Here’s part of the plans showing the station and platforms between Moor St and Curzon St (taken from this PDF which is from this page).

Secondly we learned that the Big City Plan and the consultation surrounding it isn’t worth the price of Mike Whitby’s absurd tie. All it takes is a well considered national strategy to fall into place and a decade or more of “planning” for the area can be torn up and forgotten about.

I’m actually fairly upbeat about this turn of events. I think the station is a good idea and the location a fine one. The only casualty I can see is the new Birmingham City University campus but that doesn’t worry me. The city has been suffering from BCU-creep for a while now and putting the brakes on that will be a relief. (I’ll just let the phrase “BCU-creep” just sit there without explanation so you might speculate as to what I mean.)

Now, rather than an inward looking university campus (that’s not a dig – all university campuses are inherently inward looking in my experience and so they should be) we get a transport hub. Certainly the main purpose of the station will be relatively expensive trains for the relative few but the halo effect of this should be dramatic, both for the local transport infrastructure and the Digbeth / Eastside area. Because now Digbeth will have a purpose – serving the station.

For a year or so I lived behind Waterloo station in London. That bit of Southwark is quite a bit like Digbeth – off the beaten track, full of railway arches and industrial pockets, yet right in the middle of the city. It was a good place to live because it was 10 minutes walk from the South Bank yet reasonably quiet for such a central location. And while it didn’t have every amenity most of what you needed was provided by the shops, cafes and miscellany that fed off the periphery of Waterloo.

I wouldn’t want to say Digbeth will evolve in the same way but I think a massive train station (especially when considered in aggregate with New St, Moor St and the nearby coach station) will give the area a genuine reason to develop and change rather than a spurious regeneration agenda, one which has demonstrably shown itself to be fragile when the financial climate changes. (What exactly is happening to the stretch of land cornered by Rea and Bradford Streets? If the answer is nothing can we have it back?)

Birmingham as a city has been far too overplanned. It suffered this in the 60s and, despite cries to the contrary, the Big City Plan was to be a corrective measure using exactly the same tactics. Big plan, big vision, big big big. And yet I have an inkling this sort of approach is doomed, or at least flawed. I keep thinking of desire paths – the gradually eroded paths that indicate where people want to walk as opposed to where the planners expect them to walk.

Just for fun, here’s my desire path from Fazeley St to Moor St Station involving a patch of wasteland and a car park. If you ever need to make that journey consider this my gift to you:

I’m also reminded of Peter Ackroyd talking about how London is inherently unplannable. My memory is hazy and probably inaccurate but here’s something I found from 2006 outlining his fatalistic approach to cities:

“Power and money are what have made it both ugly and voraciously successful,” insists Ackroyd. “It’s a largely unplanned city, with buildings that come and go. Little or nothing stays still in London. The drive for money makes it a restless creature, forever biting off its own limbs and watching them grow back in new, bigger and shinier forms.”

As, for example, in the case of the cluster of new skyscrapers planned for the City of London. Ackroyd will not be drawn on the merits of their designs; he simply underlines the point that London has an organic character. It has always changed and always will. “If it stops changing, it will die. It’s a monster, yet I accept it all. No part of London is alien to me. I love walking it at random every day, after writing, and watching the changes take place before my eyes. But, as to whether change, architectural or otherwise, makes it a better or worse place than it was – how can any of us really know?”

London is a clusterfuck of a city, and yet it’s quite successful at what it does, be it finance, culture or whathaveyou. Partly this is due to its elephantine size but I suspect it’s got a lot to do with it’s flexibility.

One of the exciting things about Birmingham for me is the relative freedom it offers you to just get on and do stuff. There’s very little power here and the leaders tend to follow rather than lead. While Birmingham has a lot of pride it doesn’t manifest itself in the aggressive, defensive posturing of Manchester. Rather it’s a welcoming, appreciative pride. When I do stuff in Birmingham people don’t ask me why or question whether it fits into the Birmingham way – they just take it, or leave it. Sometimes they say thanks. Sometimes they say “it’s about time someone did this” so I tell them it wasn’t that hard really.

