Don't Look Now... fate gifts me a trip to Venice.

November 15, 2023

Returning to Birmingham after a three week retreat in Berlin: city of creative inspiration, civic generosity, robust infrastructure and dark neighbourhoods. The grieving is not the leaving of Berlin but in the getting back home: the seemingly endless navigations of 5am starts, cryptic online check ins, hidden fees, lengthy stopovers, unmeasurable baggage allowances, the wasteful inconvenience of a printed boarding pass and the low key agony of the flight itself.

Hoping for a cheap, direct flight that had not yet been announced, I left booking the return journey to the 11th hour. On the eve of departure, there was just one affordable option: an eleven hour journey stopping over in Venice’s Marco Polo airport. A quick map check revealed this to be just outside the city, allowing me enough time for a whistle stop visit. What had seemed like a nightmare resolved into an unexpected (if brief) extra holiday.

What to do with five hours in Venice, that watery anti-Birmingham?

By chance, I had already had diarised a screening of Nic Roeg’s 1973 chiller Don’t Look Now on the day after my return, at Thimble Mill Lane Library’s film club, Bearwood. I should look for the various hotels, churches, canals and alley ways of that film (easy to find these online). I chose the church that John Baxter repairs a mosaic and the abandoned palace of the final scene where he finally meets the red coated figure who has been haunting the film’s periphery.

Don’t Look Now may even be my favourite film (how do you decide?) A masterpiece of story telling, atmospheres and emotions and with such well-written, beautifully realised characters that the looseness and openness of its ultimate meaning prompts sustained efforts to resolve the mystery. Many films are mysterious; few lead to contemplation years after the film’s end. Each time I revisit the film, I focus on a different aspect: dialogue, themes, background nuances, looking for further clues. The film’s atmosphere comes to mind every time someone states: ‘more canals than Venice’ (while I counter: ‘but their canals are better!’) Any red duffle coat will do it— surely true of anyone who has seen the film. Anyone standing facing the wall, a stance borrowed by the Blair Witch. In Moseley, I walk past daily Julie Christie’s home from her days with Birmingham Old Rep. Her presence was felt while I was enrolled at Wolverhampton Art School, c1991, where my print tutor Don Bessant had been her pre-fame boyfriend. Christie’s later romantic partner was Brian Eno who I had just seen perform in Berlin (his watery and sinister ‘Julie With…’ is apparently about her). These strange connection always reveal themselves when you seek them out.

For me, the film’s underlying theme is one of inevitability: that the events of your life are unavoidable, unchangeable and (nearly) unguessable. The actions and fates of the characters are as certain as the film’s script; there’s no point hoping for a different ending, though you can certainly have a different reading each time. That said, the film is not quite the same as Daphne du Maurier’s short story, in which we don’t learn how the daughter dies (so, then, why Venice?) and in which it is Laura who wears the crimson coat, so the fate of that story is not fixed. In either version, fate is cast as the unseen—or glimpsed—monster: there is no where to run and it certainly is not your friend.

Accordingly, the free gift of the Venice trip, a day ahead of the screening, felt like an omen. I was unusually careful, packing everything the day before the flight, quadruple checking flight times, terminals, boarding passes and left luggage locations. I met a friend to hand back the Berlin apartment keys, referencing my heightened sensitivity to the world. Only once before, I told my friend, had I missed a flight and that was ten years ago, in Berlin. On that occasion, my passport had slipped out in a museum visited earlier in the day. I noticed its absence in the airport, three hours ahead of the flight, so chanced returning to the museum to collect the passport. Transport links were good, roads clear, the passport safe at reception, airport security was efficient but I still missed the gate closure by about ten minutes. Never again, I vowed. Even relating this horror story to Elvira did not prompt me to check I had my passport this time, which I did not. I handed over the keys, left to catch the airport schnell train, then realised the shocking loss. Enough time to chase Elvira and return to the apartment. My passport was there on the desk, along with my souvenir Eno ticket. Then a familiar Berlin dash to the airport, during which my phone fell to the cobbles, shattering the glass and permanently dislodging the SIM. I cleared security fifteen minutes after the gate had closed, yet somehow was still able to join the departing plane. This time, no one seemed to mind that I was late, though the whole episode felt like a warning.

Later, the Alps illusion: are those clouds below, or snow covered peaks?

Marco Polo to Venice was a quick bus journey and I now had five hours to explore at leisure; or rather to make it to the single destination I decided on, situated right on the other end of the city. It would be the crumbling grand arcades visited at the end of the film, the recently restored Museo di Palazzo Grimani. Then lunch in the nearby square of Santa Maria Formosa. The phone fall meant I had to save a series of maps as photos to chart the route, but it wasn’t anywhere detailed enough. In Venice, one cannot merely follow the canals in the way that’s true for Birmingham’s cuts. They are not a pedestrian’s navigation; they are there for Venice’s various floating bodies. After a mile of second guessing the route, seeing the impossibility, I bought a map for €2 and stashed the broken phone. Instantly Venice made sense. It had to be crossed with either a local’s knowledge or by alley by alley map checks. It was mild for November and still busy - though nothing like the peak season. Don’t Look Now is off peak: the Baxters’ hotel is getting ready for a dust-sheeted winter.

I stopped to rest every time I found myself in a square with seating - and like Birmingham that’s not all of them. However, unlike Birmingham, Venice’s squares are relentlessly beguiling. Venice is the anti-Birmingham: both are mediaeval cities but while B town has cautiously held on to a few elements of its Old Town, all of Venice is the Old Town, with a few cautious forays into the modern era. The lego fantasia of the Museo del Novecento is jarring in context, yet would be taken for a Travelodge if encountered in Centenary Square.

Finally I’m there, after an hour or more of scotomaic zig zags. The palace does not look familiar from the courtyard but then I see the opulent ceilings through the windows, their decaying grandeur being glimpsed through fog and shadows of the film’s denouement. I repair to the restaurant with the map, imagining I am awaiting the Baxters, now 50 years late. Here, I can see I needed to be on a different canal:, to approach—counterintuitively—the palace by water in order to recognise the scene. After tempura, a litre of sparkling water and a chat with the waiter (who hadn’t heard of Birmingham, even when I prompt him with Spaghetti Junction) I return and suddenly everything pops into focus. There is the line of boats that John Baxter has to climb over to get to the palace’s wrought iron gates. The same gates that he inexplicably closes and locks behind him. The steps, corridors, pediments and ceilings of that scene all then crystallise from the gate. Something else feels very close: the looming sense of cinematic history, the ripples that the film—that scene especially—had on moviegoers the world over, and for decades. It feels like the scene of a real event. What actually happened? Today I can go no further, and with dusk falling, I head back to Birmingham without incident, stopping to buy Venetian cioccolatini for the film club.

