Month: January 2014

Bradford’s Westfield shopping centre is finally happening

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Work resumes on the Westfield Bradford development in January 2014

I expect the people of Bradford breathed a sigh of relief when workmen finally returned to the site of Westfield Bradford earlier this month. This will see a new Westfield shopping centre being built, which will be the only one in the north of England (we’ll place Derby in the Midlands).

The shopping centre is due to open in time for Christmas 2015, by which point it will have been almost 12 years in the making. Demolition of the existing buildings on the site started in 2004, and was done by 2006. There followed many months where the remaining rubble was piled up and no activity, but around 2007 preparatory works began to dig a large hole for the foundations.

But after the foundations were constructed, nothing. The credit crunch, and then the recession, put paid to any further progress. The whole project was effectively mothballed. The situation was so bad that in 2010, the local council, with a financial contribution from Westfield, turned part of the park into a ‘temporary urban garden’ as there was no prospect of work starting any time soon.

All this time, the rest of Bradford’s city centre suffered. The recession didn’t help, taking with it a number of shops, but the range and quality of shops in Bradford has declined over the past 10 years. There are a large number of vacant units, and many of those that are occupied are by pop-up shops on short-term lets. There’s also been an explosion of pawnbrokers, payday loan shops and betting shops.

Last year, Trinity Leeds opened in Leeds. Though it too was mothballed for some time during its construction, it’s now open and successful, and has no doubt made Leeds an even more compelling retail destination than Bradford.

Whilst I really hope the opening of Westfield Bradford will be a turning point, and help Bradford get back on its feet, I can’t help but feel that it’s perhaps too late. What if the decline of Bradford’s city centre is actually terminal?

I’m also concerned that Westfield will kill off other parts of the city. Bradford’s existing shopping centre, the Kirkgate Centre, has generally coped well over the years, but has lost a couple of major tenants as some of the larger chain stores went under. Now it too has more than its fair share of poorer quality stores, including a recently extended Poundland. It’s also home to River Island and WHSmith, two confirmed tenants of the new Westfield centre. Marks and Spencer is opposite the Kirkgate Centre and will be an ‘anchor’ tenant in Westfield.

Still, overall I hope that Westdfield is a success. It’s a shame that a once prosperous city like Bradford has fallen so far. Not only has it dropped behind Leeds, but the smaller nearby towns of Halifax and Huddersfield, both of which have (in my opinion) a better range of shops.

Manchester Beer Festival 2014

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Manchester Velodrome Panorama

On Saturday we went to the Manchester Beer & Cider Festival, one of the largest beer festivals in the UK. It took place at the Manchester Velodrome, which is part of the National Cycling Centre and was a major venue for the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester.

The beer festival was the largest I’ve been to. Admittedly I haven’t been to many beer festivals, but with 300 beers and 75 ciders and perries (pear ciders), this was an order of magnitude bigger than anything I’d seen before.

Except, we went on Saturday, which was the last day – the festival ran over four days. The previous three days had been ‘unexpectedly popular’ and so by the time we arrived, around three quarters of the beers had been drunk and were sold out. Still, with 70-odd beers to try, there was still much to drink. At least until 3:30pm, by which point all of the beer had been consumed, leaving just a handful of ciders and perries to try in the half hour before time was called at 4pm – three hours earlier than planned.

Still, it was a really good day out, and it was good to visit the Velodrome, which will be 20 years old this year. Admittedly it wasn’t the best venue for a beer festival – the main festival floor with the bars was in the centre of the track, and most of the seating was around the edges of the track. To get between the two, you were required to descend three flights of stairs, pass through a subway and then ascend another flight of stairs. But it offered some great panoramic photo opportunities, as shown above.

I think it will be a while before I visit such a big beer festival again. The ‘big daddy’ of beer festivals is The Great British Beer Festival at Olympia in London, which usually coincides with a very busy period at work, although it’s earlier this year so perhaps not.

We also popped in to The Moon Under Water pub in Manchester, a Wetherspoons pub which holds the Guinness World Record for being Britain’s’ biggest pub (and rumoured to be the biggest in Europe). It can hold 1700 people and is even important enough to have its own Wikipedia article, which explains the origin of its name.

Exploring a new realm

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A screenshot of Hexorious, my World of Warcraft character

Around two weeks ago, I finally lost patience with the queues for the World of Warcraft realm that my main characters were on, and took advantage of an offer of free transfers to another realm.

Originally, when I started playing World of Warcraft almost eight years ago, I was on a ‘medium’ populated realm. This was where my then-girlfriend Hari and her friends had her characters, so I joined her there.

