I suggest you do).

A theoretical argument in favour of allowing more and more cameras is “well, we already have so many cameras, why not just install some more? It’s not like it would make much of a difference.” ANPR has some excellent applications in the fields of proactive detection of illegal drivers; one watch of almost any episode of Road Wars or Police Interceptors will show the ANPR systems are used often (to very good effect) and increasingly relied upon as well. I have no problem with this, because it catches those who think they are somehow different from all other road users and by doing so inevitably raise the cost of driving for every other law-abiding person. However, by contrast a cynic might argue that the introduction of ANPR gantries to areas of the city centre opens the door for ‘upgrades’ to SPECs cameras for average speed monitoring, as opposed to vanilla ANPR equipment. At that point, Birmingham could potentially become a city of forcibly imposed speed limits, just as Nottingham has become, with city-wide networks of ANPR cameras and both 30 and 20mph zones.

Over the past year or so, there has also been an increase in reports of some London boroughs imposing fines on drivers remotely, via CCTV-observed infractions of comparatively minor traffic laws… The subsequent ticket and demand for payment of the fine being sent to the driver in the post, based on their information being obtained through the DVLA from their vehicle’s number plates. While this may not happen in Birmingham for some time given the comparative paucity of CCTV cameras specifically for monitoring city centre traffic flow, there remain a number of rather glum possibilities.

One of the most paranoia-inducing theories is that the SPECs trigger speed might be intentionally set lower than on current implementations, resulting in an inflated number of drivers receiving penalty points and large fines for exceeding the speed limit by as little as two or three mph. If this were to happen, I am sure many would condone it as both extremely poor policing and a particularly sneaky, devious way of profiting from honest road users. Fortunately, for that the camera network would have to first be upgraded from ANPR to SPECs, involving a degree of maintenance work, and then operational control would need to be transferred to the West Midlands’ Safety Camera Partnership - and I am sure those developments would be well documented in the regional press were they to take place.

For the time being, based on the information I have to hand at this time, these gantries are ostensibly to remain solely as ANPR gantries for monitoring of traffic flows, detection of lawbreakers and, by extension (because it is the elephant in the room) detection of terrorists using the UK’s road network. I did request some more specifics from West Midlands Police via their Press department relating to the planned rollout timetable and provisional completion date, but as of 6pm I had not received a reply. If I receive any more information, I will update this piece accordingly.

 With previous artists including Kate Rusby, José González, Fairport Convention, Morcheeba and Tunng, odds are on that this year’s lineup will be just as diverse.

To quench your thirst for folk in the meantime, the Moseley Folk Festival web site has an excellent archive of past performances (including a bunch of them on YouTube) plus plenty of photos to accompany. Tickets for this year’s MFF go on sale on the 1st of April, and will probably be around the £55 mark – bookmark their Shop and check back then