The Italian treats are received well; Viv of the film club wears her striped black and white top, like those worn by the gondoliers, while another member has a red hooded coat. Both deny these were conscious sartorial decisions. I wear red, but intentionally. Viewing the film for what might be the eighth time, I am now intimately familiar with the story and can focus on some of the supporting details, looking—like Detective Sabbione— for further clues, and the film is dense with them. This time I await the first spoken words, often significant in films whose impact lingers. These key words, wholly unexpectedly, come from Action Man, in a scene that I had not paid any attention to previously. Action Man is being transported in a wheelbarrow by the Baxters’ daughter Christine, as she plays in the fields around her home. The words spoken are radioed in by his superior, who speaks in a plummy female voice: ‘Action Man patrol: Open Fire. This is your commandant speaking. Mortar attack, dig in.’ Inside the house, the Baxters relax in front of a roaring fire, finding an answer to her daughter’s question about a pond’s water ‘nothing is as it seems, offers John. Cut back to Christine herself with the pull string Action Man, this time the commandant issues the chilling order: ‘Action Man patrol - fall in’. Only on later reflection can these words have meaning, and are the only line given to the film’s antagonist, being the powerful and malicious designer of fate, or fate itself. At the other end of the film, the crimson coated Goblin never speaks, only communicating a silent NO with a shake of her head. What, then, was the question? Perhaps it is any of those that have wrong-footed John up to this point, during his days in Venice. Or perhaps NO pre-empts any possible questions or explanations that John, Laura or anyone else involved in the film, including Action Man, Daphne, Nic and Viv, and you, could have.

Two Gray Days in Glasgow

September 14, 2023

Back in October 2019, I devised an afternoon’s walk round Glasgow’s West End in search of the murals of Alasdair Gray. I was prompted to do this by a jarring but delightful discovery: for the longest time, I had falsely believed that Gray was no longer (to quote my late mother) 'compass mantis’ and had long ago ceased production of words and pictures. A chance encounter with an online interview revealed him to be in advanced years and confined to a wheelchair, but lucid and actively translating Dante, while working on images as restrictions allowed. It felt like a spectre has become flesh again. Gray had been such an important discovery in my teenage years: an older Glaswegian friend (Bill Slimmond, raised in Paisley) recommended I read Lanark while we were both studying on the same art foundation course in Manchester. When I returned Bill’s book, he insisted I should keep it as I would want refer to it again, or to lend it out myself. Not only did I do exactly that, I read all the other Gray titles that were available in 1989, and even wrote my own (unfinished) strange story of hallucinatory workplaces, class conflict and colourful glass vessels filled with sweet, sticky alcohols. That story remains vivid but is confined to now unreachable computer disk medium, and it is better that it stays there.

I met him once, and by ‘met’ I mean we existed together briefly, near the same table Birmingham. In 1996, Mavis Belfrage was freshly published and my local art centre hosted a Q&A during the city’s Literature Festival. A key element of the festival’s extensive programme required Gray to be shown to his seat and advised on the availability of chilled drinking water on a nearby low table. I was delighted to be selected to take on this important responsibility, which was carried out efficiently and, I felt, wittily and elegantly.

In 2017, my friend Adriana had relocated from Brum to Glasgow, and I arranged a visit, inspired by Gray’s revivified presence in my mind. We drank at the darkly cosmic Oran Mor, its epic ceiling fresco surely Gray’s masterpiece (Adriana later was married there), ate at The Ubiquitous Chip restaurant, which features several of Gray’s curiously collaged wall paintings and then took the underground back home from Hillhead, which is surely the AG mural most familiar to Glasgow citizens. Earlier in the day I had visited a small tiled floor at a swimming baths, the depicted swimnasts there bearing Gray’s signature style. Adriana had seen his work around the city, but not connected them.

At The Ubiquitous Chip (an ironic reference to the standard plate-filler; one which is never seen at The UC) I thought of a more ambitious city walking tour I’d like to do, which combed the city for further Gray moments, as presented by fact or fiction. It would require a comprehensive revisit of his stories, pictures and places, and would reveal patterns invisible to the remote reader. The city would be the catalyst to reveal that lost layer. His stories straddle worlds as standard and I loved the idea of a real-world guided tour that regularly dipped into fiction. Gray’s stories are often set in named and identifiable places, even providing specific addresses, which has the effect of anchoring an imaginative or even outlandish story; making the fantastic seem more real. Unlike literature’s various unreachable towns of Arkham, Barchester, Casterbridge and Castle Rock, Gray allows his fictions to be presented as real. While we talked (Adriana and I) I sensed Gray may appear at any moment, knowing he lived locally and that this restaurant was a favourite. That possibility fuelled lively thoughts, though I would likely have only issued a cheery wave.

Two things yanked the reins of this galloping steed to bring it to a screeching halt: the sad death of Alasdair Gray just a few weeks later and, a few weeks after that, covid-19. All my various walking plans were shelved, but in their place, long dormant desires were allowed time and space, light and water. I researched and wrote my first book (a guide book to Birmingham: ‘111 Places in Birmingham That You Shouldn’t Miss’) and my first published work of fiction (‘Cup Song’ in the anthology Digbeth Stories). The imaginative use of cities, as practiced by Gray, absolutely informed my writing for both of these factual and fictional works.

Years later, the Alasdair Gray citizen’s walk is real, being the vision of Rachel Loughran and with the walking tour being devised by Rachel Cochrane-Slocombe. On the verge of a cinematic release of Poor Things, filtered through the surreal heart of Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite), Glasgow is claiming back the now drearily predictable London setting of Gray’s 1992 Victorian sci fi comedy-fantasy, which by now has a genre to identify it: Steam Punk, or perhaps PoMo Steam Punk. This is a self-guided tour that visits key places from the book and invites you (more or less) to read along in the manner of a loved and familiar film or musical. Has this ever been attempted before?

