We are still pressing Centro to get on with the conversion of the derelict former Valley Self-Serve petrol station site in Highfield Road, Hall Green into much-needed extra parking spaces for users of Yardley Wood Railway Station.

Planning permission for this was granted some time ago and it’s important that this work goes ahead in view of the pressure on nearby roads. Centro tell me that they have developed initial designs to extend the Yardley Wood railway station park and ride capacity by 70 spaces, but from what I can deduce from the most recent correspondence with Centro, there is still quite some way to go. We understand that there will be local consultation on Centro’s preliminary design proposals later in the Autumn with detailed design being completed in the Spring. After that, there will still be some time to wait before construction finally gets underway!

We will certainly welcome the extra parking in an area that suffers badly from under-provision, with consequences for both residents and businesses. When the expansion of parking capacity is eventually completed, it should not only encourage more rail travel, but should also make a big difference to the number of all-day parked vehicles that have caused difficulties for residents in Highfield Road, Cole Valley Road and Paradise Lane.

In pressing Centro to deliver this project ever since the garage site became vacant, I have also asked for a number of the additional parking spaces to be reserved for customers of local businesses (this is also an important consideration for local residents and something which certainly should be brought up in the consultation that is due to be arranged). There is proving to be a much longer wait for this locally important scheme than was originally expected and it’s to be hoped that we won’t be faced with any further slippage in the timescale.

With the Credit Crunch now bearing down on families throughout Hall Green, and sky high prices for essentials such as fuel and food, money can be very tight. If your family are beginning to struggle, one option could be to contact our local Credit Union.

Credit Unions are financial co-operatives that are owned and controlled by their members. They are both local and ethical. Each Credit Union has a ‘common bond’ which determines who can become a member. This could be people living or working in the same area, belonging to the same association or working for the same employer etc. To find out more about Credit Unions in general, click on the ABCUL link in the left hand sidebar.

Joining a Credit Union could help you to build back a nest-egg and borrow from the savings of fellow members when you need to, at only the cost of administration instead of exploitative commercial charges. Once you’ve repaid your loan, your savings will still be there, ready for any rainy days in the future. An additional benefit is that the money stays in the local community.

The credit union covering Hall Green is the South East Birmingham CU which has over a thousand members. For further details of the SE Birmingham Community Credit Union and how to become a member of it, simply contact Josephine Smith on 0121-777-2578.

Concerns have been raised about the future of Yardley Wood Library, which, while located just over the border in Billesley Ward, is used and relied upon by many residents of Hall Green Ward.

We understand that the backlog of repairs now stands at around £900,000. Yardley Wood Library is very important to people over the wide area that it serves. If over two hundred times the amount of money needed can be found for a library in the city centre, less than a million surely can’t be too much to ask to invest round here. We are losing post offices hand over fist and we don’t want to start losing our local libraries as well. There is already a dearth of community assets in and around Hall Green - local communities depend on these local resources.

A Friends of Yardley Wood Library group has been formed and will lead the campaign as well as supporting the library and the services that it provides. Reassurances have been offered about the future of the library - and these are welcome. But people recall with sadness and distress the loss of Highfield House which, it was claimed, had been allowed to fall ‘beyond economical repair’. Ten years ago there were concerns about Hall Green Library.

Councillor Jackie Hawthorn and Liberal Democrats worked very hard with residents to secure the library for the future. This was successful, and Hall Green Library is now more popular than ever. So we in Hall Green will support the efforts being made to ensure the future of Yardley Wood Library in every way that we can.

We deeply regret the forthcoming enforced closure of the Robin Hood Post Office. The petitions, letters and on-line campaigning fell on deaf ears. Post Office Ltd. were unmoved and so the Government directed closure problem will have a further impact on residents of Hall Green following the closure of the Highfield Road branch in an earlier cull.

The valuable branch in Shaftmoor Lane is also to be closed. In fact all bar a token one of the intended 51 closures in Birmingham, Coventry and Warwickshire will now be imposed, adding to the 4,000 post offices already closed under Labour following the 3,500 closures under the Conservatives. We should hold this whole closure policy and the so-called ‘consultation’ process in contempt. This would reflect the evident contempt in which the Government must hold its citizens when they act in such flagrant breach of our wishes.

