Citizensheep. "Michael Grimes lives in Birmingham (UK). This is his blog about anything that he fancies."

The Custard Factory in Birmingham has become a bit of a joke. It’s looking run-down, and suggests no-one really cares anymore about promoting it as a vibrant space, and no-one really goes there (except for loud music at weekends).
Simon Gray just tweeted a small but important change that would vastly improve accessibility for visitors:
“My advice [...]

Some time ago it occured to me that the stalls in Birmingham’s outdoor market resembled table-tennis tables, and what a waste it was that they were unused a lot of the time. I made the mistake of thinking this out loud in front of Nikki Pugh, who has a habit of making things come true: [...]

Last week I went to hear Lord Carter discuss his Digital Britain Final Report in Birmingham. I took a laptop and tweeted a little.
As a crude record of what I wrote, what follows is my Twitter stream for that event. All I’ve done is take the html from Twitter Search and pasted it here without [...]

I’ve been meaning to go for ages, and on Saturday I finally went to Birmingham’s Pen Museum. Nikki Pugh steered me there: I’m not sure I’d have found it otherwise. It’s one of those incredible places that sit politely out of the limelight but are full of cool stuff: in this case, nibs, nibs, nibs, [...]

A few weeks ago Nikki Pugh and I were walking through the empty market stalls in Birmingham, and were struck by how much they resembled table-tennis tables. What a waste, we thought. Yesterday we put that right.
Nikki and Charlie, who facilitate the BARG events, organised a bunch of us to meet at the vegetable market yesterday [...]

Every year the Birmingham Post polls the region for the top fifty most powerful people in Birmingham. So this year I’m doing the opposite (it’s probably been done before, but who cares).
I’m looking for fifty people in Birmingham who are in the public eye but who seem to wield very little power.
I’m doing this in [...]

Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a little girl and her name was Nicky. And she had a shop.

Actually that’s not quite true: Nicky doesn’t actually have a shop. What she does have is a website, a Flickr account and a load of junk.
It was rather an unsual shop because it [...]

For a little while I’ve been aware of a blog about my postcode area of B29, but it had never dawned on me to offer to contribute. So today I offered my services, and jumped in by plotting B29 onto a Google map. And in so doing I remembered the void that used to be [...]

I have a favourite tree. It’s not so much the tree itself though, as its location: slap bang in the middle of the pavement.
It’s quite an old tree, and clearly the footpath has been built around it:
I often wonder why it’s there. The trees are otherwise in a deliberate line, equally distanced, along the road. [...]

I spent the latter half of this afternoon looking for neutral patches of concrete near Birmingham city centre, that would be suitable for a team game. Finding such a place is no mean feat, even in the wastelands of Eastside and Digbeth.
It wasn’t my idea. Nikki Pugh of BARG wants to run a ’social game’ called [...]