The scale is ambitious, even epic. The introduction suggests 2 - 2.5 hours across three separate city zones, but I think only the most competitive and sporty of Gray’s fans will complete the journey in this meagre time. I allowed myself two days to explore the city at leisure and select from the most intriguing of the annexed optional extras. The suggested order of the walk is: East End > City Centre > West End, perhaps to reflect reading a page from left to right, but I did not follow the route sequentially: more like the ‘flashback’ narrative of Lanark. I was meeting another friend for lunch at the University and so decided to start there. Alas, it was Ken’s first day at a new job at UG so he couldn’t join me for the walk. After I gifted him Lanark following a move from Birmingham to Edinburgh in 2018, he too had become a keen Gray reader.

I arrive via Hillhead station, where an amazing mural by Gray of the area was installed in 2012. A pigeon’s eye view allows a good sense of how the local land lies… and this was Gray’s domestic domain since 1969. Buildings and streets are faithfully rendered and labelled in Gray’s distinctive ‘wedged’ lettering (the ‘Gray Display’ font) with the occasion wry caption and comment. The network of streets is bookended by grids of illustrations of the real and imagined. Here are ‘All Kinds of Folk’: Urban Foxes, Fiery Dragons, Lucky (white) Dogs, Bonny Fighters, online Culture Vultures (their talons clutching at mouses) and the Sharp Stingers: a pair of poised scorpions, one of whom we will meet again.

Hundreds, thousands see daily (or at least walk past) these lines:

Do not let daily to-ing and fro-ing

To earn what you need to keep going

Prevent what you once felt when wee

Hopeful and free.

The whole work looks like it could fold into a book jacket for an imaginary or yet-to-be-published codex of works. The mural is behind the turnstile but if you aren’t travelling by underground, you can ask to be freely admitted to see the mural.

On then to the University, where Archibald McCandless studied as a medical student in 1879. Head to the main gatehouse rather than the modern medicine block for a more authentic setting. In the foyer, a collage of Glasgow extracts includes an illustration by Gray, where she is moping around on a staircase with a likewise listless ivory king.…she looks familiar but I couldn’t quite place her! I nod politely in case it later turns out I do know her [note: it is still a mystery]. My G trip coincided with Scotland’s hottest day —27 degrees!— and so lunch with Ken was a picnic in Kelvingrove Park, also on the walk route. The river Kelvin flows through the park, forming a wooded, natural valley, giving the impression of being much more rural than its true metropolitan setting. Without really trying, we find the Loch Katherine Memorial Fountain. The stonework features carved fauna and flora, but in recent years real ferns now grow straight from the stone work amongst the gannets, owls, centaurs, fish and other real and not-real beasties. A welcome revelation is the scorpion, curled over ready to sting, to be found in an upper roundel of the fountain, perhaps with some lost heraldic meaning and possibly this specimen collected by Gray, for display in his Hillhead mural. Several people have thrown in lucky coins amongst the algae, others vocalise their wishes aloud that the fountain be repaired (it was last active during Glasgow’s City of Culture era c 1990). Until that repair happens, a cheeky pair of enterprising weans collect the coins, sparkling through the water in the noon sun, in a seaside bucket brought for the occasion.

The river, fountain and park are backdrops to the story, and referenced in footnotes, rather than featuring key events from the Poor Things narrative. Further along the route is a specific address that is pivotal to the story. 18 Park Circus is the prestigious residence of Dr. Godwin Baxter, and the location of his secret experiments in reanimating the dead. Not a stone is or leaf is out of place on this crescent of fashionable townhouses, but counter this civic scene with a stroll along the service alley (or ‘tradesman’s entrance’) of Park Terrace, a more humble domestic vantage and, what’s more, scene of a hotly contested coach house in the novel’s later thorough, fussy (and fictitious) footnotes and references. The houses are dominated by the suitably gothic towers of Old Trinity College and Park Church Tower, and for me this is a highlight of the walk. The routes allow some flexibility and indeed the official order further suggests extra locations to optionally drop in, so I don’t feel I’m missing a particular narrative arc by spending the rest of the day at the Kelvingove museum, glad to be out of the sun. For the infrequent visitor to Glasgow, the draw is too great. Lansdowne United Presbyterian Church, scene of the thwarted and confused marriage between Bella and Archibald, dominates all of these streets. When you visit it, you will realised you saw it many minutes previously.

My hotel is next to the School of Art, where Gray studied from 1952 to 1957, and now encased in scaffolding. On the way back, I dip into the degree show exhibitions by architecture and interior design students. The young creatives I chat to there don’t know Gray’s work but have heard of the forthcoming Poor Things, such is Lanthimos’ current rising star quality and are glad to hear of the link.

I leave my luggage at the station the next morning, then head out to St Andrews Suspension Bridge, location of one of the book’s darker moments: the suicide of the woman who becomes Bella (I am merely hinting at the story’s plot points and navigating around spoilers: the creators suggest you already have familiarised yourself with the novel before tackling the walk). The story is a work of fiction —obviously but also not so obviously— and the suicide is a key plot point, but nevertheless the bridge visit may bring to mind all real watery deaths and sad ends. When I visit, there is a nearby fresh floral and photographic tribute to ‘Brian’. The bridge in fact and fiction allows the work of the Glasgow Humane Society to be told: the bridge is dedicated to the memory of Ben and Sarah Parsonage; the unassuming boatman rescued more people from drowning than anyone in Britain. The nearby lodge was theirs, planted with sculptures, canoes and cherry trees to further their memory.

Perhaps the bridge was chosen by Gray for its proximity to the People’s Palace, where he once worked as ‘city recorder’ and his portrait work is still exhibited there today. Gentle sketches, loose interiors, playful perspectives and collage-like assemblies offer informal glimpses of the civic dignitaries and key city figures of the 1970s. An opulent, perhaps overwrought fountain outside depicts figures and animals associated with Victorian Empire - an Eastern twin to the Loch Katherine fountain of Kelvingrove Park. ‘This terracotta fountain is the largest and best example of its kind in the world,’ brags a sign, but the fountain sure could do with a clean. The park here is generous and expansive but doesn’t have the mixed terrain of Kelvingrove. The former Templeton carpet factory, now empty, is a striped spectacle worth a quick glimpse.

The walk to the Necropolis, in search of the McCandless tomb, passes through domestic residences and the gigantic Tennent Caledonian brewery. On the way, look out for the paired castle-like buildings when you reach Gallowgate, one swallowed up by a low level housing estate. They invite a folk story to be invented to explain their connection and survival. Maybe there is a clue in the street name.… Devise that story as you pass the Caledonia brewery, with murals celebrating Tennent’s advertising down the decades, including the famous Lager Lovelies of the 1970s—and their recipes for potato scones.

