Archive for September, 2017

Rural Staffordshire is not declining

It’s often rather casually assumed that rural places everywhere around the world are in deep decline, and I heard the same story again on a recent podcast. It’s an easy and slipshod elite metropolitical explanation for recent populist votes — “oh, those old rural yokels, in declining places, everyone leaves, only the dumb racists are […]

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Secondhand bookshops, coming back?

Wormwoodania muses on The Rise of Secondhand Bookshops in Britain, and crunches the overall numbers with the aid of a 1984 Driff’s Guide and the current thebookguide. “So we can see that there are indeed more second-hand bookshops in the UK than there were thirty years ago, in fact about 25% more.” Interesting. Yes, given […]

New report: BBC spending in the Midlands

The Campaign for Regional Broadcasting Midlands has a new report out… “The new annual report showed the BBC spent just 1.5% of its programming budget in the Midlands in 2016, down from 1.8% the year previously.” Admittedly Birmingham will soon get BBC Three, but on investigation that’s less impressive than it sounds. According to Computer […]