(Sidebar – I remember Noel Dunne talking about moving here decades ago. He memorably said it takes three generations before Manchester will accept you as a Manc but you’ll be a Brummie in three months. True that.)

The thing is, I see the obsession with city planning as a threat to this. I suspect the reason Brummies have, in recent history, been a little reticent to get on and do stuff is the top-down infrastructure of the city hasn’t encouraged it. From the physical stranglehold of the road network to the intellectual void of the council chamber the Brummies have been held back by a sense that it’s not worth the effort. And with the Big City Plan we were faced with another monolithic attempt to get the city “right”, an endeavour that is surely missing the point. Cities aren’t got right. They evolve based on the needs, wants and desires of the people who make them. The thing is, no-one knows what those needs, wants and desires are until they have something to bounce off. You certainly can’t plan for them with high-falutin concepts.

I’m being a bit knee-jerk in my ranting here. I know that some planning is essential and I know I don’t have the language to explain exactly what I mean (hence the knee-jerk) but I think that planning needs to be adaptive. Have a look at what we’ve got, see what people are doing around it and encourage that. Don’t demolish a much loved cafe because it doesn’t fit the big plan – build the plan around the cafe. Rather than give a hugh trance of land to a university or shopping centre or Bennie Grey (god love him) divvy it up into small plots and create a bit of competition between the landlords. A hive of Bennie’s.

Cities are chaotic and vibrant and alive. They cannot and should not be controlled. Certainly they should be safe, well lit and well connected but you can’t plan for what they’ll be used for. What you can do is drop in some nice big coral reefs and see what sort of fishes start gathering around them. Then you feed the fishes.

I think our new station, a structure that has a use and a purpose, could be that reef. It’d certainly be more of a stimulus than Millennium Point, a structure as effective as a breezeblock in an aquarium.

And on that note, I’ll stop.

It’s a measure of how far things have come that I can go to a warehouse to watch a Japanese man make loud yet beautiful noises with a striplight and it be a fairly normal night out for me. That’s not to say it wasn’t really good and mind-bending, just that it wasn’t that strange really.

The man was Atsuhiro Ito and it was good.

Anyway, I’m writing it up for BrumLive so for now here’s my photos, taken at a long exposure setting with a tripod:

(I would advise hitting the fullscreen button on the slideshow for these.)

If you can find it yourself, let me know and you’ll, um, not win anything.

The one thing that keeps jumping out at me is these cuts are a defensive move by Thompson against a potential Conservative government, one which has the support of most of the popular press, specifically Murdoch’s News International and Sky. And the thing that keeps bugging me is roughly this:

In the 2000s the BBC invested time, money and brains into figuring out this digital / internet thing. I remember after the dot.com bubble burst loads of brainy internet people found refuge at the BBC (before being poached by Yahoo et al when the bubble recovered). The BBC, for all it’s very many faults, was looking ahead and wondering what to do about the radical changes the future would bring.

The rest of the media industry… well, safe to say they weren’t, on the whole. Here’s a great quote from a Press Gazette column from a old-school newspapers editor talking to his young protege (via Jo):

“You know, Grey,” my ex-boss says, “I remember meetings back in the early nineties when we didn’t know what to do with all the money we were making. We had to find cunning ways of hiding it from the shareholders. We were hitting margins of over 30 per cent and were turning advertising away despite constant rate increases.

“The daft thing is, we all knew that it was going to end. We knew that the internet would eventually take away our ad revenue; that classified would go first, followed by property and sits vac. And yet we did nothing about it. We didn’t plan for the future or invest in innovative content and means of delivery. We just carried on snuffling up the profits like pigs around a trough.”

He paused and put his hand on my knee.

“Grey, I’m truly sorry.”

What’s shocking and radical about this quote is the humility. You’d never see anyone from News International talking like this.

And that pisses me off. They fucked up. They should pay for that. Meanwhile the BBC spent a decade or more figuring it out and, surprise, they’ve kinda successful at this digital / internet game.

