Archive for October, 2015

Birmingham’s new Cultural Strategy 2015-2019

Birmingham’s new Cultural Strategy 2015-2019 is now open for public consultation. Stripped of Council-speak it might be boiled down to… * integrate culture with new developments and the city’s big infrastructure / transport projects. * integrate culture with the more mundane and everyday type of public services. * promote the Jewellery Quarter as a centre […]

New book: Archaeology of Sutton Park

Thirty-five years in the researching, a new book on the Archaeology of Sutton Park, an ancient semi-wild park a few miles to the north of Birmingham.

Reclaiming the Rowley Hills

Reclaiming and preserving the elevated grassland of the Rowley Hills, an unregarded outcrop near Tipton/Dudley, in the Black Country.

The lost genre of ‘great race’ comedy movies

I remember greatly enjoying comedy ‘great race’ movies on TV, back in the day, but I only realised the other day that the movie industry doesn’t really seem to make them any more. Here’s the handy list of those films that have been made, many of them rather good if judged simply as entertainment. The […]

World Map of Stereotypes

Amazingly detailed and complete, a new World Map of Stereotypes…

Punk ‘posium

Local robo-journalism

A classic example of how not to do robo-journalism… wrong categories, no evidence of human curation (other than the appaling header graphic), several jobs are actually out of the area and on others the deadlines have passed.

Project Apollo Archive

Over 8,000 hi-res Moon Landing photos made by the NASA astronauts have been added to Flickr, at the Project Apollo Archive albums.

Furnace Journal

Furnace Journal from the Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage (IIICH), University of Birmingham. Issue Two is out now, on “Cultural Heritage in a Digital Age”.

What is might cost to get a short graphic novel made?

A new edition of the What do Comic Creators Earn? table, this week. So it seems like £130 per page for line-art + colouring would get art from a mid-range artist. I’m assuming that the writer is the one commissioning the artist directly and can do things like… * the finished script * provide the […]

New Phyllis Nicklin exhibition in Birmingham

A new Phyllis Nicklin photography exhibition has opened in Birmingham, containing previously unseen pictures of the city in the 1950s and 60s. Demolition of terrace homes, Aston, presumably 1960s. Bromford Estate tower blocks, 1968.