Work starts on the tiling of the John F Kennedy memorial for Digbeth, Birmingham

Work has at long last started on putting the thousands of small tiles together to form the mosaic that will re-create the 1968 John F Kennedy memorial in Digbeth.

Oliver Budd who is recreating the memorial has started a daily blog, showing photos as his work progresses – see his blog at http://www.buddmosaics.co.uk/newsblog.html

Readers who follow my own blog will know I have taken a lead role in getting the John F Kennedy memorial re-created in Digbeth, Birmingham.

Previous blog entries can be seen at:

http://martinmullaney.blogspot.com/2011/10/permission-sought-for-new-john-f.html

http://martinmullaney.blogspot.com/2011/10/creation-of-birmingham-kennedy-memorial.html

Oliver Budd is re-creating this memorial, which will be located on the corner of Floodgate Street and High Street Deritend; across the road from the Irish Centre.

Oliver is the son of Kenneth Budd who created the original 1968 memorial. He still runs the same studios that his father ran and has all the original scale drawings that his father used for the numerous mosaics he did across Birmingham in the 1960s.

The longest part of this job was always going to be getting the small tiles, or smalti tiles, from Italy....and it has proved to the case. Four months after ordering the tiles, they arrived in late February.

As a result of this delay, we don’t think we will have the memorial ready for 29th May 2012 – the 95th birthday of JFK. Instead it will most likely be finished in late June, in time for the arrival of the USA Athletics team.