The BBC haters (and if history is anything to go by they’ll be in the comments with their idiotic bile) bang on about the license fee being wasted on things that aren’t television but rather than have such a binary, consumer based view, why can’t we see this as a rare example of long term investment in the future of media? The commercial broadcasters are benefitting hugely from the BBC’s lead because the hard work has been done. They just need to copy it. Are we going to throw away the machine that did all that work? Is that really a sound investment? Or is that just pandering to fucking Murdoch.

Oh, poor old Murdoch. He doesn’t have the millions he used to. What a shame. Have a tear.

It’s all going rather well. So well I haven’t had a chance to blog about it (oh the fucking irony!). I will do soon though as it’s all very interesting.

Blogger: It’d be really useful if we would embed your content.

News person: Ah, we can’t make that sharable due to rights reasons and stuff.

Me: It’s okay, you’ll just have to use piracy.

Maybe you had to be there, and be me, but I thought it amusing.

“People don’t know where they are anymore,” he said, adding: “In the post-industrial age, this is the only form of real exploration left. Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?”

I was also reminded of one of Bill Drummond’s psychogeographic exercises where he wrote “BILL” across his A-Z of London and then followed the lines, walking his name. Again, this isn’t so he can say “I walked my name” but to force a restriction upon himself, to say “I will experience the city through rigid yet random parameters”. And then to record that experience and see what it reveals about the place. (I can’t find the original piece online but I suspect it’s somewhere in his book 45.)

This is, of course, what Jon Bounds’ Eleven Bus project is all about, encouraging people to go all the way around Birmingham’s Outer Circle bus route and experience the city in a new way. The project takes place every November 11th from 11am (see what he did there?) but the framework of the Outer Circle is, I feel, too great to be restricted to this one idea.

When I did the 11-11-11-11 thing last year I didn’t take the bus. I cycled and it gave me a much better sense of how the city changes, or indeed doesn’t change, as you move around it. But I was struck by how do-able cycling 26 miles was when you stopped every quarter mile to photograph a bus stop. Sure, I was exhausted the next day, mainly because I’m super-unfit at the moment, but it wasn’t an endurance thing at the time.

So with all that in my mind pot I’ve come up with a project I may well have a go at this Spring: Cross City Walks.

The idea is you pick a spot on the Outer Circle bus route, preferably at random, and draw a line that crosses the City Centre and stops on the opposite side of the Outer Circle. Here’s two I drew earlier.

You then walk this line. Hmm, maybe the project should be called Walk The Line. Or maybe not.

As soon as you start walking an immediate problem will occur. The Line will not correspond with the roads, especially in the suburbs with the cul-de-sacs and canals and such. For example, here’s how you’d walk a section of the line in Handsworth:

The Line only covers 3/4 mile but the route is double that. Especially when you include the two rules I just made up – that every intersection of The Line with a road must be passed and you cannon double back unless the road is a dead end.

There may well be more rules. And if you do this you’re welcome to make up your own.

The diametre of the Outer Circle is about six – seven miles, depending on where you start. Using the above as a terribly unscientific formula I reckon a cross city walk would be between 15-20 miles. Which is perfectly do-able in one day even when you’re stopping to take photos and record your thoughts.

I hereby submit this project to the hive-mind.

– — – –

A little later and I’ve decided on my first route. Using a random number generator and my Outer Circle TTV photos I landed on the Acock’s Green Bus Garage, the spiritual and actual home of the Number 11 bus and thus the perfect place to start a project.

I drew a line from there, through St Paul’s Phillips’s Cathedral in the city centre and out to Soho Road in Handsworth. And then I mapped out a road route to see how far it actually is. Turns out that thanks to a freak straight line through Digbeth and the Jewellery Quarter it’s only 10.5 miles, less if I can cut through the parks and industrial estates. Pretty reasonable for a first go.

The Google map isn’t saving properly so here’s a screen grab:

Now, I just need a date.

Anyway, here’s a video Nikki shot, and a do go read her thoughts on this performance.

