Vocal Voices

I was watching the Evan Davies thingy on BBC last night "Mind the Gap" about the economic difference between London and everywhere else.
He visited West Bromwich to find out that...
The Public has closed, after having tens of millions of pounds of public money spent on it!
What do people down there think of this saga?

It was inevitable, really, that it would be closed permanently; at the end of the day, it was a white elephant with little to attract visitors, and opening hours were pretty restricted. As a community arts showcase, it was OK if you like that sort of thing, but I don't think it had a lot of general appeal. That said, it has clocked over 1m visitors, but it's not somewhere you'd want to revisit. It was way over budget in construction and the local council had to bail it out financially. They had talked about an entrance fee of £6 at one point - that would have been a total rip-off.

Mrs O and I visited it about 3 years back. The lighting was weird and the loos were disgusting. The café on the ground floor was nothing much to write home about. Some of the interactive exhibitions didn't work very well, and the day we went the top two floors were closed. There were exhibitions of photographs and a kids project, but there seemed to be a focus on teenage sexual awareness and yoof culture, from what I remember. It was interesting to have been, though.

It was becoming more popular in the latter days and various community groups used to meet in there. In future, It's going to be a 6th form college which is a bit of a as they have recently built a huge edifice of a 6th form college just down the ring-road.

I think the locals were pretty cheesed off it cost what it did when it was being constructed, and thought it a bit weird when it was first opened, but latterly came to embrace it as a local landmark.

A local council selling off / disposing of assets (at a loss) ..... well, Birmingham City Council are now having to sell off the NEC to pay for financial mismanagement and the new showcase Central Library which some might describe as a vanity project - I'll remain on the fence over that!

Looking in from a distance it seems to have suffered in the same way as a lot of these arts biased focus group "regeneration" schemes do. The general public does not appear to have much interest in "the Arts" as such, so these things do not have the mass appeal to survive unaided.

Thanks for that Os. I didn't know they were having to sell off the new Library; crikey.
I do have an interest in the fate of the Public, because our council has a similar vanity arts project in The Hepworth. They are very coy about how much it's costing to run. It's an art gallery so they can't charge an entrance fee; so as WM says I wonder how long it can survive in these austere times.

Regarding Mind the Gap, the difference between the SE and elsewhere in this country is striking! Every time we go back we notice it.........last summer we spent a weekend in Staines (Now Staines-on-Thames) and it was even more prosperous than when we left in 2009 - no boarded up shops, no scruffy people, everywhere all shiny and clean looking, you really would not think the country had any economic problems at all.............A massive contrast to how Gloucester has gone downhill in the same time frame

Most of the so-called economic recovery is in London and the surrounds..................

It was a very interesting program Kaz, I thought. The idea of having a bigger second city to London wasn't something I'd ever thought of, but he made it sound sensible. Even if it was to be Manchester!
One thing that did strike me is how much of our infrastructure was provided to us by the Victorians.

Oh yes most of it pretty much

I didn't know they were having to sell off the new Library; crikey.

Sorry, Crommers, just to clarify, it's only the NEC that's up for sale.

The Library is really part of the city's financial problem. It cost £188.8 million; compare that to the Public's £72m and your own Hepworth's £35m (per Wiki). They did actually contemplate abandoning its construction half way through when the council cuts began, and it also became evident what the council's liability would be for not paying proper wages to female staff since the inception of the equality pay legislation, but decided they'd look such a laughing stock that they had to complete it. It's very interesting and well worth a visit if you're ever in Brum, not least for the stunning views from the top deck, but the lending library part of it is only around 5% and the automated lending machines didn't work when I tried to get a Terry Pratchett out to test the system!

I quite like the Hepworth from the photos I've seen, it sort of looks like a mediaeval castle in the aftermath of a medium size Richter magnitude 7 earthquake ...... have you been?

Yes Os, I have.
To me the Hepworth looks a bit like an old cement works, but there you are. I forget the architect's name but it looks remarkably similar to other stuff he's done!
The views from the inside are good; big windows, well positioned. The cafe is OK too.
When I went they had a few Turners on show; I really liked them for the craftsmanship, for the attention to detail. Most of the other stuff was umm very contemporary. But they do change it round.
OK but not the sort of place I'd keep on going to.

cromwell wrote:OK but not the sort of place I'd keep on going to.

And that's another problem. A lot of these schemes are situated in places that are not, of themselves, tourist attractions (e.g. Wakey - do forgive me Cromwell) so once local - and fairly narrow -interest dries up they become a drain on other resources. The National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield springs to mind.

BTW the Evan Davis thing. It was discussed at length yesterday and he was pulled to pieces for his highly selective examples of Zipf's law regarding second cities.