Save Birmingham City Council Conservation Department

Note the actual petition link is now  just below, for ease of access.  Reasons for signing follow.

Click here now to sign the petition.  It is easy.  (By all means add a  comment, if you wish, but it is also fine to leave the comment space blank.)    Sign the Statement

Note: we are not possessive of this petition!  Please feel absolutely free to Tweet it on Twitter, Flog it on Face Book, Stick it up on The Stirrer Mail it to The Mail, post it to The Post,  Bang it on your own Blog, or just email it to your friends.  Lets get as many signatures as possible.

Why Sign?

Great concern has now been expressed by Birmingham’s conservationists  at the 23rd February 2010 Council approved Budget plan to disband Birmingham City Council Conservation Department, in order to save £350,000 a year.    Here is one recent piece in The Birmingham Post:

Fears For Birmingham\’s Historic Buildings if Conservation Group is Disbanded

The Council has a ‘Conservation Panel’ of local conservationists who work with the Conservation Department.   The Chair of this panel,  Cllr Paula Smith was, herself, so concerned at the plans to disband the Department that she went against her party in abstaining from voting for this measure.   Birmingham’s Conservation officers are highly trained and experienced not only in Conservation work, but, more specifically in Conservation work in Birmingham.  They know the history of the areas they work with, and they know many of the active voluntary conservationists among the residents; residents who are used to being able to contact the Conservation Department with their concerns and speak to ‘their’ local officers.

There have now been assurances that Birmingham’s Conservation officers will continue but they will be ‘absorbed’ into the general Planning Department.  This is unlikely to be satisfactory.  There seems a real danger that much of the time conservation officers will no longer be engaged on conservation work, at a time when we are already seriously behind on city conservation projects.  Very recently Acocks Green councillors and concerned residents were told that plans to designate an area in Acocks Green as a Conservation Area had been put back from six months to eighteen months, because of the huge backlog of work, and other projects in the pipeline.  This is not just about Acocks Green, though.  This is a city wide petition.  How much Conservation work will happen anywhere in the city after the disbanding of the Department.   How many of our fine buildings will we now lose?

Oxford Circus (Barry Phillips, Daily Mail Read the rest of the Daily Mail piece below)

We’d like to think so …

See Channel 4 New’s coverage of the redesigned Oxford Circus here

The Daily Mail’s take is also available here

Shared Space is taking hold in more and more places around the country.  Why?  It makes sense.  It looks better and it is safer. Check out the media links here.  If this works in Oxford Circus think how it could work in Acocks Green!

Draft: Examples from West Brom, Sheffield and Dublin in Connection with the Acocks Green Feasibility Study.

There has been renewed interest in suburban centre re-design in Brum  in the past few weeks.   The kinds of ideas Acocks Green Focus Group has been proposing since 2005 are starting to become a hot topic in the city.  Cllr Martin Mullaney chaired a Birmingham City Council Transportation Strategy group discussion with Ben Hamilton-Baillie .  Moseley Forum has commissioned a Hamilton-Baillie Associates designer to draw up  a Shared Space Scheme for Moseley centre. See here:  Birmingham Mail: Moseley Shared Space Plan 14. May 09

Meantime, Acocks Green had a by  invitation only exhibition of three alternative new designs for Acocks Green in March this year.   (Sorry – the ‘by invitation’ was the Council’s idea, not ours, though we managed to get a few more names added to the list!)  The three designs were by James O’Sullivan of the Birmingham Landscape Practice.  James has viewed the Kensington ideas and likes them, as does Acocks Green Councillor Roger Harmer, who came with us to Kensington (see our posting on Kensington below).  Two of the three schemes involved making the two Acocks Green islands into one, adding some more trees, and flowers, retaining some car parking space and providing a public area for events.  On special occasions one road would be closed off.  Generally speaking traffic flow would be smoothed by various measures, clutter would be removed and more trees added.  We would also get much needed extra parking space.

Everyone who saw these ideas seemed very enthusiastic and many positive remarks were recorded on the provided slips of paper.  This seems all round a community and trader friendly scheme, which will still leave it possible for traffic to get through without problems.  A 500 page traffic monitoring report has recently been submitted to Planning and Regeneration for consideration.   This will need to be combined with other local reports which council officers have been working on for some time.    A Local Area Action plan will follow, sometime in the late summer or early Autumn.  In conjunction with this, we have been advised that there will be a further exhibition of plans, to which the general public will be invited.  The date has not yet been set, but watch this space.

Meantime, below, are a quick preview of the ideas collected from the Sheffield and West Bromwhich studies:

Pictures From the Landscape Planning Files: Ideas collected for Acocks Green

Following our highly successful “Shared Space” Workshop held on September 27 2006 we took part in a meeting with Birmingham City Council Regeneration Team for the East Birmingham area. The meeting was attended by Council planners and representatives from the Transportation Department as well as by representatives from a range of Acocks Green organisations. Everyone seems in broad agreement that, although Acocks Green centre has great potential as an urban village, it has suffered from lack of investment in recent years. For one thing, the village is not as accessible as it might be. This applies equally whether the people wanting to use it are pedestrians, car drivers or cyclists – see our street furniture pics for some ideas why! This, hopefully, is about to change. A redesign may be on the way. Another meeting of Council officials and residents’ organisations is about to take place on 20 March 2006.

New Shared Space Workshop

Watch this space for more details. A new Shared Space Workshop has been arranged for Monday 21st May, 7 – 9 pm at The Inn on the Green, next to The Green, Acocks Green. All welcome, but, in particular, those who live or work in Acocks Green, or whose work concerns Acocks Green.

An Earlier Campaign

At peak times and frequently throughout the day, a substantial queue of traffic builds on Dudley Park Road, waiting to join the out-of-city queue on the Warwick Road.

Traffic on the Warwick Road approaching the Acocks Green island frequently builds to a slow-moving queue reaching back to Broad Road/Flint Green Road.

The Focus Group has noted that:

1. The bus lanes on both roads restrict cars to a single lane.

The action -Following much correspondence and an office meeting with Rachael Kingsley of Birmingham City Council Transportation Strategy, the Focus Group held a site meeting with BCC – present for BCC were Rachael, John Blakemore and Councillor Len Gregory, Cabinet Member for Transportation.

The result – so far…..

The BCC team had been considering changes to this area of Acocks Green. These issues will now be considered in the broader context of the discussions for regenerating the centre of Acocks Green scheduled to begin between Birmingham City Council and local residents’ organisations on 20 March 2007.