BirkenEd’s Place – w/c 9th January
16th January 2023
Last week, we welcomed many new and familiar faces into the shop for a warm drink, a friendly chat, and to gather further perspectives, comments, and ideas on the plans for St Werburgh’s and Birkenhead Town Centre. We enjoyed many more rich and meaningful conversations over the last week for these projects and our walls are currently covered with post-it notes highlighting local people’s pertinent and important comments. On Saturday, we hosted our second walking tour for St Werburgh’s and Birkenhead Town Centre led by Architect Mark Braund of BDP. Following the tour, which had fantastic attendance, participants were invited back to BirkenEd’s Place for a cup of tea and to look over the plans with representatives from BDP who are on the project design team.
Since we opened BirkenEd’s Place in November 2022, we have been running a photography competition based on the question “what makes Birkenhead special to you?”, inviting the people of Birkenhead to submit photographs that show what makes the town special to them. We invited submissions to highlight a special place or space, person or group of friends, or special event. The competition was open to anyone within professional, amateur, 12-18, and 11 and under categories. On Thursday morning, our photography competition judging panel met in the shop to look through all the brilliant entries and select winners, including a first, second and third prize – a difficult task indeed as so many worthy winners! The judges remarked on the outstanding quality of submissions and impressive standard of work.
We will be hosting our Photography Competition Awards Evening on Tuesday 24th January 6-7pm to celebrate all the entries in the competition. The evening will begin with a drink on arrival at 6pm and we would encourage you to arrive early to have a look through all the amazing entries before we reveal the winners. If you would like to attend our awards evening, please register here. A free exhibition of all our Photography Competition entries will be on display in BirkenEd’s Place from Wednesday 18th January for a week to allow the public to vote for their favourite photograph. We’re sure you’ll be as impressed as we are by the standard of the entries.
A big thank you to all our volunteers, ambassadors, design team colleagues, and photography judging panelists who have supported us this week – Mark Braund, Kyle Chong, Bev Staniford, Louise Jones, Karen James-Hunt, Ben Lavell, Chris Han, Oliver Terry, Emma Hopkins, David Roberts, Cathy Palmer, Anthony Poldervaart, Andy Shaw, and Ryan Gauge.