A few weeks ago I was chatting with Dave Peebles at the Custard Factory about the large number of art galleries and similar projects and establishments that were cropping up in Digbeth all of a sudden. Ideas such as approaching the council or Marketing Birmingham about doing some kind of awareness campaign were thrown around with the notion of, if you’ll excuse the concept, branding the area as Birmingham’s Hoxton or Camden or something. At the very least shouting about the fact that Birmingham now has more arts venues in one square mile than anywhere outside of London and they happen to be in an area that isn’t, strictly speaking, supposed to have them. Possibly. I’m not partial to the exact plans for Digbeth but most of these spaces have sprung up autonomously so I expect the planners would be surprised to see them all there.
Anyway, I left Digbeth with ideas spinning around and threw they past a couple of Artist (with a capital A) chums. Predictably the balked at the “branding” thing and we kinda lukewarm about the general idea of getting the council involved (I’m paraphrasing from memory hence no direct credit) but I still thought the idea had legs.
And then I thought it through a bit. Going the long route is kinda boring and usually ends up with the wrong result. Better to just do it CiB-style so on getting home I did a bit of clicking and discovered digbeth.org was available. So I bought it and installed WordPress on a subdirectory. Now, since I had no interest in running another arts blog myself, all I needed was a blogger.
Nicky Getgood seemed like a good candidate. She knows a fair number of people in the Birmingham arts and culture community and actually lives in Digbeth (unlike most of the people who work there who come in from Moseley / Kings Heath on the whole) so she bridges the two worlds rather well – she loves all the interesting stuff thats going on but is also one of those people living in the so-called “luxury” flats that are springing up. So I put the notion to her and she said she’d give it a go.
And so, after a week of me faffing about, Digbeth is Good went live last week. The design is off the shelf and needs work but Nicky has, I think, found her voice pretty quickly. It’s her beast to develop as she sees fit but the general idea is it’ll report on the art and culture that’s happening in the area, from the high-falutin’ conceptual art shows to the random stuff that goes on in the Spotted Dog. Hopefully it’ll show Digbeth is not a brownfield site ripe for bulldozing but a vibrant and essential part of Birmingham’s social ecosystem. We’ll see.
So go subscribe, spread the word and, if you feel the urge, leave a supportive comment or two so she doesn’t feel she’s blogging in a vacuum.
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