The question is, can she, or we, or someone do this on a stage to an audience of people?

This very blog remains my hub and while I might not update it as much as I used to it’s where I’ll post anything pertaining directly to me. I’m pretty terrible with blogging links these days but do throw stuff onto Twitter, about which more later.

My Tumblr has been my Internet scrap book for a good three years now and I continue to fill it regularly with daft nonsense, beautiful gems and everything in between.

The TTV blog gets most of my attention at the moment. I’m trying to post at least once a day there and I’m trying to make it about more than the mechanics of TTV photos. If you miss old-school Peteblogging this is the closest you’re going to get to that.

Flickr has seen a bit of a resurgence with the TTV stuff kicking off as I’m trying to post there every day too. I’d like to get more involved with the groups on Flickr but haven’t really managed that yet.

ASH-10 has calmed down a bit since I moved my focus away from the social media quagmire but I still post there occasionally. Despite my misgivings about the “industry” that’s emerged I still have a serious interest in Internet culture and the phenomena of increased access to publishing and distribution and I still earn a living from this. I also use this blog to post about events I’m doing. (The peripheral stuff needs a bit of a refocus though.)

Twitter continues to have an iron grip on my online social activity despite my misgivings about centralised services and it’s woeful inability to allow me access to the stuff I’ve poured into it over the years. I tweet a lot but I’ve been told it’s not quite as irritating as it could be. Maybe I’ve got this Performance Conversation thing down pat after all this time. Who knows. I currently have about 7 Twitter accounts, which is rather excessive, but you can follow them all with the Pete Collective list. This has the added bonus of ignoring any conversational tweets I’ve sent to other people so all you get are my status updates and links to cool stuff I’ve found.

In fact, given that all my activity online will be flagged by at least one of those account if you just want to check in on me once a day you could simply bookmark that list. It’s like a Pete Digest with extra goodies. And yes, Mum, I’m thinking of you here.

And that’s about it. Things will change (who knows, I might actually start using Facebook again) but I will always be blogging at this address no matter how far or wide my activities spread. Just as I have done since June 2000.

Yup, 10 years of blogging this summer. I should mark that really. Any ideas for how would be appreciated.

Since she’s very unlikely to actually use it I thought I’d archive the fruits of my labour here.

8bit Pete has been around for a few months now but tonight he actually got paid a token £10 for playing 8bit music and related nonsense for 90 minutes in the Hare and Hounds to actual people who didn’t all leave the room, and he did it all with his own equipment and no assistance, so he figured it was time to sort of formalise the thing into a formal form thing.

You can expect 8bit Pete websites and stickers and the like to emerge but for now here’s a quick mix based on tracks he played at 8bit Lounge last night.

8bit Pete 001

8bit Pete is available for all manner of events that require the playing of blippy bloppy music for an pretty reasonable fee.

It’s one of those pop-up shops which take an empty unit for free for a short amount of time and fill it with cool stuff. The shopping centre fills a gap with something quirky and bespoke while the artists get the sort of traffic they can only dream of.

Of course whether that traffic turns into sales is another matter. Sometime a small curated audience is better than a massive random one – quality, not quantity and all that – but it’s still an interesting and challenging opportunity.

Since my involvement Created in Birmingham currently amounts to being introduced by Chris as the guy who started it off and having occasional chats with him about what he’s doing I can take zero credit for setting this up, but I am going to be involved.

Y’see, as long-time readers will know, from 1990 to 2003 I worked pretty consistently in retail, mostly for Waterstone’s where I found myself stumbling towards management before circumstances (see this blog, summer 2002 – spring 2003) caused me to leave the wacky world of the high street. So while I might be rusty I do know a little bit about how to run a shop.

I’m also currently without an office and while home-working has been pretty good over the Winter I will be getting itchy feet soon, so the shop can double up as somewhere to work on my photography and other things. And it’ll be a regular gig, getting in to open up and so on, which is probably what I need at the moment.

