It’s great to be a part of the larger playing out community – in the UK, Leeds, Bristol, Hackney and a few other places are all working with their councils to make playing happen on streets. Even though Birmingham is implementing a slightly different model from the way street play and others are organised, it’s great […]
Obesity in the UK govt statistics 2015 Obesity in young people and children is on the rise – it’s widespread, growing and the consequences are costly. The solutions themselves are pretty straight forward (improved diet, exercise etc) so why is it health professionals seem powerless to get their message through, and could social media help? […]
Our car breakdown cover provided us with a nice new car for a few days which had an ‘automatic start-stop‘ after our old car died (thank you LV=). It’s a nifty bit of technology which helps reduce car emissions, but you don’t have to buy a new car to stop idling; The first UK Clean […]
When a new street becomes an ActiveStreet, Playing Out for the first time like Main Street in Sparkbrook, it’s hard not to get excited.
Today I read about the Greenhouse of Abundance, a course teaching the principles of building a passive (i.e. heated only by sunlight) greenhouse attached to your home to provide a year-round food growing space. I was initially excited about the idea, but had to reality-check it against my situation. The house pictured on the course website […]
You could guess what problems there are on Main Street in Sparkbrook, but the only way to understand them is to meet the people who live there. And how to make things better? Active Streets and KIKIT are working together to support residents.
This is Just a quick post to let you know that we are reactivating Space Explorers! Our first job has been to rebuild the website and we’ve taken the opportunity to apply a new design and a new name. We loved ‘Space Explorers’ as a project name but a lot of people did get the […]
It all started on Swan Corner when Oz, the Neighbourhood watch man thought we could do something about it. He provided the pickers and the bags in 2015, and now we do it every year – next one for Swan Corner is 10:30 on 8th April meet corner of Cold Bath and Brook Lane .
OK, so you’re interested in playing out. What next? Well it’s remarkably easy, and following the last two years of ‘Playing out’ in Birmingham we’ve built a lot of support within the Council, across Moseley and Kings Heath, and across Birmingham. There are a few simple steps to follow, and we will support you to […]
We’ve supported the Moseley and Kings Heath Playing Out group to open streets for play on National Play Day with great success for the last two years and we’ll be doing that again in 2015, but what we’d really like to see is residential streets across Birmingham closing to motor traffic and opening for play […]