There will be enormous adverse impacts on all people who depend on the services that the Robin Hood Post Office provides. For example, it is going to be very difficult for residents in areas such as Pitmaston to get down to the Baldwins Lane branch - people could have a wait of up to an hour if one of the 41 buses doesn’t arrive.

The needs of people in our area seem to be of precious little concern to this wretched government. High time for a major branch closure in Westminster we feel.

Highlights of the Shire Productions dramatisation of Beowulf are now available for viewing on YouTube in two parts. The Anglo-Saxon poem was adapted and produced by Viv Wilkes, who leads Hall Green based Shire Productions. Filming and production of the video was by Roger Cunningham. The outdoor performances were given at the Middle Earth weekend.

If other drama groups are interested in the script for this unique adaptation, contact Viv through the Shire Productions website. So if you’ve twelve minutes to spare, I hope you’ll enjoy our efforts! To view the video, go to the YouTube site and in the YouTube search box on the site key in: testmatch beowulf

Following on from the visits mentioned in an earlier post, the Hall Green Preservation Group was addressed by Mr Andy Foster, a highly regarded architectural historian and author (for example of the Pevsner architectural guide to Birmingham). A very wide ranging talk included coverage of the use of tithe and manorial maps (the ancient local organisation of England was in terms of parishes and manors - the smallest kind of medieval landholding) and sources of documents and records that could be useful in making detailed cases for our heritage to be preserved against the predations of developers and the passivity of planners.

We are fortunate that there are extensive records held both at Hall Green Library and in Birmingham Central Library. There are many interesting old pictures too. Our forebears didn’t need campaigns to try to save their local Post Office!

Valuable sources of information include building plans and applications, old periodicals (such as Homes and Gardens), long running trade journals (such as The Builder), newspapers, electoral rolls, directories, rate books (going back to around 1800 in Birmingham) and more besides. Before the main phases of suburban development in Hall Green, most of our area formed part of Yardley Parish in Worcestershire so that some records held in Worcester would be relevant to us.

We also learned that Hall Green once formed part of Solihull Rural District and that there are Hall Greens elsewhere (for example there’s one in Wolverhampton). We very much look forward to working with Andy again in the near future. Based on its existing research and professional advice, the Preservation Group is now making cases for listing of local buildings and other structures (such as the bridges in the Dingles).

HGPG member David Hardy has made an absorbing DVD of archive pictures of Hall Green’s remaining landmark places and buildings and photos of them as they are today that he took from as close as possible to the original camera position.

To obtain a copy for a contribution to production costs, call David on 0121-777-1802.

We reported in an earlier post on progress with the Withywindle Performance Arena - a local project that has aroused a great deal of interest. We noted that it was the intention to grow Camomile plants on the backs of the tiered seats in the arena, which is located at the rear of Sarehole Mill along the Peninsula. We can report that Shire Productions Chair, Vivienne Wilkes has been working hard and so far has got well over a thousand seedlings set out in tiny individual pots. A labour of love if ever there was one!

Camomile is a scented plant with flowers like small daisies. It can also be used to make herbal tea. Any of the camomile plants that are not needed for the performance arena will be donated to the Country Park for planting elsewhere. The wet weather we’ve been experiencing at least has the benefit that the grass, seeded a few weeks ago, is growing well on the seats and the Arena should be ready next year for outdoor performances.

Be Prepared

A very good motto! On a day of very mixed weather, the Hall Green Preservation Group recently made its first set of site visits, journeying to locations in Hamlet Road, Wake Green Road, Highfield Road and Baldwins Lane to view characterful and historic buildings in our area that we see as well worth protecting.

The first stage of the protection is to achieve the status of local listing as a step towards the goal of full statutory listing and the substantial legal protection that this provides. As we saw with the dire fate of Highfield House, a combination of self-seeking developers, a planning context in which the law can result in costly appeals, and officials under pressure to hit Government targets for planning approvals, forms a toxic mix that can result in a local listing being over-ridden.

