1st Jewellery Quarter Festival
Jul. 19th, 2015 06:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
major_clangerThis weekend saw the first Jewellery Quarter Festival, organised to mark the transformation of what had been a rather ugly car park between the Rose Villa Tavern and the Big Peg building at the centre of JQ into Golden Square, a much nicer-looking pedestrian plaza and event space. In addition to three days of music, food and craft events at the new square itself, JQ businesses and art centres ran a doors-open weekend. Although the Quarter is, not surprisingly, famous for its concentration of jewellers and allied trades, it's also home to a lot of other decorative and artistic enterprises, many of which even local residents tend not to notice given that a lot are tucked away in converted factories down the JQ's many back streets. Given that Golden Square is about 200 metres from our new house, we've had three days of popping over to see what the latest attraction is and wandering round discovering new things about our neighbourhood.
The Square itself was home for the weekend to a music stage converted from a double-decker bus, and a helter-skelter (not as far as I could see converted from a bus.) The latter was very popular with children of all ages...
The owl is part of The Big Hoot - there are 89 around Birmingham and nearby towns. I would say, as per this picture, that the one on Golden Square is embedded with precious gems and has a 24-hour police guard, but you might think I was pulling your leg, or perhaps wing.
Saturday the square was host to a craft market whilst today was given over to food and drink. Another converted double-decker appeared, this one turned into a mobile pub called The Bus Bar. I am delighted to see an electrical engineering pun get an outing like that.
I am not quite sure what is going on here, and whether the Dalek is looking for lessons or is actually the tutor...
We didn't have time to visit anything like all of the 40 open venues, but we did get to look around the Birmingham School of Jewellery, 125 years old this year and now part of BCU. Unfortunately photography wasn't allowed inside, but there was a very impressive exhibition of student project work. It turns out that the SoJ also runs a unique degree course in horology, so the display included watches and clocks made by students.
A very different collection of creative work was on display at The Dual Works - although it turned out that one of the artists in the partnership was a lecturer at the SoJ too. It felt a bit like a conceptual art workshop run by the team from Mythbusters, and among the projects on display were a series of small robots that you stuck on paper, popped felt-tip pens into and switched on, turning them into a sort of autonomous spirograph with St Vitus' Dance.
A related project was this combined pantograph/spirograph driven Scaletrix-style by a couple of hand controllers:
I got an explanation about their current big project of miniaturising artwork on sellotape strips to run through bodged slide projectors for art installations. I'm not sure I understood it all but there's a dedicated website if you want to know more.
Today we found a local garden designer specialising in tiny patios and enclosed spaces - like the ones we now have - and wandered around The Coffin Works, a traditional JQ factory that closed in 1998 but reopened last year as an industrial museum and event space.
(An aside for photo geeks: this picture was taken with the exposure-bracketing mode on by Canon 70D, in which it takes three photos in very quick succession with varying exposures to try to catch the brightest and darkest parts of a scene. I tried out one of the new features in the latest version of Adobe Lightroom, which is automatic alignment and merger of such pictures into a single HDR image that you can then tweak and adjust as if it were a single capture. The whole process is very easy and I have to say I'm quite pleased with the result.)
The JQ Festival seemed to be very popular, and all the venues we visited were seeing a fair bit of interest. It looks like there's a programme of further events for Golden Square, and with any luck the success of this year's festival may make it an annual event. All in all we're very glad we've ended up living in such an unusual and interesting area, which after this weekend we now know a little bit more about!
The Square itself was home for the weekend to a music stage converted from a double-decker bus, and a helter-skelter (not as far as I could see converted from a bus.) The latter was very popular with children of all ages...
The owl is part of The Big Hoot - there are 89 around Birmingham and nearby towns. I would say, as per this picture, that the one on Golden Square is embedded with precious gems and has a 24-hour police guard, but you might think I was pulling your leg, or perhaps wing.
Saturday the square was host to a craft market whilst today was given over to food and drink. Another converted double-decker appeared, this one turned into a mobile pub called The Bus Bar. I am delighted to see an electrical engineering pun get an outing like that.
I am not quite sure what is going on here, and whether the Dalek is looking for lessons or is actually the tutor...
We didn't have time to visit anything like all of the 40 open venues, but we did get to look around the Birmingham School of Jewellery, 125 years old this year and now part of BCU. Unfortunately photography wasn't allowed inside, but there was a very impressive exhibition of student project work. It turns out that the SoJ also runs a unique degree course in horology, so the display included watches and clocks made by students.
A very different collection of creative work was on display at The Dual Works - although it turned out that one of the artists in the partnership was a lecturer at the SoJ too. It felt a bit like a conceptual art workshop run by the team from Mythbusters, and among the projects on display were a series of small robots that you stuck on paper, popped felt-tip pens into and switched on, turning them into a sort of autonomous spirograph with St Vitus' Dance.
A related project was this combined pantograph/spirograph driven Scaletrix-style by a couple of hand controllers:
I got an explanation about their current big project of miniaturising artwork on sellotape strips to run through bodged slide projectors for art installations. I'm not sure I understood it all but there's a dedicated website if you want to know more.
Today we found a local garden designer specialising in tiny patios and enclosed spaces - like the ones we now have - and wandered around The Coffin Works, a traditional JQ factory that closed in 1998 but reopened last year as an industrial museum and event space.
(An aside for photo geeks: this picture was taken with the exposure-bracketing mode on by Canon 70D, in which it takes three photos in very quick succession with varying exposures to try to catch the brightest and darkest parts of a scene. I tried out one of the new features in the latest version of Adobe Lightroom, which is automatic alignment and merger of such pictures into a single HDR image that you can then tweak and adjust as if it were a single capture. The whole process is very easy and I have to say I'm quite pleased with the result.)
The JQ Festival seemed to be very popular, and all the venues we visited were seeing a fair bit of interest. It looks like there's a programme of further events for Golden Square, and with any luck the success of this year's festival may make it an annual event. All in all we're very glad we've ended up living in such an unusual and interesting area, which after this weekend we now know a little bit more about!
