Birmingham Post

Residential Property: Rate Rises Fail to Slow the Market

The 'crash' shows no sign of coming -and commentators are getting restless. Estate agents are busy, houses are selling -and buyers are still paying up. It's commonly known as a seller's market as competition remains a feature and good property, priced soundly is moving on -and off - the market, sometimes in days.

Residential Property: For What It's Worth

Happy is the Midland buyer with between pounds 650,000 and pounds 750,000 to spend in the busy Spring marketplace. A quick tour of agency shelves shows record choice in these upper-mid price reaches, where better-heeled househunters still expect family space with status thrown in. Marsya Lennox picks eight across four counties and two top suburbs. Mill Race

Residential Property: The Lasting Appeal of Broadway

Locals tell tales of the old days, pre-bypass, when the fast lorry traffic used to thunder into Broadway setting nerves jangling and the architectural heritage all a-rattle. Things are better now, best enjoyed in the peaceful Upper High Street, even more desirable for its no-through road status.

Property: An Enviable Share of Green

The Ordnance Survey Map of Rowney Green shows an unfair share of green on this edge of North Worcestershire. Dig out the most detailed version of the local area to see a liberal scattering of tree symbols denoting mixed woodland.

Perspective: Hughes Who in the Resignation Stakes ; Political Editor Jonathan Walker Looks at the Current Attitude to Resignations

I t was on Monday that an angry David Blunkett warned Tories: 'Look somewhere else because you are not getting a scalp from a minister in my department.' Three days later, the Home Secretary was lamenting his 'worst personal day' after Beverley Hughes finally quit in a row over bogus visa applications.

Perspective: Why, in a Word, Politics Is Never Just Plain Sailing ; the Post's Own Word Expert, Alexander Tulloch, Takes an Etymological Dip Into Politics

Politicians, it has been said, are people elected every year or so to misrepresent us in Parliament. Be that as it may, they are seldom if ever out of the media and our lives, one way or another are dominated by them. And there is nothing new about this. Since man made his first tentative steps along the road to civilisation, there have always been those who felt the urge to organize our lives and tell us how we should behave. And, just as the ideas of civilisation and politics go hand in han...

Anniversaries

On This Day: 1801: The British andDanish fleets met at the Battle of Copenhagen, during which Nelson put a telescope to his blind eye and ignored Admiral Parker's signal to stop fighting. The British fleet won. 1873: Toilets were put in sleeping cars on trains for the first time. 1935: Sir Watson-Watt patented radar. 1940: Mussolini ordered the mobilisation of all Italians over the age of four. 1960: America put the first weather satellite into space. 1990: Eric Clapton was fined pounds 300 a...

Theme for the Day

How can we develop a more positive attitude to people we find difficult or irritating, or who are even downright antagonistic? Here's a real challenge: we can try to see things from their point of view. Take the person who cuts you up on your drive to work. Do you curse them and feel resentful? You could reflect that they are probably in an anxious hurry, or maybe young and showing off. It is this that has made them rather unaware and aggressive.

They Said

Archive

25 years ago The long-awaited Georgian style flats to be built in St Paul's Square, Birmingham, have been approved by city councillors.

Culture: Meet Lichfield's Own Juliet ; Growing Up in Lichfield Was the Ideal Preparation for Working with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sian Brooke Tells Terry Grimley

Sian Brooke isn't the first Juliet I've interviewed, but she's the first who has offered to show me around her home town. No, not Verona -Lichfield. No sooner had I carelessly admitted to having somehow always found the cultural essence of this admittedly historic, pretty-in-parts South Staffordshire city somewhat elusive than she was offering me tea and a guided tour.

Culture: Sculpture Park Finds New Home at Ragley Hall ; Terry Grimley Reports On a New Home for the Jerwood Sculpture Park

The Jerwood Foundation has decided to move the sculpture park it has been developing at Witley Court for the last few years to a new home at Ragley Hall near Alcester. Difficulties in the foundation's relationship with English Heritage, owners of the ruined Victorian mansion in Worcestershire, have prompted the decision. It will now continue to develop the project at Ragley, home of the Marquess and Marchioness of Hertford.