The path to the tomb is one of relentless ascent, with some red-herring paths to beguile the less familiar visitor. One headstone spoke to me; an illustration of surreal Glasgow’s coat of arms, which seems very much like Gray’s own bold line drawing style.

There’s a tree that never grew, There’s a bird that never flew, There’s a fish that never swam, There’s the bell that never rang.

It is true that for two days, all heraldry, all rampant leopards, dragons, cats and dogs have taken on his clean, bold style. Archibald (McLellan) is the name on the grave… it would not be the first time a graveyard inspired character names for a writer. On conquering the summit, I lie on the sunlit uplands beside the Monteath mausoleum. No name or text of any sort is recorded there, meaning it can fictionally assume another identity: in Poor Things it is the Baxter family tomb. By good fortune a tour group arrives and relates the (real) history of the tomb; easy, passive and supine research for me. I learn that the noduled stonework actually features the heads of leopards, now weathered and gnarled but just about recognisable as such when I find my feet, fifteen minutes later.

For the final chapter of the tour (or second if you are doing them sequentially), I headed straight to GOMA—Gallery Of Modern Art — where there are Alasdair Gray works in the Domestic Bliss exhibition in gallery 4 (on for years, it seems). This was formerly the Glasgow Stock Exchange, mentioned in the book along with the Theatre Royal, Glasgow Art Club, Sauchiehall Street and more… I feel certain I’ve visited all these on my various Glasgow visits. The two that intrigue me this afternoon are the given address of Duncan Wedderburn, who lives at 41 Aytoun Street, some way out in Pollokshields, and the Alasdair Gray Archive itself. The Archive, I notice, requires some advance notice ahead of a visit which I assume is more than my available hour and a half. Accordingly, I Uber to the address (in reality, it’s Aytoun Road, perhaps a disguise) vowing to return to the archive with a more comfortable schedule. It’s a smart residential address in Pollokshields that would be an hour’s walk away were you to do it. I like it’s inclusion in the official itinerary, another element to make the strange story real. I also enjoy ending up in a part of town I’d be unlikely to visit otherwise — it feels like somehow challenging fate, or at least challenging the destinations that Glasgow might otherwise hand me. There is time to stroll back to the station in the still-warm late afternoon, even against the impossible-to-cross. Part of me, I feel a week later, is still in Glasgow, waiting to cross the road.

And then it’s all done. A beautiful landscape is revealed out of the window as I head back through Cumbria to Brum, eventually too dark to see anything but myself.

The walk info is here:

https://www.poorthingsnovel.com/poor-things-tour-/

…while the comprehensive Poor Things novel guide is here:

https://www.poorthingsnovel.com/

…and the even more comprehensive Alsdair Gray Archive site is here:

https://thealasdairgrayarchive.org/

Spaceplay for the Win

March 20, 2023

Back in December, the University of Wolverhampton and Spaceplay announced a competition to win one of Spaceplay’s sold-out micro-sculptures of the School of Art, known affectionately—I think— as the Milk Crate. Entrants were invited to share their memories and stories of the school. This was pretty much my daily destination between September 1990 and July 1993 while I was a student there and the location of many fond experiences and memories. Below is my winning entry! And below that, an unboxing of the prize…

What's your strongest memory of the School of Art?

I studied Fine Art (Sculpture) there between 1990 and 1993. I loved the course and would often go in to my studio space over the weekend to work, though most students did not take this option. One wintery evening in 1992, I was working alone in the ‘sculpture pit’ on floor 6, sewing together scraps of roofing lead with wire to create strange, organic 3-D forms (I still have this rather ugly sculpture). Progress was slow and precise and it was easy to zone out while working. I lost track of time, estimating it to be late afternoon but knew that the security officer would appear at 4pm to announce that the building was closing. By the time it grew dark enough for me to put the lights on in the studio, I realised it must have surely gone 4pm. I took the lift down to the ground floor and sure enough the building was unstaffed and I was locked in. My immediate response was to go back to work on my lead sculpture, glad to have some extra time. By nightfall proper, the heating had turned off and it was getting cold. I was also getting hungry. I found some tinned goods on the Illustration floor, beautifully rebranded with a student’s handmade label designs featuring cut out letters (this was before digital design methods were widely adopted). Survival instinct engaged, I hacked these open with a screwdriver and heated up some curried beans (with raisins) on a portable hotplate that I had in my studio. I went back to work, hotplate serving as a radiator to the enormous space. By late evening, I was freezing and hungry again and went to look for more food. A second sweep of the floors turned up only cinnamon ‘Winter Warmer’ Tic Tacs and a carton of Ribena. I felt the urgent need to leave and resolved to escape. On the side of the School of Art facing the Molineux Stadium, scaffolding had been erected for the full height of the building. I knew my window would slide open as the screw keeping it shut was missing (opening the windows since some tie after 1971 was strictly forbidden). Dare I risk climbing down the scaffold? Yes—the call of hot food and a soft, warm bed was too great. I grabbed my housekeys and stepped out onto the narrow ledge, closed the window behind me and began my descent of the scaffold lattice. I seem to remember there being wooden platforms and ladders connecting the levels, but that these had been chained closed to stop people using them to get in. By focusing on each successive hand- and foot-hold, I could avoid thinking about the sheer drop or being seen. My memory of the descent is of how cold it was rather than how scary. Minutes later, I landed safely on the snowy ground and minutes later was walking home, past The Feathers where I had enjoyed many after-hours lock-ins, past the football stadium and into Whitmore Reans, relishing the rare feeling of freedom and gratitude to be on solid ground. I vowed never to share the story with anyone for thirty years...

If you studied Illustration at Wolverhampton in the early 90s and came in one Monday to find your illustration project ruined, well we need to talk!

The boxed concrete sculpture made by Spaceplay is a beautiful object and I’m thrilled to own it, not least because their creations tend to sell out very quickly. As much time and thought has gone into the packaging as making the sculpture itself. It is housed in an almost Mecca-like mysterious black cube with no external clues to the contents or who made it. Once inside, a small card shows a detail of the building, including the octagonal windows like the one I escaped from (these are less clear on the small scale of the sculpture itself, so it is nice to have this extra detail in another medium). The block itself is protected by several layers of grey foam. A U of W T shirt and tote bag accompanied the box when it arrived last week, with Spaceplay’s modernist restyling of their logo. Look our for Spaceplay’s Brutal Easter Egg Hunt over the Easter weekend 8 -10 April 2023.