We popped in for a look today. Here’s the shop floor which is about a third as deep behind the camera:

(The white balance was really weird thanks to the mix of light sources so excuse the tone. (What I am saying, it’s a cameraphone snap. You can deal.))

And here’s Chris, Ian and the Bullring lady at the rear of the shop:

(Ah, that’s better.)

Oh, and excitingly (well, for me anyway) there’s a big storage bit upstairs with loads of shelves!

No idea what we might do with this other than store stuff in it but, ooh, I do like it.

The lease is for at least 6 weeks and it could go on for much longer. I’d probably best not go into too many details at this stage as that’s what Chris does and I’ll probably get them wrong. But it looks very likely I’ll be working in a shop in the Bullring this spring.

If you’d told me that a few months ago I’d have laughed you out of town.

This one sort of came from nowhere with some help from Rob and, naturally, Jon.

• It’s a game played on busses in a city about the size of Birmingham.
• The aim of the game is to score exactly 501 points.
• Points are gained by riding on busses and adding their service numbers to your score.
• For example, a ride on the 63 followed by a ride on the 8, then a ride on the 101 will give you 172.
• You on leaving a bus your next bus must be of a different number. (This is to close the “ten 50s and a 1″ loophole found by Jon.)
• You can only travel by a recognised bus service (no other vehicles allowed).
• When switching buses which stop at different stops the two stops must be on a line of sight or just around the corner, where “just around” is no more than 50 yards, give or take.
• If you are waiting at a stop that serves multiple bus numbers you must get the next bus that comes alone, even if it is the wrong number, and add that to your score. This is a “miss”.
• Optional advanced rule: Bus services with letters after their numbers count as negatives. This means your game is not over should you score above 501 and can switch to a negative bus.

This game has not been tested and further rules may be needed. I hereby submit it to BARG.

You’re welcome to play this game to your hearts content and to adapt it in any way that suits you. If you somehow manage to convince someone to pay you to do it you’re free to bung me a cheque. Just saying, like.

This got me thinking of other literal souvenirs one could sell for areas of Birmingham. Saltly salt shakers came to mind and a few others emerged from the table but it was announcing the game on Twitter that brought it all flooding out.

Since this was the first #hashtag game I’ve ever started and since Twitter’s inability to manage their archive means they’ll be effectively lost in a few days, I’m going to list the best here.

Other than the Saltley shaker I suggested:

• A miniature diorama of healthland for Small Heath
• a wooden statuette of a bear for Bearwood
• a model of a very long bridge for Longbridge
• A small castle on wheels for children to pull around for Weoley Castle

Eightball suggested:

• Bearwood saws
• Sparkhill Decorative Matchbox

Craigfots suggested:

• King Sheath condoms
• Lickey End lollipops
• An inflatible Mike Whitby (to which I said “No, a SELF-inflating Mike Whitby”)
• A 3-D jigsaw of Spaghetti Junction (Beach sold seperately)
• Chocolate Gold from the Jewellry Qtr

leolodreamland suggested

• Soggy fireworks from Sparkbrook

helgahenry suggested:

• Little model wino on a bench with real urine and feet smell for Moseley

Katchooo suggested:

• Tyseley ties in grey and brown
• Frankley my dear I don’t give a Damn mugs
• Niche shells
• Winson Green Mile rosary beads

siwhitehouse suggested:

• Cofton Hackett lozenges
• a Saltley Gate
• Hollywood bowls
• Muntz-ter Munch crisps
• Castle Veils
• Warstock cubes

jontutcher suggested:

• A high gate

jonhickman suggested:

• 0.91m long rulers from Yardley
• Four Oaks! Collect them all

KarlHeld suggested:

• a model phalanx of blackshirts for Moseley

tk4721 suggested:

• birmingham new street station match-stick model

simonjgray suggested:

• a home birthing pool made in harborne
• a jewel-encrusted glove made in handsworth

Dubber suggested:

• Hall Green paint (to which jonhickman replied “a much paler version of Hall Green paint for Mere Green”)

Frantic 101 suggested:

• a heavily mouldy cheese, fashioned into a candle = Cheswick Green

JohnColby suggested:

