Photography Competition Week and What’s Coming Soon…
24th January 2023
This week at BirkenEd’s Place, we have presented a free exhibition of the impressive entries we received for our photography competition, which has been running since we opened back in November. We invited the people of Birkenhead to submit photographs based on the question “What makes Birkenhead special to you?” We welcomed submissions to show us what makes Birkenhead special to the people who live here, being this a place, space, person, or event. Following the competition closing date, a judging panel met to select a first, second and third prize from the submissions – David Roberts (Independent Regeneration Advisor), Cathy Palmer (Wirral Council), Anthony Poldervaart (Make It Happen), Andy Shaw and Ryan Gauge (Convenience Gallery), and Jo Harrop (PLACED).
A free exhibition of all our photography competition entries has been on display for a week at BirkenEd’s Place to allow the public to vote for their favourite photograph ahead of our awards evening on Tuesday 24th January when we’ll be announcing the winners. Our display of outstanding competition entries has been enjoyed by all our visitors and has sparked many interesting conversations about Birkenhead and its culture, history, and people. Connecting with our engagement work in BirkenEd’s Place, alongside this photography exhibition, we’ve been asking the public what makes Birkenhead special to them, what they would like to see in the future, and what they want to protect.
If you did not get a chance to see the exhibition, the winning entries will remain on display in BirkenEd’s Place. The standard of entries was extremely impressive, so these are well worth coming down to see!
We are delighted that we now have an extra month of BirkenEd’s Place, with the shop no longer closing in February but instead late March – our final day being the last Saturday of the month (March 25th). There’s lots of exciting engagement and events to come over the next two months. Soon we will have the Wirral Waterfront and Surrounds project back in for its second phase of community engagement. The Wirral Waterfront and Surrounds project aims to deliver highway and public realm improvements to Wirral Waterfront and its surrounding areas, covering the area from and including the Argyle Street/Conway Street roundabout to the Woodside Ferry Terminal. The design team, which includes Mott Macdonald and Planit-IE, are looking at how these areas could be redesigned to be more attractive to spend time in, more accessible for walking and cycling, and include improved landscaping. In early February, we will also have two walking tours for Dock Branch Masterplan which you can book onto here. These walking tours will be followed by the return of Dock Branch on February 8th – a project that will create a new neighbourhood centred around a linear public park on the former Dock Branch railway line.
Thank you to all our volunteers and ambassadors who have supported us in the shop over this last week – Bev Staniford, Louisa Hughes, Ben Prince, James Walley, James Moore, Tim Johns, Ellie Bichard-Collins, and Diya Calleechurn.