Fast forward a few years, and following the release of the Cataclysm expansion my friends all jumped ship, to a high population realm. I followed a few weeks later, firstly with my main character and then one of my ‘alt’ characters, paying £15 each time for the privilege.

Being on a high population realm has its benefits – a very active economy on the auction house, lots of guilds to join, and plenty of people to group with. But recently the population has continued to grow, to the point where the realm servers were running at capacity. This means that players have to queue until enough other players log off, and at peak times on week-nights these queues could be as long as half an hour.

If I was able to get home from work early then this wouldn’t be such a problem, but I don’t get home until the start of the peak period. Consequently, it just wasn’t possible to quickly log in for a few minutes on an evening – I’d have to wait in a queue, and then once connected, not log out because I wouldn’t be able to get back on again.

And, by now, most of my friends who I used to play with have either quit the game, or gone to other realms. So, all in all, I had no real reason to stay on that realm.

Thankfully, Blizzard Entertainment are all too aware of the issue with the realm (and others in the same situation). The realm has been ‘locked’, to restrict the creation or paid transfer of characters, and they are offering free character transfers to other realms. I decided to take advantage of the latter; by now I had three characters on this realm (plus a low level bank character) and I didn’t want to spend £15 per character to go somewhere with greener grass.

There are some restrictions for free character transfers. First of all, they can only be between selected realms, so I had to choose one of four destination realms. WarcraftRealms.com is useful for population estimates, and so I picked the one with the highest population and best Horde to Alliance ratio. Since I would be moving to another Player-versus-Player (PvP) realm, I didn’t want to choose one where Horde characters significantly outnumbered Alliance – I’m a big, wet, useless scaredycat when it comes to PvP.

There are also eligibility criteria for your characters. There were three main characters I wanted to transfer: my paladin (my main since 2006), my priest, and a rogue which I’ve recently levelled up. These were all fine – I just had to ensure that they had empty mailboxes and no outstanding auctions. But I also had a ‘bank’ character which I used for storage. This character was too low level – characters need to be level 10 to be eligible, and my bank was level 1. So, I spent about half an hour levelling it up.

The next issue was that this character was also a guild leader, with a guild bank full of various crafting materials. Guild leader characters are ineligible for transfer; as this character was the only one in the guild, I made the decision to sell just about everything in the guild bank on the auction house. This took a few weeks, but eventually just about everything sold and it netted me a few thousand gold in the process. I then had to disband the guild.

Finally, there are also limits on how much gold characters can take with them when transferred, which vary by level. My three high level characters were fine, and well within the limits, but my bank character had way too much. Level 10 characters should have less than 300 gold; mine had more than ten times that, thanks to all of the auctions. Of course, this was easily solved by distributing the money amongst my other characters before I transferred them.

So, I made the transfer, and have been playing on my new realm ever since. I’m pleased that I don’t have to queue any more, and I’ve been able to find a reasonably nice and active guild to be a member of. It hasn’t cost me anything, and means I can play the game more often and get more value out of my £9 per month subscription. Indeed, I would not have bothered transferring my bank character had the transfer not been free. Generally speaking the transfers only take around an hour to complete, so there’s not much downtime away from the game either.

If you play on a realm with queues and are offered a free transfer, then unless you have ties with people on that realm, I’d definitely recommend moving. After all, you’re paying for the game – so why not make the most of it?

Kickstarted: reviewing the projects I’ve backed on Kickstarter

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Screenshot of my Backer History page on Kickstarter

Over the past two years, I’ve backed 12 projects on Kickstarter. All 12 have reached their funding goals, and I’ve paid out approximately £40 in pledges in total.

Some of those projects have now produced the products that they were raising money for, so I’ve decided to look back at each one, over the next few months. I’ll be writing about why I backed the project, and what I got out of it.

I’ll post the first entry next Sunday, and then a new one every Sunday until I’ve reviewed all of the projects I’ve backed. Obviously, if I back any additional projects in the next three months, I’ll tag those on the end too.

Blogiversary number 12

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Twelve

It’s that time of year again – another birthday for the blog. This time, if this blog was a human living in the UK, it would have started secondary school in September.

I can’t believe that, 12 years on, I am still writing on this blog. Though my interest wanes at times, and I can go several days without posting, I’m usually able to come up with something at least once a week.

I didn’t have any suitable photos to use on this entry, so I quickly drew the above birthday cake with a multi-coloured biro, and then Instagrammed it. This is why I’m not an illustrator.