Dear Concrete Readers,

It feels very strange to be writing the first Concrete Editors Note and even stranger to be addressing it to actual readers (heyyyyyy you’re all so conventionally attractive and smart and cool wow). I wanted to firstly say thank you for all the incredible support Concrete has received so far, before the first article has even been published. It has been amazing and immensely encouraging for our team to see. To me it cements (no pun intended) the idea that there is a space for Concrete in Birmingham and that there is an audience ready and waiting to be a part of it. 

Personally I have always had an obsession with magazines, hoarding them as a kid and passing around little comics I had made at school (something I still do today). My interest in magazines led me to notice the lack thereof in Birmingham. I wanted to know how this could be – that the UK’s second city, with a population of over 1 million, had no dedicated space to catalogue its going-ons?  It seemed to me that every other major city had its own magazine culture, from monthly zines, to newspapers, to local newsletters, except for Birmingham. 

It’s hard to say exactly the reason for this. Maybe the suffocating budget cuts that have strangled the city in recent years? The total lack of national attention to the Birmingham cultural scene? Or maybe even because of Birmingham’s size, its sprawling array of neighbourhoods and towns, that make it hard to put this vast city into a cohesive narrative? Whatever the reason, we (some would say naively – we would say arrogantly) have attempted to fill that hole: to create a magazine by, for, and about Brummies. The kind of thing I would want to pick up and read. 

While headlines decry the internet as the killer of print culture, there are benefits to an open information market that creates endless possibilities for independent publications. With the collapse of Birmingham City Council and the looming danger to the arts community, we felt it was necessary to draw as many eyes as possible to the stuff we love about Birmingham community, to either help keep those thing going or to capture them before they’re gone. The outreach we’ve found so far has only confirmed the obvious – we are just drops in the ocean, of a sea of Brum.

When Jacob and I discussed what we might want to say in this introduction we quickly realised neither of us could actually remember the initial conversation we had about Concrete. Maybe this conversation could have taken place at Pan Pan, the unofficial Concrete HQ, and most likely we were more than a bit drunk? Or perhaps it was while volunteering at Flatpack Film festival, where we first me? So in the spirit of Concrete we decided to to both draw our vague memory of that first meeting.

Dear Concrete Readers,

When I met Charlotte, I was coming to the end of a three year stint at the University of Bristol. While Birmingham had still, of course, been my home, it hadn’t felt that homely.

I met Charlotte (alongside Concrete writer Callie Derbyshire!) volunteering for Flatpack – my first time doing so. I was quite shy, I think – I still hadn’t gotten a grip of the whole Networking thing – but being really keen to know what she was about. Charlotte quite quickly began singing the praises of Pan-Pan – a site I’d only heard the rumours of. At the end of the festival, I got my first taste, and that was it – I was hooked on Brum culture again. 

My experiences at Flatpack strongly encouraged me to reckon with the need to D.I.M. If I felt uncertain about the future of film culture in Birmingham, or about the lack of my favourite artists playing here, I’d have to turn that into something. Either I’d prove myself wrong – finding, for instance, a brilliant teeming swamp of independent screeners constantly putting on great events – or I’d be calling out for change. Either way, it felt a bit more productive than just having it as a conversation starter. 

Concrete feels, to me, like both an assurance and a reaching out. It’s a chance for me and Charlotte to explore avenues in Birmingham that may otherwise have felt invisible. Putting ourselves in a slight bit of titular responsibility – being about Birmingham’s culture in some regard – we’re forced to explore Birmingham’s vast exploits, jumping into great events and great venues, meeting great people who are similarly keen to make something of that Midlands nihilism.

I’m quite scared about the foundations of Concrete. It feels like the potential for Birmingham is so strong that the idea of documenting it is inconceivable. I’m scared of the confirmation that something like this can’t exist – that it will ultimately fail, or prove itself useless in the face of so much.

I trust, though, in Charlotte. In the friends and family who want to have a space to write. The website can be a little fucky in the first weeks, sure: it can have the wordpress.com in there, a couple faulty links. All that matters, to me, is visibility – finding a way to show what this city can do, from its events, bands, artists, and writers. 

There are tons of metaphors for concrete – all of which we’ll overuse by the first year. For now, here’s one: our concrete, right now, is a wet sloppy sludge. Maybe it’ll be wet until the day it dies. But concrete will constantly be imprinted upon by those who connect with it, like a cat walking through on its way home. It isn’t a set structure, but a malleable entity, changed by our writers and our projects, becoming something all the more beautiful for its imprints.