Finally, for Photo Sunday, yesterday a tenants and residents association in my ward had a big gala launch of their new children’s play area. Most of the work raising the money and preparing for the park was done before I was a councillor for Leen Valley so the credit goes to the TRA themselves, community development worker Susan Ward Rice, Simon Hunter from the Parks Department and my colleague Cllr Gary Long.

The gala launch yesterday was great fun for kids and grownups alike and was really lucky with the weather.

Cutting ribbons is harder than you think!

The clown kept adults and youngsters alike entertained

Inviting the fire brigade was my idea – the youngsters got to go on the fire engine and have an informal talk about smoke alarms with the fire fighters, who then got into a Kids v Firemen footy match.

No-one wanted the last piece of cake!

I got some lovely photos of youngsters in facepaint, and if any parent wants a copy, do please let me know.

I think Brenda had a go on everything! She also supplied the workers with much needed hot cups of tea, for which much thanks!

The Nottingham Eye has been a huge ferris wheel in the Market Square for a few months. Initially only supposed to be there for a few weeks, it proved popular and applied for planning permission to stay a bit longer. It took a week to construct, and it closes today, but they are thinking about bringing it back next year too.

It launched on “Light Night” in February, when the Council arranged an evening of lighting up buildings and putting in weird light sculptures as a way of reclaiming the streets for families. We didn’t show up to the event until very late in the evening, around 11pm, by which point most of the families had left and the streets were once again the preserve of the semi-naked drunk teenagers who come to Nottingham to dance every week.

The photos in this set are a mix of pictures from Light Night in Feb and from a gondola of the ferris wheel, which I finally got around to riding last Friday. That day, I only had my old compact with me, but it was better than nothing.

The giant ugly red building in the middle of that is barely visible from street level and is a surprising, really incongruous rear to a really nice old building on Queen Street.

Ferris wheel at night, reflected in the new Market Square water feature

Water feature, Council House and ferris wheel in day light

Victoria Centre flats from the air

Back of the new Ibis.

From the air, it almost looks like the Victoria Centre, the new Litmus Building and last year’s Marco Island renovation are one building

A new version of the famous “three spires view” you can get from the Castle, where St Mary’s, St Peters and the old unitarian chapel in the Lace Market, now the Pitcher and Piano, all line up.

My ward is called Leen Valley, named after the River Leen that flows through Nottingham. Much of its length is in culverts, piped under roads and industrial areas or in giant concrete channels visible from the Derby Road and the QMC campus.

But bits of it have lovely riverbanks with trees and ducks and swans. There is definitely a planning presumption along the river to improve it both in terms of open public space for people and better habitat for wildlife.

2drakes1duck

This swan didn’t relax its wings whilst I was there and I wondered if it was protecting a nest or getting ready to brake my arm or something. It certainly followed me a around for a bit.

Culvert example.

At the other end of the scale from the falling-down industrial buildings are these new buildings constructed as part of the Nottingham University Jubilee campus. The first buildings on this site opened while I was still a student there, and I was a tour guide for a while. Most of those buildings were square and normal-looking, but sustainable development was a major factor in their construction, and in the middle was a really striking spiral library. They’re just outside my ward, but still represented by Lib Dem councillors.

These new buildings are erm, not square at all. They seem to me to owe a lot of their form in science fiction: the big triangular ones look like AT-ATs from Star Wars whilst the main building with Triumph Road running underneath it is two discs held together by a bridge, which reminds me of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek.

In addition to the buildings already well advanced in construction, they also have planning permission for a 60m high spire, called A-Spire, ho ho ho, which will be in the middle of this.

Judging by the speed these are going up at, they want to be teaching in them by September.

Some local residents have raised concern that it appears that the University want to close off Triumph Road to the public. They do not have permission to do this, and the current plans do not include that proposal. They do, however, have permission to move the road a bit, and introduce a big bend in the road to help reduce traffic speeds. They will also be opening up and grassing out land on either side of the road to turn it into open space, and also bringing the River Leen out of its culvert. There is a chance they will want to close the road in the future, but they won’t be able to do this without major public consultation and demonstrating it will have no impact on the road network.

In my ward is an industrial estate that is long past its best. Although there are some businesses remaining there, most of the units are smashed up, with broken windows, crumbling walls, and giant puddles in the cobbles. Within my ward, it should be the major focus of regeneration funding before too long, so I thought I’d take some photos before it is improved.

The full set of photos are here, and here are some highlights

Local householders have bricked up their garages because it’s cheaper than continually replacing vandalised garage doors.

These were outside a car repair business. I do hope they’re not going to become a cut’n’shunt

This is the main building from the reverse. Every window is broken.

The street through is cobbled, and on the day I visited, there was one massive puddle.

These are some closeups of the cobbles – I thought they might be useful as textures or stock photos.

I’ve been using my camera a lot lately, but not really finding the time to process or upload my photos to share them.  Last night I did find time, and queued hundreds of photos to upload whilst I slept.  This morning, they have all nicely arrived, so expect a flurry of blog posts about photos today.

I don’t use Flickr quite right, I’m afraid.  All the people I really admire on Flickr use it just to showcase their absolute all time greatest photos.  I tend to use it more like offsite backup, and put up all my average photos on the offchance I might need one sometime in the future.

Still, it’s a wide variety of pics I’ll be sharing over the coming hour.

I just upgraded the software running this blog, again, and ran into difficulty.

All appeared to work well until I attempted to login to the management pages. Whereupon they crashed inelegantly with a next to useless error message

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_register_sidebar_widget() in

I prodded a bit. I deleted more files and reuploaded the new version. No dice. So I resorted to the next thing which was googling the error, and landed on this page which explains that WordPress 2.5 and the K2 theme don’t play well together, and gave instructions to fix it. Read through the comments before attempting the fix because there’s a slight mistype which causes ongoing problems.

Wp2.5 is very nice indeed.  Killer function “One of your plugins is out of date: click  here to upgrade” and it does it all by itself.  Superb.

However, something wacky has happened to my hyperlink button – it just doesn’t work. Wonder if anything else will become apparent?