Liberty's heli of a curry (from The Sun newspaper)

Sticking on the big-news-from-B29-theme, I was reminded on Friday of this excellent story from 2006.

As reported in The Sun newspaper, pop group Liberty X splashed out £4,500 by hiring a helicopter to deliver food from the Sundarbon restaurant on Bristol Road in Selly Oak, to London.

Apparently Westlife are big fans of the Sundarbon food as well.

Tornado hits Selly Oak (a long time ago)

Whilst searching for any big news story directly related to the B29 area I came across the enticing headline "Tornado hits Selly Oak".

One look at the story, from the BBC website, and it didn't take long to realise that this was quite an old story, from July 1999 in fact.



However, it still made me chuckle for a number of reasons - not least that the story is credited as "From the newsroom of the BBC World Service".

Fair play though, it appears that the story was published by a very alert journalist at a quarter past five in the morning.

Birmingham University Welcome Week

This week (24th Sep - 1st Oct) will see more than five thousand new students arriving in Selly Oak as the latest batch of new students begin life at the University of Birmingham.

(photo by Biscit aka Simon J)

Birmingham Uni's Welcome Week will see new and returning students take part in a range of activities - organised by the university and its Guild of Students - designed to involve and introduce everyone to Birmingham's 27,000 strong student community.

From The University of Birmingham website.

If you're not one of the new 5,000 but fancy having a nose around then why not try out this virtual tour of the uni, or step into the real world and go along to the next open day.

Tiverton Pool & Fitness Centre

One of Selly Oak's hidden gems is the Tiverton Pool & Fitness Centre which has been open now for over 100 years.

Located on Tiverton Road in the heavily student populated area of Bournbrook, the centre is open 7am - 9.30pm Monday to Friday and slighter shorter hours at the weekend.

Facilities include a swimming pool, separate childrens pool, sauna and 'pulse point' gym.

There are a whole host of organised activities and fitness classes for all ages that can be booked online including strokes, pulse point, and studio cycling.

A few more photos

This morning I finally managed to do what I'd been promising myself for the last few weekends now and got out of bed and took the camera for a walk around selly oak/park.

Images have been dutifully uploaded and added to the B29 flickr map, including another Selly Park image for the collection.

Podnosh, The Knife and Fork, and a new speed camera

This very complimentary snippet on Podnosh today has made me release that it's been a while since my last post.

So then I started to borrow yet more content from Podnosh, like this insightful blog from a newly trained Birmingham bus driver which is well worth a read.

Then I noticed that Birmingham: It's Not Shit has gone through a very worthwhile redesign and come out looking very lovely and shiny in the wash.

And it has an associated flickr group with a recent photo of one of the landmarks of B29, the soon to be disappearing Knife and Fork (left: photo by ellybrown1980).

Still just about surviving (although not still serving unfortunately) but by the gathering of equipment and signs I would imagine that it is sadly just about on its' last legs.

I also couldn't fail to notice tonight that an extra speed camera has appeared on the Pershore Road very recently (not even any marker lines on the road yet), heading out of the city just after the junction with Pebble Mill Road beside the Nature Centre. Just about here.

It didn't slow down my journey to the excellent Jumbo Chinese takeaway though, thankfully.