I dug out some photos of the Art School and my sculptures from this time at the request of the U of W and share some here. The red rubber objects are dog toys twisted into nine different shapes. My friend Phil Beech owned the original—or maybe his dog ‘Orph’ owned it— and while playing with it, I realised it naturally would hold its shape in a variety of forms. I set about trying to find them all by outsourcing the work to likely ‘noodlers’. Eight came back over a few days and then a ninth (shown in the 1 o’clock position) was discovered by Kath Gardner some weeks later—an impossible eureka moment for those ‘in the loop’. Print tutor Pete Olly remarked that it was the most ‘complete’ sculpture he had ever seen.

The intense pencil drawing was chewed while rolled up by the same dog; Phil was horrified and thought I would go nuts but I actually liked the results…good dog! The black objects were plastic and rubber components that I found on urban walks, presumably things that fell of vehicles as these discoveries tended to be roadside finds. I collected dozens the only rule for picking them up was not to know what they were. I arranged 154 of them as if they were part of a larger taxonomy, each element similar to its neighbour. After graduating, I kept them in a cardboard box which I threw out in 1994, believing them to be a waste of space. That decision is one of my few regrets in life! Looking back, I think I was trying to shed a particular outlook that I felt would not be helpful in the world of work; shortly after this I realised my earlier mindset was still applicable to many aspects of work and my Art School days still inform the work I do today. Since 1994, I have been restoring the sculpture with replacement roadside finds and by now have a similar number to begin arranging them according to that same invisible taxonomy. The original work took three years to collect and the replacement nearly 30, which says something either about the amount of urban walks I undertook back then, or perhaps the quality of the adhesion of the rubber components to the vehicles.

The last photo is of Illustration student Kulbir Sohal, pictured outside the art block in Winter 1991/2 and definitely not the student whose work I wrecked during my fight to stay alive. The cosmic jacket she is wearing was actually mine! What can I say, it was the 90s…

‘Fleas Do Not Smoke’

May 30, 2022

A trip to Manchester Art Gallery to catch the last day of Protest, an exhibition celebrating the life and art of Derek Jarman.

I booked a late return train to give me time to do something else with the day, without knowing exactly what that would be. As a teen, I could happily spend the entire day in the city and Manchester still holds that charm and allure for me. However, after a few mental calculations I decide to spend rest of the afternoon in Hyde, the town of my birth and upbringing between 1971 and 1990 and the town that I would be escaping by spending the day in the city.

In the 1980s, the 210 service would go directly from Piccadilly Bus Station to Gee Cross, taking me and my Brian Eno LPs back home. I also caught it from my secondary school in Denton, a few miles further down the line. Years later, if the number pops up in another context, I still think of it as being a ‘reliable’ quantity. These days, no bus seems to go further than Hyde Bus Station but this allows me to revisit the miles leading up to my former address.

I want to revisit the environment around the house I was born in and grew up in. We never moved during that time and my mother remained there until her death in 2009 (my father died there a few years earlier). Inevitably, the terrain has been keenly embossed on my memory. This visit was prompted by the reading of around 170 letters written and exchanged between my parents from 1959 to 1966, totalling around 2000 pages. I always knew about the letters, knew where they were kept, but had never read them or really felt motivated to do so. Covid-inspired introspection prompted me to absorb the letters over the past few months, illuminating the unknown years and events that led up to my existence.

The journey is very familiar and it feels as if just a few weeks have elapsed since I last travelled this way.

Facing the bus station in Hyde is the compact Astoria, never actively a cinema in my lifetime and barely registering at all during my childhood, but now a source of fascination like all other ‘invisible Cinemas’. In 2022, its original sign is still just about visible, the name retained for its later time as a Bingo hall. Nearby, something prompts me to dip into a side alley (which turns out to have a name: ‘Borough Arcade’). The alley runs behind what I remember being a supermarket and now still trading as a discount store. In the upper reaches are the remains of the neon sign which once advertised the supermarket to the shoppers of the busier Market Street. This sign was never lit in my lifetime and it is a surprise to see it still there. The alley wall space it occupies is now low value ‘estate’ and removing it would represent too much time and energy. Alleys such as this are where to find those old commercial survivors. The supermarket itself is a blur: no clear memories other than the colours cream and oxblood, both of which may also have been on sale somewhere in the market. Large weighing scales with a huge dial up to 20 stone, for the personal use of shoppers. Curious how that was once a public service. How old was I if I remember being three stone? 1p secured the measure; scales made by Avery of Birmingham.

Across Clarendon Street is the children’s roundabout ride, surely not the same one I knew in the 1970s but certainly occupying the exact same space. Maybe every element has been replaced. The vehicles themselves are hidden by boards as it is a Sunday, but the upper reaches are adorned by painted characters from Finding Nemo and Toy Story, films whose earliest viewers are now in their 20s and 30s. Mickey Mouse, now well into his 90s, is here airbrushed to recapture his youth. Through my teens, I watched as the vehicles I knew from childhood were replaced until nothing familiar remained other than my favourite: a miniature, dark green double decker bus. With my pink-tipped sweet cigarettes or licorice pipe, I would pretend to smoke on the ‘upper saloon’ until around 1977. The timeless children’s game of recreating what you saw around you. A polite but unenforceable rule seen on Manchester buses: Please Do Not Smoke. On an older bus you might see the request No Spitting, a public drive to curb the spread of tuberculosis.

Nearby is The White Lion, still trading and adorned with the tiled relief of a proud lion, made in six separate pieces. A rich, golden-brown hue, like a tangy sauce. The pubs of Hyde are largely a mystery to me, known only from the outside. My parents never came here and my own drinking days began in nearby Ashton-Under-Lyne, where I attended college aged 16 - 19. Hyde pubs therefore still hold some mystique for me, an unknown quality. Many were tiled and richly glazed, an attractive and expensive adornment but one which was chosen primarily to facilitate an easy clean up the next morning. As a child, I knew that only pubs and butchers did this.

Not accessible today is the indoor market which absolutely held an enduring and deeply magical allure. Many weeks I could choose a dinosaur from the toy shop cabin and there was a coin-op vehicle ride for children on each level. The food stalls held just as much intrigue. The fish stall near the entrance with exotic-looking steaks of larger fish that we never bought. ‘What’s that one mum?’ I asked of one such puck. ‘Cod’ advised an elderly lady, helpfully. A silence from me as I knew the rule about strangers, but then an urgent order to thank her from my embarrassed mother. Then there was the dreadful day I asked for fishcakes from this market: what I thought was merely a new shape of fish finger for a penny more was instead a mix of fish, dry potato and bitter herbs in a bright orange coat breadcrumb. Retching through tears, I just couldn’t see how it was considered food. My thrifty mother hated to see waste, though relented at my sheer anguish. My food tastes became stuck for years with that incident, reluctant to try anything new again.

