Eastern promises

Meanwhile, to the east of Perry Park, the Council’s new project team faces much greater challenges.

Here, as in the west, much of the park has been kept out of bounds, behind seemingly endless Heras fence panels.

There used to be a very popular play area in this section of the park, which was vital for the children who live in the Perry Park Villas estate adjacent to the park - an estate comprising a mix of flats where kids do not have back gardens where they can safely play.

That play area was unceremoniously ripped out to make way for a road to accommodate Commonwealth Games traffic.

The Commonwealth Games organising committee had been required as a planning condition to reinstate the play area - but they negotiated with Birmingham City Council to hand over £125,000 instead - and the Council has, so far, ignored the pleas from local families to replace play equipment so that local kids don’t have a third summer in a row with nowhere safe to play locally.

The good news is that the new project team has significant experience of designing and installing quality play areas of the sort that local children actually want to use - and they seem to have understood why it’s so important that the play area is located as close as possible to its former location (as 71% of respondents to our survey last year confirmed).

The access road zig-zags around the eastern boundary of the park.

And when we talk about how important it is that local children have somewhere safe to play, we mean it’s essential that the Council tackles problems that the previous project team did not address, such as the ditch adjacent to Perry Park Villas, lined with precarious fencing supports (the fence panels themselves having been stolen and not replaced).

Similarly, there are several drainage pits scattered around the east of the park, required because of the enormous tarmac “transport mall” which dominates the largely flat area where people used to play or picnic.

Sometimes the fences that are supposed to surround these drainage pits are intact - other times they have collapsed - but the new project team has understood the challenges these drainage pits present to the accepted aim of reinstating the park.

Then there’s the issue of the Perry Park barrow - the vast heap of soil which was supposedly temporarily stored on site until the transport mall was to be removed and the soil replaced.

Inevitably, a large earth bank has proven irresistible to anyone with a bike and a sense of adventure.

The new project team might not be able to magic the soil mound away, but they seem to have considered sensible options to mitigate the problems it has presented.

But it’s the transport mall itself that represents the biggest problem for the local community over to the east of the park.

This supposedly temporary tarmac parking area is absolutely massive, and dominates the park on the ground.

But if you’re living in the flats on this side of the park, it’s pretty much all you can see from your window.

We’re optimistic that the new project team has some imaginative ideas on how to tackle the transport mall problem.

We know the Council won’t remove it or reduce it in size until it has hosted the European Championship athletics event in 2026.

But that’s still two further years.

Our understanding is that the new project team has been thinking up imaginative ways to mitigate the difficult problems that the transport mall and access road present - ideas to better landscape the area and mask at least some of the sea of tarmac, or to install planting that breaks it up a little and softens the view - as well as smart ways to use the space until the mall can be reduced in size, such as painting it up for children’s games.

There is a lot of pressure and high expectations on the new project team, but the scale of the challenge they face, especially with extremely tight financial constraints, is huge.

We’re cautiously looking forward to seeing their ideas when the new plans are unveiled…