UPDATE: PICTURE CHANGED. Bournville’s a beautiful place. It has not one but two conservation areas with listed buildings and a historic chocolate factory. It is possibly the nicest place to live in the UK. What a shame then that the council represent Bournville’s beauty by using use the worst ever photograph of Bournville on its website.
The offending image of Bournville can be found at Birmingham City Council’s page for the area. It’s not taken from a bad position in that it shows off one of our parks (although it’s tricky to see which one), but it is at such a low resolution (and then enlarged and stretched) that it is hard to make out any detail. The original photographer isn’t credited but here at bournvillevillage.com we’re tired of seeing it whenever we go to that page for information on Bournville Ward.
We’re now asking for a change. We’ll be bringing this post to the attention of our elected representatives and seeing if they can’t help us get better representation. We seem to be the only ward that has the honour of having a photograph on the council website, which is great. We’d just like a better one.
Here are some images of bournville we found on Flickr from a variety of photographers. ALL of them are better than the one the council use.
UPDATE: July 1st 2010 –
Well done City Council (with, we suspect, help from Councillor Nigel Dawkins and Andy Mabbett in the web team) for updating the image on the offending webpage to the one shown here. Next stage: change the census link at the bottom so that Bourn(e)ville is spelt correctly and change the reference to ‘Univeristy of Central England’ to ‘Birmingham City University’ – changes now made.
(Images at top and bottom of page used without permission from the City Council website)
It’s not that the photograph of the roof of the Butter Market building is a bad photograph, it’s just that it says nothing to outsiders about Bournville. I hope the BCC will take it off their site and replace it with something more representative of the community and its environment.
now the first victory has been achieved, perhaps the next step in the campaign could be to lobby to ensure that the tasks of editing pages on the website as a whole are given to people who are properly trained & having the proper skills in the first place (& by that i mean general online communication skills, *not* necessarily, even if ideally, specialist web skills), who have that as a central part of their remit – rather than leaving the job to people whose core jobs is planning transport strategies, writing regeneration plans, & maintaining parks etc…