I am drawn to residential side streets that I’m sure I wouldn’t have used when I lived here. There is something liberating about exploring these streets thirty years later, places I’m unlikely ever to return to. I find an alley behind a church and suddenly I know where I am. My sister once attended school here but left after a year as it was considered by my parents (and sister) to be too rough. Her accent had changed to adapt to the new conditions and my parents withdrew her. Elocution lessons were considered to undo the impact of the flat Hyde accent, and the school (in an unrelated incident) was later demolished. Clues to my parents’ aspirations on leaving Huddersfield to a town where nobody knew them. The further reaches of the alley are new to me, used by locals only, so I walk like I’m heading somewhere in particular to avoid any suspicion. The path deteriorates to shattered tarmac and is clearly for access to backyards only. I take advantage of a steep gap in the houses that looks like a stream sometimes runs through it and escape onto a the familiar and busy Mottram Road.

I try to to find my friend Steven’s house, a large detached home on an elevated garden: his father worked in advertising. For a moment I’m convinced it has been demolished, the garden now thick with weed trees and rhizoming irises but it still stands just a few doors down from where I remember it. One summer, as teens, we walked through local woods, my red wooden jumper too hot for the day. We encountered a folly in the form of a miniature castle. I remember being surprised and delighted that there were still such discoveries to be made in Hyde, a place I thought I knew inside-out. A shade of my childhood was still intact at a time when my peers shed theirs with glee. There is no sign of this crenellated structure but I do find a footpath that looks like it will take me around the edge of town. In recent years, these routes that skirt a town, largely unknown and unused by the pavement brigade, hold a beguiling attraction. Paths that sometimes predate the roads. Green Lane - a clue in the name that this is all it has ever been. An aspect that I always liked about Hyde: how quickly gives way to rural. I am not dressed for the change, preferring to blend in at Jarman than to be suited to muddy footpaths.

The whole hillside oozes rainwater which may have taken days to get to my soft, blue, low-rise shoes. A tough-looking horse occupies a field many feet lower than the path. The railway is carried over the path with a single arched viaduct. Godley station is near. More horse farms -‘stud farms’. Everything is in craggy grey-green stone, walls and houses, with 17th century survivors amongst the farmhouses, a flavour of Hyde before it became industrial on a greater scale. I cross Mottram Old Road which would lead to my village if I turned right but I’m not ready to go there yet. I want to continue to prowl around and then descend from a height.

Here is a familiar name: Apple Street. I walked here in the late seventies, having set off on a sponsored walk with a pack from the local scout hut…a wolf-pack and a back-pack. Six epic miles. The local landscapes I had never visited or even knew about were probably mere dog walks for the Arkelas. Apple and cheese sandwiches were provided, though I didn’t eat cheese, or crusts. The apple core was tossed into a bush, which displeased the walk leader, who considered it litter. I still bristle at his well-meant idiocy: how many apples must have returned to the earth here over the centuries? Apple Street becomes steep and is surfaced in textured concrete, adapted to allow cars –and poorly-shod walkers– to ascend in safety. I realise I was here just a few years ago in an old car, turning to our passengers in the back seat, urging them to ‘hope harder!’ as the engine struggled alarmingly. I didn’t recognise it then as the Apple Street of my cub crawl: it needed me to be walking it to do that.

The hill-climbing illusion: there’s always one more rise when you crest the current hill, imagining you are surely now at the peak. Radio masts crown this hill: assume any mast is the hill’s true pinnacle and rest when you reach that. This is Werneth Low, offering a spectacular view across Manchester, with regular overhead flights to the airport. The view is surely one of the reasons my parents moved here from Huddersfield, via Whalley Range. The vista of my childhood had many brick chimney stacks rising from the land, textile mills and hat factories, a few still belching smoke and stink. Now none stand. Folk singer Ewan MacColl lived for a time nearby on Higham Lane, his ‘Dirty Old Town’ being the city of Salford, just beyond Manchester. Industrial folk artist LS Lowry lived in nearby Mottram.

The walking here is good, this is the foothills of the Peak District. I realise I can’t navigate this expansive terrain at will and only a small triangle of footpaths feel familiar. My parents were not adventurous explorers, or perhaps they were restricted by children in the distance they could go. We regularly came to Werneth Low to walk or in winter to sledge, but rarely any further. Even as late as the 2000s, I couldn’t tell you where the Peak District was, yet basically I lived there. Around the times of my parents’ deaths, I had time to explore the wider landscape on foot and discovered several lost valleys, some wonderful pubs and a towering wooden crucifix on a neighbouring hill, all utterly unknown to me. It won’t happen today, but I will return to understand these footpaths. Better too late than never.

A few minutes with the view, then a steep descent of Joel Lane. This next section is the landscape that made me. There’s no pavement in the upper reaches, so you should face oncoming traffic. What was an annoyingly steep walk or alarming cycle plummet in 1981 is now intriguing for its mix of buildings: all are very different and built centuries apart. There’s Harvey’s House with its lopsided pitched roof and asymmetrical windows. Harvey was a school friend, or possibly from even earlier, about whom I can recollect nothing other than his name and the distinctive house his father built. Further down is a stone farmhouse with a later brick wing. The stone section looks very old, maybe 17th century. That enduring ruggedness that houses needed then. Then the lane dips beneath the height of the houses, a holloway and a clue to its long established use. It means a further steep climb to the door for anyone arriving home. One house has an octagonal tower like a lighthouse built into the corner, glass on seven sides, upper coloured glass elements. What must it be like to occupy such a tower? A cluster of bungalows, one being the former home of my friend Andrew. How steep was Joel Lane? 1 in 3, we estimated, though his father suggested a more modest 1 in 8. That felt so obviously wrong in 1981 that I was embarrassed for him, but of course he was right.

