Village Focus


Can it really be 20 years?


Richard Peach looks back to the launch of The Village as the magazine celebrates a big birthday.


I


(and that is probably the first time I have used that word under my byline in this magazine) am


20 years older and possibly a little wiser than I was that day in October 1998 when the first boxes of The Vil- lage arrived at our office. I was co-running a public relations and marketing firm in the trendy Custard Factory in Birmingham back then, but we were soon to move to offices on the top floor of 50 Hewell Road, Barnt Green, above what is now a travel agent, but was then a dress shop. We’d be in the heart of The Village


patch – and I’d be much closer to home, which was handy with two young children to keep up with. Sandwiched between our office and the dress shop was (and still is, I believe) Alvechurch Plumbing & Heating Services, from whence the redoubtable owner would invariably be making himself heard. Those were heady days for a late-


thirty-something, sometimes work- ing until four in the morning or later to hit deadlines. It looks like madness from my current vantage point, approaching my 60th year, so why on earth did I start a magazine, with the enormous volume of work that entailed, and for very little financial reward in return? Weirdly, I’d always enjoyed playing


with typewriters as a child, creat- ing “printed” words on pages and making booklets. I think it all started on a Cub Scout visit to a large city


newspaper office in Sheffield in the 1960s. There, I had been fascinated by the machines that produced thousands of words per second on paper as it flew by and even more enthralled by the excitement leading up to this point, from the newsroom to the presses starting to roll. The vast amount of manpower


and investment needed to produce a newspaper or magazine in those days meant my dream was, at most, to be a reporter; perhaps on a weekly paper somewhere. As it turned out, my first job was on an evening paper, where I learned all I could about covering court hear- ings and council meetings, making contacts and developing the sixth sense that alerts reporters to the human interest stories that are all around us and might otherwise go unnoticed. By chance, I discovered I was also


good at the “production” side of newspapers; rewriting other report- ers’ stories to fit the required space and coming up with memorable, or at least serviceable, headlines. Also by good fortune, and in spite


of never having had an art lesson in my life (I did Latin instead at school), I found that creating the designs for pages, with the spaces for the stories and photographs to fit into, also came naturally. Armed with these skills, I could


move quite rapidly from job to job, from Scunthorpe to Grimsby to Bir-


mingham (how glamorous!) and on to the national press, parts of which were still actually in Fleet Street. After a sojourn on the now-de-


funct Auckland Star in New Zealand I arrived back in Birmingham in the early 1990s and by 1993 was living in a 1930s semi on the Birmingham Road, Alvechurch, where our second daughter was born on the living room floor. By 1998, even after five years in the


village, I would no doubt still have been considered a “newbie” or “in- comer”, but Alvechurch felt like home to me, being the longest I’d lived in one place since childhood. My reporter’s nose could sniff all


sorts of stories in the village air and I started playing with designs for a magazine for the area from very early on.


The “desktop publishing” revolu- tion meant people like me could now just about produce a magazine without the resources of a large pub- lisher and I still have the files of those early designs somewhere, almost all with a cover bearing the same pho- tograph I’d taken of Morris dancers outside The Crown Inn at Withybed Green, Alvechurch. It was during the continues overleaf


The Village October 2018 25


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