Lynne Jones - MP for Selly Oak

Lynne Jones has been MP for the Selly Oak constituency since 1992.

Party politics aside, her website feels like a really useful tool for people living in the area to get a better understanding of what is going on.

Plenty of press releases, events, and articles offer an insight into Lynne's day-to-day work for the Selly Oak area and her views on important matters.

The area I found most useful is this section on local issues which neatly outlines latest information and Lynne's views on such issues as the 'Studentification' in Bournbrook and Post Office closures.

The pubs and bars of B29

www.beerintheevening.com lists 9 pubs in the B29 area and most have a good selection of comments and reviews on the website. The Weoley Castle (below) has received no comments so far and also has the dubious honour of the lowest rating, scoring only 4/10.

(photo by rtubb99)


At the other end of the scale, TC's in Selly Oak has the highest rating, scoring an impressive 7.3/10 based on 7 users - helped by being a good venue for watching sport according to the comments.

Having never really used this website before I was quite impressed with the amount of information that it holds - and it does appear to be fairly comprehensive in its listings.

Apparently there are 760 pubs/bars within a 10 mile radius of Selly Oak train station which seems fairly comprehensive to me - anyone for a pub crawl?

Selly Oak train station

An interesting overview of the history of Selly Oak train station, situated off of Heeley Road in Selly Oak and the A38 Bristol Road.

The first station was originally built in 1876 but, as anyone who has used it will quickly realise, the station was entirely rebuilt in the late 1970s with the launch of Birmingham's cross-city rail service.

loose_grip_99 has some interesting photos from Selly Oak station from the mid 70s on Flickr.

(photo by loose_grip_99)


For the complete guide there's the usual comprehensive page on Wikipedia including a link to the live departure board from Selly Oak station, courtesy of National Rail.

The 10 most expensive roads in B29

Here's an interesting (maybe!) list of the ten most expensive roads to live on in B29 based on average sale price of houses over the last 2 years. (from ourproperty.co.uk)

Upland Road in Selly Park comes top of the list with an average sale price of £520,667 while the next three roads at the top of list are also from Selly Park. They are, in order of 2nd to 4th, Oakfield Road, Serpentine Road and Greenland Road.

A quick check of properties currently for sale in B29 via rightmove.co.uk suggests that things aren't about to change with the six highest priced houses all in Selly Park, including this 5 bedroom bungalow on Upland Road currently on the market for £825,000.

Ourproperty.co.uk also has more interesting stats based on house prices/sales in the B29 area (or any other postcode area for that matter) including the ten most transient roads, based on number of sales in the last two years.

Unsurprisingly the heavily student populated area of Selly Oak (aka Bournbrook) scores well in this area!

Map of B29

In case you were wondering, here is the B29 area in full detail (click on map for larger image).

Peeling Paint (from Flickr B29)

(photo by pindec, from Flickr B29)

Welcome to Birmingham, B29

Hello, welcome and bonjour!

This is the new website/blog/portal for the postcode district of B29, Birmingham, England, UK.

It was primarily born from a desire to catalogue, photographically, the diverse nature of a postcode that I have now lived within for a cumulative total of 8 years.

At the time of writing (13th August 2007) there is nothing to show but a web address (this one - www.birminghamb29.com), a flickr group, and this single blog post.

However, the hope is that this thing will now begin to grow into something much more. At the very least I hope we can show, through the community of photographers using Flickr, what an amazingly interesting, varied and exciting area B29 is... and maybe we can do a whole lot more interesting stuff as well.

And maybe, just maybe, there'll be a few more postcode districts across the UK (there are 2,900 of them apparently) that'll decide to follow suit, and then things really could get interesting!

take care for now - hopefully plenty more to come soon.