We miss Smokey’s. We miss the much loved shed where you could get a sausage cooked to perfection, you could read The Star with impunity and invariably there was a hungover builder boasting of how many grams of toot he’d managed to hoover up on a Tuesday night. For many years a landmark in our community, but as is the nature of progress no modern urban habitat, with aspirations of grandeur, can sanction its sole source of sausages coming from a shed. Inevitably Smokey’s past into history only to be replaced by…….what? What is that tiny building that sprang up to replace our sausage shed?
It appears that the delay in bringing this site back into use is not completely down to the abysmal standard of building work.
The decision to close Smokey’s sent shock waves throughout the upper echelons of Moseley’s great and good and it seems the Moseley Society were not going to take it lying down. In a fit of desperation they managed to get a covenant attached to the land that stipulates that all future businesses should also be called Smokey’s in order to preserve our heritage. This outlandish move has effectively frightened investors who can’t see what return they can make on a business with a predefined name.
Until now that is.
We can exclusively reveal that steps have been taken to raise funds to open the world’s smallest Smokey Robinson museum in the heart of Moseley. The genius behind this idea told us “It makes sense really, Smokey was born in the heart of Motor City Detroit and the parallels are obvious, a once great area, trading on past glories in the shadows of a derelict testament to the auto-mobile, that’s basically Moseley isn’t it?”
He went on “We’re going to have everything, two foot high replicas of The Miracles, examples of Agony and Ecstasy and genuine tears from a clown. Of course we’re competing with the big boys in Smokey Robinson memorabilia so we’re going to need a good sum of cash to get started. That’s why we’re trying to crowd fund £3 million.”
This is surely one of the most sensible ideas we’ve heard in a while.
At time of going to print Smokey Robinson had no knowledge or interest in Moseley.
I HEAR VIOLINS.
The Smokies new idea stinks and we all know that a grant from Big Lottery, The People’s Democratic Republic of Birmingham and donations from the street dwellers will make this place into what it should be – an exhibition of down town Beruit as it was and as it is to remind us all of conditions the locals have to live in. Similarities have been made to conditions found in apartments in South B14 to give the exhibition a local feel. One local smiled when informed of the new venture and asked if coffee would be served at tables outside as a change from the many other venues offering this experience locally.