Further down is Slateacre Cottage, the name being a long-ago farm, taking the form of two attached houses with the initials GPJ and a helpful date for researchers: 1757. Handsome, dark red brick. The solid garden wall is the same solid stone as the farmhouse higher up but brick at this time a message of wealth. Elevation meant prestige. Then a detached house in brown brick– not local– with a steep rambling moor of a garden. A ship in full sail illuminating the stair well. Here a pavement finally greets pedestrians, the wilderness now all done. Set back from it is a stone horse trough, which may be the oldest thing on the street. Wedge-shaped and still gathering water from the nameless stream that runs through the hill. A simple and elegant engineering solution: rainwater spills out just where horses are thirsty from the work needed for the hill. There is another small well or spring further down, recessed into the wall. The neighbours’ son Ian told me there were trout in the water, just below the surface. He could see them; you just needed to let your eyes relax. This now is absolutely the realm of my childhood, the fringes and limits of ‘playing out’. Every kerb stone is significant. A row of stone houses, elegant in a regency way. One was once the ‘Travellers’ Call’. This is earlier than my memory, though a neighbour (now forgotten) remembered it as a pub.

A wonderful building next: a simple, single storey structure, whitewashed stone. A row of four tiny, square windows, or rather glassless apertures, and one larger one. No door. A curious wall on two levels, the lower one is part of a boundary wall around a garden. The structure was a curiosity in childhood: aged eight, I remember another neighbour’s kid edging along the lower wall and climbing through the open window, pantomiming falling into the darkness. We could see stored wood inside. Whenever my parents drove us home, the beacon of its whitewashed walls signalled we were now back. Many years later when looking at the register of listed building in the area, one property on Joel Lane was recorded as being an 18th century hat making workshop in someone’s garden. How interesting, I thought, where was it, could we see it? Then realising this curious white shed was it. Here the felt fabric of hats was rolled out, drawing water from the spring and turning it into steam, which left through the five square vents. An epiphany to have that long-familiar, dormant edifice transform into something with its own story.

Then off Slateacre Road, the avenue I lived on: Arnold Avenue. An unusually long plot of land with three separate, narrow gardens lined up. Beyond the upper garden, a wild meadow with the brook surfacing briefly there. Dens, traps and fires, geese and for a while, a horse that was surely at the centre of someone else’s childhood. An amazing view over the reservoir and the two cities of Manchester and Salford. Urgently familiar. I was born there in 1971 and lived there until 1990. Returning regularly until 2009. Being so constant means it features regularly in my dreams. It’s a Cul de Sac (and ‘unadopted’, so no corporation tarmac) so wandering down there would be a very visible act. This is as close as I will get.

More water ahead: a reservoir that was decommissioned some time in the 1990s and which quickly grew over with trees. A story now which may have altered with retelling, but at its core is the truth. The time in the early eighties when Kay, the neighbour’s kid, suggested we cross the frozen surface of the reservoir. How silly, I thought, as we slipped past the water authority’s green railings. But seeing her chipping and hacking at the thick ice with a stone convinced me it was easily thick enough to bear our weight. At the half way point, twenty metres in, a creaking sound and a white ribbon appearing below our feet prompted a gentle but immediate but U-turn. We silently scaled the bank, returned to our respective homes and never spoke of it again. ‘That is until now…’ My life has contained a few close calls like this, variously featuring cars, cliffs and the sea.

Joel Lane levels off and the houses come closer to the pavement. ‘Loughrigg 1682 cottage’ (as the plaque reads) is as rugged as its Cumbrian counterpart. This was the home of Hyde mayoress Kathleen Grundy, who early one morning in 1998 was killed by a fatal injection of diamorphine administered by her doctor Harold Shipman. It was the final (or rather, the penultimate) killing by ‘Dr Death’: a nickname he acquired before, not after, his arrest.

Then two doorsteps that I loved from a very young age, perhaps as young as three or four. Like the horse trough, the door steps here are wedges. One stone block has a flat top and sides but rounded vertical corners, which seemed to me to be like a tin of spam. The step was painted red which strengthened the meaty connection. I could taste it when I saw it. The step has since been painted black but the red coat is still visible where it has flaked. Another stone step here has been tiled in robust, red earthenware. These two of all the doorsteps of Hyde fascinated me. The row of houses here, two and three storeys, are fronted with an older, narrow pavement of stone flags, widened in the mid 20th century. Further down, on the reservoir side are two small, stone cottages before the lane becomes exclusively brick. The older is apparently from 1669, a year stated with plastic door numbers glued to a slate. The later house has been stuccoed and whitewashed but still retains its original date plaque, which reads 1738 in convincingly wonky numerals. This plaque yields further clues to ownership: the initials IC, a black star and some indistinct floral designs. The I is formed from entwined strands and may be a J. A few years ago I awoke from a dream set here, in this last cottage’s build year. The townsfolk walked in the lane, doffed their felt hats and greeted each other, and me, with such warmth and openness, that I felt the loss on waking. A dream from a time when there were no strangers in your street and few in your village. Another memory of a memory set somewhere around here: my mother recalling a Dutchman who stood on his doorstep smoking a pipe and with ‘frogs’ on his jacket. To a child growing up in the 70s, this could only mean vinyl or embroidered patches of cartoon characters. Years, decades later, I realised she meant ‘frogging’ or ornamental braid. I don’t know if his glamorous puffing overlapped my lifetime, but I have created an image if needed. More vivid a memory is the sweetshop in the lower section of the road, still evidenced by the corner chamfer where once the door stood, and now a domestic property. Two kinds of Refreshers were sold here: in a colourful striped roll for 7p or as a single soft, wrapped sweet, yellow with a sherbet centre for a hefty 2p. Both are still available. Whenever anyone offers a ‘refresher course’, I think of these sweets and this shop.

Another shop at the bottom of Joel Lane: Lynes the Grocer. Our neighbour Anne Robinson, mother of Ian the great trout deceiver, worked here. Freddo frog, maybe 3 or 4p. Dry biscuits featuring a moulded relief of cows, stamped with a decorative, wheaty border. Too young yet to read the words ‘Malted Milk’. My sister would buy pot noodles here as a teen, aware the news would get back to our mother. Opposite is the Grapes Hotel, a proudly handsome pub with tiled interior and coloured glass features, and a huge sign advertising the fine ales and stout to travellers, this being an important junction for travellers. Only in my 30s would I step inside this beautiful pub, steered until then by a vague warning from my parents that it was ‘rough’.