Culture: Explorer On Home Turf ; the Great Outdoors Comes to Birmingham This Weekend and Chief Feature Writer Paul Groves Talks to an Explorer Happy to Be Making the Trek Into the Heart of the Country

It probably should not have come as a surprise that touching base with Benedict Allen took quite a bit of organising and a fair few phone calls. To say he has itchy feet wouldn't come close to describing one of our most prolific living explorers. The impeccablymannered, softly spoken adventurer has been behind a number of memorable televised expeditions of recent years -pitting his wits and testing his survival skills in some of the most extreme places on the planet.

Go Diving with the Birmingham Post

The Outdoors Show 2004 kicked off yesterday at the NEC and The Birmingham Post has teamed up with Crusader Travel and Libra to offer one reader a one-week holiday for two people to Taba, Egypt. A major new addition to The Outdoor Show 2004 is Go Diving! -the UK's newest diving show. Go Diving! not only offers the latest in diving equipment to buy, but visitors can also test out the equipment in the Dive Pool, being careful not to bump into Roboshark -the BBC's famous undercover shark. And if ...

Culture: Fine Show for Testing Production ; Amateur Stage

42nd Street Grand Theatre, Wolverhampton Surely 42nd Street is one of the all-time great musicals -precocious, musically block- busting and filled with characters who hustle, wheedle, throw temperaments and eventually become stars through sheer grit. For an amateur company the evening is a test of singing and dancing skills like no other, but the Wolverhampton Musical Comedy Company has nothing to fear. I can happily report that from the moment the overture brought to life all those beloved t...

Culture: Gellar has Slayed Her Last Vampire

Sarah Michelle Gellar returns to the role of Mystery Inc's Daphne having just said goodbye to a character she's been playing for the past eight years. Buffy The Vampire Slayer has finally staked her last blood sucker, but while she misses the show she admits it was time to call it a day. 'I could have stayed but it was important for me that the show go out while it was on top. It had become a cult phenomenon and I didn't want to see Buffy fighting vampires from her wheelchair, staking them wi...

Culture: A Better 2 Doo with Monsters Incorporated ; Mike Davies Meets the Mystery Inc Crew

It may have attracted a sizeable sheaf of sniffy reviews, but the first ScoobyDoo movie was a whole lot better than might have been expected. And, given it raked in $153million in America and pounds 21million here, there was never going to be any doubt that a sequel would arrive sooner rather than later. Surprisingly perhaps, while the cast were contractually obligated to make a second, nothing was set fully in motion until there'd been a chance to see what audiences made of the first. And wh...

Culture: Tour de Force of Reality ; Mike Davies Reviews the Week's New Cinema Releases

MONSTER CERT 18 109 MINS Though cynics may snipe that she got the Oscar for wearing prosthetic make up that resembles Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice, a bulked up de-glamorised Charlize Theron not only looks spookily like her real life character but delivers a truly towering and utterly immersed performance as Aileen Wuornos, America's first female serial killer who was executed in 2002 after a decade on Death Row. The subject of two Nick Broomfield documentaries, the second of which, filmed in...

Culture: All Human Life Is Grist to Bob's Mill ; Bob Chilcott Tells Christopher Morley About the Birth of His Work Circlesong, Written for Birmingham Festival Choral Society

With a proud history of premieres dating back at least as far as Mendelssohn's Elijah, Birmingham Festival Choral Society unveils its latest new work on Saturday. CircleSong by ex-King's Singer Bob Chilcott is a joint commission with City of Birmingham Young Voices, who also participate in this performance at the Adrian Boult Hall, with the BackBeat Percussion Quartet and pianists Julian Wilkins and Kevin Gill making up the complement.

Post People: An Inspired Idea

More than 100 representatives of businesses and organisations in Staffordshire attended the launch of Creative Network -a Staffordshire-based project aimed at bringing together designers and creative professionals to share ideas and experience. The Advantage West Midlands-funded project was launched at the Moat House Hotel in Acton Trussell near Stafford.