A gross failure of the Council to stand up for local residents, the Highfield House disaster was made all the worse by the fact that some of the key players were local people. For instance the demolisher / developer lives just a few hundred yards from the razed building. We understand that this same developer is now attempting to buy up parts of the gardens of houses adjacent to the Highfield House site to increase the scale of the scheme.

We do not want anything like this dire scenario to happen to Hall Green again - not in our lifetimes. So as part of our fight back, and against the odds of weak and biased planning law, the preservation group are actively compiling evidence and putting together strong cases to preserve for the future, as far as we possibly can, the essential character of both our built and natural environments. As events have made clear, if the local community doesn’t do this, no one will.

Thanks for visiting this website! I hope that you find it interesting and that you get something of value out of it. For further, somewhat different items, you could try a visit to my personal blog. You can use the link on the sidebar to go direct. I’ve just set this up and intend this to be a complement to this website. As well as highly topical local news from our part of the world, personal opinions and responses to events, the blog will cover an extended range of items that are of particular interest to me - and hopefully one or two other people too! Maybe meet you there!

We were contacted earlier in the year by residents concerned at the scarcity of young water birds around Trittiford Pool and at the disappearance of the few chicks that hatched. We were also concerned because, as reported in Focus, we had heard of birds and fish being poached and of other birds being shot by hooligans. The mystery of the missing water birds may now have been solved, with the sighting of two mink on the centre island in Trittiford Pool.

Mink are members of the weasel family. They are semi-aquatic carnivores, mainly active at night and all year round. They are 18-24 inches long (including the 5-7 inch bushy tail) and have soft, dense brown fur, usually with a white patch on the chest or chin and scattered white patches on the belly. They weigh between one and a half and three pounds. The mink escaped from fur farms in the 1950s and have spread widely, displacing otters from many areas. They have no natural predators. Incidentally, the image above is from ‘Tales of Moseley Bog - the Voles of Old’ by Vivienne Wilkes (see sidebar).

Mink need a suitable water area, which can be a stream, river, pond, marsh, swamp or lake. Water with a good population of fish, frogs and aquatic invertebrates and with bushy or uncut grassy shoreline is ideal. Hence Trittiford Pool.

Mink will eat mice, rats, frogs, fish, rabbits, crayfish, insects, birds and eggs. They kill poultry by biting through the neck or skull (closely spaced pairs of canine tooth marks indicate a mink attack). When food is in abundance (as in a chicken coop) they will, like hooligans, kill for the sake of it. They attack animals up to the size of a chicken, duck or rabbit and will eat nesting waterfowl.

Mink have one litter of 3-6 a year, in late April or early May. Dens can be in a bank burrow, under a log or pile of logs or in a rock crevice. The young disperse in late summer. Mink don’t hibernate but in very low temperatures or heavy snow, they may stay in their den for a day or more. Mink do not gnaw like rodents but are able to use burrows or openings made by rats. There are no ‘frightening devices’ or repellents effective against mink. If you have mink nearby, and especially if you keep chickens or rabbits, the only protection is to block holes in perimeter fences larger than an inch with wood, tin, chicken wire or mesh.

Friends who enjoy night fishing tell us that they see mink frequently, on riverbanks across the Midlands. It is a pity that they have now taken up residence in Trittiford Park but somehow preferable to the thought of two-legged predators killing the local wildlife.

[My thanks to Hall Green colleague Councillor Jackie Hawthorn for researching this article].

Members of Hall Green based Shire Productions, The Shire Country Park Rangers, NVQ students and a local school have contributed towards the landscaping and Viv Wilkes, Chairman of Shire Productions and a keen gardener, now has 3,000 tiny Camomile seedlings to plant for September! It is hoped the Arena will be ready next year for outdoor performances, concerts, lectures, picnics or whatever might catch the imagination.

Withy is an Old English word for willow and windle is a word that comes from winding about. Hence the name which seems to work on several levels. The name Withywindle is used by JRR Tolkien in his poem about his character Tom Bombadil: ‘He lived up under the hill, where the Withywindle ran from a grassy well down into the dingle.’

