Best of 2025 | What you’ve been reading on Place Midlands this year
It’s fair to say 2025 was a big year at Place Midlands – it’s the year we launched to the world! We’ve trawled our statistics to work out what you’ve been looking at, and loving, over the first few months of our coverage.
And it’s an eclectic mix which kicks off our first end of year round up, throwing up a few unexpected wins. Here are our best-read stories over the latter half of the year.
Work starts on £8m Bilston Market overhaul
Our most-read story of 2025 was a surprise, although it is a hot topic in the Black Country. The long-awaited and somewhat delayed redevelopment of Bilston Market was getting a few of you hot under the collar, judging by the comments we received.
After a delay of some eight months while City of Wolverhampton Council completed a value engineering exercise on the scheme, work finally begun on the market redevelopment in November, after demolition works kicked off earlier in the year.
The scheme has generated some strong opinions from the public and from traders, who have been moved off to a temporary site while work is completed. It should be good news when the market re-opens next year though, with better access, a new canopy, upgraded toilets, enhanced stalls, and improved public spaces, set to make it “best market in the West Midlands” – according to the council.
Latest expansion of Villa Park gets green light
The chimneys of Birmingham City’s bold new Sports Quarter stadium may have grabbed the headlines in December, but it was city rivals Aston Villa who won the hearts (and the clicks) of Place Midlands readers.
We broke the news of their successful planning application to expand capacity at Villa Park in early November, part of a project to get capacity up to the 50,000 mark ahead of the Women’s World Cup in 2028.
This project involves filling in the corners on two sides of the stadium – but it’s linked to a larger redevelopment of the North Stand. Further improvements to Witton and Aston railway stations are also planned before the tournament, further power of the proof of sport to regenerate our towns and cities. Which brings us nicely onto…
Urgent Euro 2028 upgrade plan for rail stations
Those railway station upgrades were the third-best read story on Place Midlands this year.
The West Midland Combined Authority is set to plough up to £25m of extra funding into railway stations connecting Villa Park to the city centre, which handle around 8,000 football fans between them on a match day.
Of further interest though is a single line in the report to the WMCA’s investment board, which says a potential phase two programme could see “aspirational long-term improvements” to unlock wider growth and regeneration opportunities in the area.
No specific details have yet been released, but we should know more by the summer, when updated designs and a business case are brought forward.
War Rooms redevelopment heads Nottingham Agenda
We love a planning committee here – and so do our East Midlands readers, it seems, with the planned redevelopment of a former cold-war bunker leading the statistics for the region.
The 1950’s bunker was originally planned to house 400 people including senior government officials in the event of a nuclear attack – but was decommissioned in the 1960’s.
Following planning approval, the building is now set to become more than 100 homes as part of a redevelopment by Hamilton Russell Harper and East Midlands Housing Association, which will also see office space, a restaurant and a health and leisure facility built on Chalfont Drive, around two miles from the city centre.
HS2 pauses key sections of ‘overriding priority’ test track
We know our readers are mad for transport stories, and they play a huge part in the connectivity and regeneration of our communities, so we try to cover them as much as we can.
And it’s a big year for transport across the region, with an expanding Midlands Metro, the launch of a new transport strategy in the East Midlands, and of course – the (sort of) imminent arrival of HS2 to Birmingham.
It was the ongoing saga of the latter which captured your attention earlier this month, as we flagged up a significant update which had been passed over by a big-government-project-weary national and regional media.
As part of re-sequencing efforts for the project, major engineering work on the line has been paused in order to concentrate on a 50-mile section of track between Birmingham and the Cotswolds.
The move is an effort to push ahead with testing for the railway before major systems can be commissioned for all parts of the track – and although it seems unlikely to get the much-delayed programme back on schedule, it does at least seem as though things may be gathering momentum.
You can, of course, insert your own railway related pun about the project being back on track or hitting the buffers here.
And finally…
From the Place Midlands team, a huge thank you to our readers for all your support in 2025.
While we’ve been finding our feet this year it’s fair to say the reception we’ve received from you has been phenomenal. We’ve got some great stuff lined up for the new year and we can’t wait to share it with you.
What are the hot topics you’d like us to cover in 2026? What are you enjoying, and what are we missing? Leave us a comment below, or drop us an email at [email protected]