• Small bag of shingle to form into a pile – Gravelly Hill

tobyklatter suggested:

• Giant condoms from King Sheath
• Miracle cure powder from Sandwell

Silas Marner suggested:

• A plateful of Muffins – Muffins Den

Jenny_Drew suggested:

• Roughley sandpaper
• Hockley ham
• Liquorice Allsorts tie-in for Bassetts Pole

daveharte suggested:

• a range of hats and scarves from Walmley

pigsonthewing suggested:

• A strap-on dildo for Ladywood

nebolland

• miniature figure of the actor who played the joker in the dark knight – Small Heath
• figure of actor who played the joker in the dark knight cleaning his genitals – Washwood Heath

tomlennon1 suggested:

• Autographed photos of Dudley Moore & Charlton Heston (for Duddeston)

And of course, the souvenir everyone was thinking about but none dared utter. Except me. The Acocks Green penis pistol cigarette lighter in green:

There were more but they either missed the point or weren’t funny (yes, less funny than the above) or I just didn’t get them. You can see them all in this Twitter search. Or you can for the next day or so until Twitter’s search facility looses them along with all the other history of people’s lives that’s lost in there. And you know what happens to those who forget history. They’re doomed. Doomed I tell you.

Sure, his focus is out but check the composition. It’s perfect.

I am in awe.

Here’s Fiona admiring him.

And people say I don’t have any Christmas spirit. Pah.

The thing is, the quality of light that Danny was referring to wasn’t actually that good for photography, or at least it wasn’t that interesting. As you can see above, once you adjusted the tungsten tinge out of the photo the night reveals itself to be a bit dull really.

Or you can leave the colour in, except that’s not really right as the above photo didn’t come out of the camera like that. I adjusted it until it looked like I remembered it looking.

What I think Danny was referring to was how weird the park looked with the lights of the city bouncing off the low cloud cover and then bouncing back up off the snow on the ground, creating this soft light seemingly coming from all directions. To a certain extent this is interesting in that there are hardly any shadows in these photos.

But then there wouldn’t be any shadows normally in the park so a long exposure of these scenes would pretty much look the same, only without the snow adding contrast to the trees.

The difference is that this shadowless environment is visible to the eye and that, if your paying attention with your soul, is something rather special.

Doesn’t necessarily make for interesting long exposure night photos though. Take, for example, my 4am photos taken in Moseley last year.

What made these work, and made them unique, was the direction of the light. The sky is dark but the buildings are lit as if it is day. That’s kinda odd and the sort of effect you can only get with a tripod in the middle of the night. But tonight’s snow photos just look like they were taken on an overcast day.

What you need for a good night time photo, I feel, is a light source. it can be street lamps, it can be a building’s windows, but it has to be there in order to make things interesting. Otherwise you’ve just got daytime only less so.

Still, the snow is awesome under foot. And that’s all that matters.

Met up with Nick and Michael in the Fighting Cocks today. I seem to only ever drink tea in there. Lots of tea.

The nasty head fug has mostly cleared now so I’ve been able to finish off the new Through the Viewfinder site I’ve been working on. It looks like this:

Currently it’s got a blog and a collection of Projects pages (on the sidebar). Soon it’ll have a shop where you can buy prints from me. That’ll launch once I’ve got some prints to sell.

The main thing is all my TTV-related blogging is moving over to that site. I’ll probably do a weekly roundup here linking to the major posts, like today’s piece on changing to a new contraption but on the whole there’ll be hardly any TTV here. Which for some of you will be a relief I’m sure.

Given that most of my blogging these last few months has been about square photos, what on earth will I blog about now? Well, there’s the diary stuff I always threaten to do more of and I’m still keen to drag the focus of my activity away from Twitter and onto a platform I have some control over. I might even mothball this blog and start afresh with a Tumblr model – that’d be an interesting way to celebrate 10 years of blogging. But whatever I do the purpose will be clear – to figure out what my next Big Thing will be once I get bored of selling TTV prints in a couple of years.