Those who know Sarehole will also know of the nearby Dingles through which runs the willow-lined River Cole. Our Dingle is upriver though but that is a minor detail! For those who might want to know, the word ‘dingle’ means a wooded valley. It is interesting to think of Tolkien and his brother Hilary exploring this area along the River Cole as children when they lived in Sarehole.

[From the Shire Productions Website - see the link on the left-hand sidebar].

The recent, outrageous price hikes from ‘British’ Gas will have a severe impact on a wide range of people, particularly, but by no means only, the millions who are already in desperate fuel poverty. Average bills are well into four-figure territory and are likely to be pushed much higher still. In my view, the fuel companies benefit from a so-called ‘market’ where the main competition is about getting away with new charges and inflated prices, making more profits, taking bigger bonuses and treating people as monetary cannon fodder.

They point to rising prices in the wholesale ‘market’ for gas. But they keep secret the prices they actually pay for supplies. They choose the timing and extent of price changes to suit themselves. Like other notorious sections of business today, they operate in effect, quite legally, as an informal cartel. They set their prices and margins in the same way and take it in turns to hike prices according to what they think they can get away with. Whether it’s gas or petrol, one thing is certain, unless there is action they will be getting a way with a lot more of your money and mine and their profits will not suffer one bit as a result.

Still, at least we needn’t lose sleep at night worrying about their executives’ remuneration; they at least will be comfortable in success or failure. Even if pensioners can’t afford to keep a room warm, the board will still have money to burn!

In my opinion there should certainly be windfall taxes on fuel, power (and other) profiteering - the only question should be about the extent. It is clearly wrong that companies should make fat and inflated profits while people struggle to make ends meet, faced with rapidly rising costs for other essentials such as food or even hanging on to their own homes.

Electricity generation is now dominated by six firms that can in turn dominate you and me. Industry ‘regulation’ in all quarters has been weak under successive governments and will remain so. The exhortation to ‘shop around’ is worth little over time. It has been found out that a third of switchers make themselves worse off. And do they think that elderly and now vulnerable people who have built the country up should be spending their retirement ‘switching’ between fuel companies (and banks) to reduce the extent to which they are exposed to highway robbery?

In my view also it is no defence for these organisations to retort that they are operating globally. Who has paid to make their fat global profits possible in the first place? We have! We’ve already paid ‘global’ companies with the British jobs they have exported and the higher prices they extract from us for the same products sold in other countries. This has fattened their profits and we’re entitled to a return on that too! Furthermore, companies have profited from their very own windfalls from the emissions trading scheme - the vast majority of permits to produce carbon dioxide being given away - and energy companies can decide to sell rather than use these free permits.

Since privatisation, foreign owned firms with even less concern for people here, sell North Sea gas to themselves during the summer for storing in Europe and reselling here at higher prices in the winter. Those companies who use (by whose consent?) the label ‘British’ should be made to act as if they were. Big business in general should not be a morality-free zone. They should think of those who have to eke out a small pension. They talk about their tough choices. How would they like to try the really tough choice between food and warmth?

Those who take big from society should also give back in comparable measure. Long gone are the days when those in near monopoly positions could be relied on to do this to some extent on their own account - or to be socially responsible in the first place. So they need now to be taught how to be generous. That would certainly be one way to create a warm glow all round!

Hall Green residents will no doubt have heard this exhortation from us in other contexts! But here we’re talking about the deadline for representations to be made against the threatened Post Office closures in Birmingham, Coventry and Warwickshire.

Most importantly we are urging that a reprieve be granted for Hall Green’s essential and very popular post office at the Robin Hood Island.

I have now confirmed that the absolute deadline for representations against closures to be received is 5 p.m. on Monday the 4th of August. As long as your emails are sent in by then, they should be included as part of the consultation.

Following repeated requests for information, I have also now been advised that the decisions on the Post Offices to be closed will be announced in the week beginning August 25th (which is Bank Holiday Monday by the way!) - most probably on Wednesday the 27th.

It’s very easy to help with the campaign. Just send in an email supporting the Robin Hood Post Office to: consultation@postoffice.co.uk

Yours could be the one that makes that vital difference. We need all our post offices - don’t let them get away with it!