Kings Heath’s Town Centre Manager, Matt, works behind the scenes to improve the area and support local businesses to ensure Kings Heath continues to be a thriving community.
Here’s an update from Matt, detailing what he has been up to in February.
Aside from dealing with everything involved in the ballot, positive and negative, administrative and on-the-streets, there has been plenty going on, as ever!
Here are just a few of the other things that I’ve been up to this month:
- A couple more catch-ups with the organisers of Kings Heath Artisan Market and helping them to put together a couple of funding bids. Also managed to help them secure some additional traders for the market.
- A Sunday-afternoon meeting with a couple of businesses based on York Road who want to put an event on. Subsequently helping them to establish that they wouldn’t need a Road Closure Order and that a Temporary Event Notice, at a cost of £21, would be all that they’d need to keep the council happy.
- Met up with Featherstone Bread at York Supplies who was being filmed for a documentary commissioned by Birmingham City Council about using the BID’s e-cargo bike to make deliveries.
- Clean & Green Committee meeting on Thursday evening. A couple of graffiti removal initiatives and a street sweep of the high street were discussed, amongst many other things.
- Got to know at least six more of our wonderful businesses, including Chickanos and Tiffin Guys (10/10 for their food, by the way!).
- Met with our new Police Sergeant.
- Attended the Kings Heath Neighbourhoods Forum meeting – this is important for keeping residents up to date with what’s happening with the business community and to also get a feel for any concerns coming from residents about any high street-related issues.
- Chased Birmingham City Council for an update on the high street parking barriers – there’ll hopefully be some actual news on this soon!
- Managed to get the waste removed from Millford Place.
- Spent some time with Soul City Arts, based in Sparkbrook, but very much run by a Kings Heath “champion”. Some good ideas are beginning to emerge about some creative solutions to some of the issues on the high street, from low-level violence to poor car-parking.
- Planning meetings for Queens Heath Pride, including discussion around establishing a formal “steering group” for the event.
- Spotted this in the BT Hubs:
- Introduced our local councillors to the new manager at Sainsbury’s. They are still trying to eliminate some of the problems at the store in the car park and on the roof.
- Held the first couple of drop-in sessions at Costa Coffee (Thursdays 10.00am – 12.00pm).
- Continued to promote the Cost-Savings Clinic at New Life Baptist Church on 1st March and Business Networking Event on 8th March.
The campaign to save the BID is in full swing, a letter called the “Notice of Ballot” was sent out on 20th February and the ballot papers should have arrived by 8th March. If you think you should have received one but didn’t, please do make sure to get in touch.