As the Middle Earth Weekend approaches, members of Hall Green based drama company Shire Productions have been taking advantage of the (so far!) good weather to hold outdoor rehearsals for their unique production of excerpts from the Anglo-Saxon heroic poem Beowulf.

Adapted, directed and produced by Viv Wilkes, there will be three performances of Beowulf each day of the weekend taking place at various points in Moseley Bog. Groups will be escorted across from the main weekend site at Hall Green’s Sarehole Mill to see the performances.

The Middle Earth Weekend will be held on Saturday the 17^th and Sunday the 18^th of May. It will be a packed and exciting programme of events and attractions, so let’s hope the weather holds!

Alas, the demolition brigade is now setting about the razing of Hall Green’s historic Highfield House. We hope that Stone Developments are satisfied with themselves and their work on this ‘position potential product’ as they describe it in their atrocious sales-speak. This destruction is legitimised vandalism and it remains a total disgrace.

Those members of the Planning Committee that voted for the demolition and those officers that recommended it should be ashamed of themselves. A building that was of historic importance to the area has been sacrificed on the altar of profit motivated mediocrity to be replaced by another intensive development including yet more flats.

As if there weren’t enough in the area as it is, with many remaining unsold. Perhaps that will prove to be a sting in the tail. The sad scene at the corner of Highfield Road and Robin Hood Lane underlines the necessity of preserving all that we have got left.

Not yet the end of this particular Eden it would appear!

The bungalow, with the evocative name of ‘Eden End’, number 100 Smirrells Road situated at the corner with Kedleston Road, did not reach its reserve price (which we understand to have been £375,000) at the auction held last week and so has not yet fallen into the hands of developers.

Further good news for the area came on Thursday when the City Council’s Planning Committee rejected yet another application to demolish the bungalow at the end of Harewood Close and erect massive residential blocks on the site in what is still a locally important environmental green oasis.

We are at present strenuously resisting a planning proposal to erect more flats between Scribers Lane and Baldwins Lane and, of course, there remain other significant development threats. While profit driven developers will never consider heritage or environment you would have thought that they would have noticed the number of unsold flats in several parts of Hall Green. There are now many of these in both long established and new developments.

Overall, sustained vigilance by everyone in Hall Green along with concerted efforts continue to be needed to preserve our area and its many minor Edens.