Finally, we are off Joel Lane. I pop into the churchyard of Hyde Chapel to look at the stocks: are they as old as I remember? And why were they in a graveyard? It seems the wrong place for public humiliation at the hands of the villagers. Certainly they are old: 1712 says the stone bracket (the wooden elements restored in 2000). Two sets of beautifully rendered initials: HB and GC. V cuts, lettered by a stone mason used to making headstones. A guess: H for Hyde, B for Boundary, GC for Gee Cross, which is where we now are, although geographically GX is a subset of H. Perhaps the stock end was also a boundary marker as an economic measure. Therefore the stocks had to go somewhere along the boundary at a populated place. The graveyard postdates the stocks, it absorbed them rather than removed them. A project for next time: look for more Hyde boundary stones to see what they look like. Historic England’s website of listed buildings and structures doesn’t explain the initials, suggesting there is still a mystery to be solved.

I cross Stockport Road past the site of another after-school sweetshop (a grocer but only one of their wares interested me). Greenhalgh’s, though Andrew pronounced it ‘Greenhalches’. A pivotal moment in my childhood was reached when I asked the price of the leftover sugar fizz, once they had sold me their last cola bottle. ‘No charge’ Mr G replied, happily dispensing an ounce of the valuable chemical crystals into a white paper bag. A few times over the years, this prize became mine if the timing was right. I walk down Knott Lane and on to Enfield Street. A curious Victorian building here where my sister had ballet lessons. Stepped gable, Flemish style. It was a school associated with the church, dating from 1889, and making the best of its side street setting. Aged 16, a former schoolfriend rented a flat near here, having found work immediately on leaving school. Instantly an adult, while I was still in search of cola cubes.

The memories thin out on this automatic D-line toward the schools I attended in childhood. Here is where various minor friends lived, prompting me to imagine what it must be like to live in a house with a garden trellis, a toaster, or with cars driving past at speed at night. I try to find a favourite short cut, the snicket. It has been gated off now, probably after too many burglaries, accessible only to resident key holders. A token thirty feet of paving stones through the grass and a badly concreted drive. In the grass here, I once found a pile of toy cars, in a terrible state. I was mystified and so left them. Looking back, it was surely an early instance of goods being left out for chance collection, an adult knowing that children regularly took the route. The pile was too tidy to have been left by a child at play, and too ruined to be current toys, their dull silver chassis now flip-flopping. Wedge-shaped Alfa Romeo Carabo, a concept car in vivid purple metal flake, now hopelessly marred.

Both the infants and junior school are still intact, dense with memories. Sunday means I can stop to look through the railings. The single story building seems largely unaltered, the playground still painted with play shapes and games. It is now augmented with basketball hoops and climbing walls. Generous windows. The raised tile section where I played an office-bound Cowley, to Keith and Kevin’s far more dynamic Bodie and Doyle. ‘What does he do?’ I asked, not being allowed to watch The Professionals, or most things on ITV. ‘He sits and writes’. So aged eight, I stood behind a waste bin and mimed writing in my office as K&K skidded around the playground. This imagined office also contained the wall where I kissed my first girlfriend Jacqueline. This is the meadow where in the summer lunchtimes of 1979 J and I played house, a younger school friend Melanie being our daughter, preparing salads of dandelions and dock leaves. A mysterious cuboid of granite, always to be found by the fence, stood in for unsliced bread. Its rotund upper side gave it a convincing loaf shape, straight from the oven. We could barely lift it. Disappointedly, this loaf has now disappeared from the edge of the meadow. Why can’t people just leave things alone?

Another short cut further down suits my route back to the bus station, a cobbled alley connecting two residential roads near the school. The arrangement of the stones is broken up in places and then the mystery of the tough old loaf is solved. A child freed a cobble (or rather a ‘sett’) on their way to school and brought it with them, or perhaps over several days.

I take the back streets out of curiosity, possibly for the first time ever. The street names here celebrate royalty: King Edward, York, Balmoral, Sandringham, Windsor, Frogmore (this last being Jacqueline’s address – its namesake the marshy burial place of Royals). Yet another former sweetshop, familiar by its corner door. The idea is that if your customer entered by one corner you could see them arrive from wherever you happened to be in the shop. Some pubs do this too. A corner door doesn’t suit the usual layout of a house, so now they are bricked up, leaving the tell-tale chamfer. This particular one was infrequently visited, being well away from my route home from school. Its bricked doorway is exceptionally well done, only a floating floral keystone above a driveway lamp gives the game away. A bridge over a former railway line reveals an active walkway stretching off through woods I only vaguely can recollect.

Henry Street, which runs parallel with the main route of Market Street, yields several new, if minor, discoveries. These are terraced houses, which estate agents of the 80s called ‘cottages’, built in Hyde’s dark, variegated brick. Curious industrial buildings have today been made domestic but which must surely be very dark inside. Curiously, I think what it would be like to live here, as if I don’t know. On one of these side streets was an art supplies outlet and studio, where I bought my first oil paints aged 15. ‘You don’t need black, try purple and brown’ advised the ginger-bearded owner who years earlier had graded a spaceship interior I drew in pursuit of a rare cubs badge. ‘No shadow is that deep,’ he explained. Later memories surface from 1988, based around my college years in nearby Ashton-U-Lyne. Pete, a mature student at 25 lived somewhere round here and I would stay overnight after last orders, at a time when two pints was as much as I could get down. My friends then tended to be the older students, highlighting my keenness to understand adult life from non-relatives.

I rejoin Market Street and that’s the circular walk complete. At the bus station, no-one is travelling to Manchester – or anywhere it seems – on a Sunday evening. In best Sunday tradition, nowhere is open for me to buy pop fizzy sweets but I still have an apple and a bottle of warm water. I rest for the first time in maybe three hours’ avid walking. My muddy shoes and clothes are now dry and the dirt can easily be brushed off as I return to the metropolis.

Past Where the River Bends: Searching for Spiderland.

August 19, 2019

On the back of my recent quarry visit in Plymouth, another quarry excursion, this time in Utica, Indiana.

Utica is a small township just north of the mighty Ohio river, which forms the border between Indiana and Kentucky. The nearby city is Louisville, known for the Kentucky Derby and Muhammad Ali but for me, Louisville was the home to the band Slint.

Slint endorsed the American Gothic style, even in the light and sub-tropical heat of America’s southern states. Their shadowy, intricate sound would become a genre of its own: post rock. But in 1991, a web of mystery surrounded the band and especially their second (and final) album Spiderland. For many, it appeared fully formed from nowhere, with successive plays revealing ever richer means to understand it. For years after its release, I’d eagerly scour record shop racks, looking for further recordings.

By chance, in 1995 I met Slint guitarist David Pajo at a party, not long after I moved to Birmingham. He told me it was here he’d got his Celtic knot tattoo and how he had later discovered the SLINT BANDS category at the local record shop. He confirmed that the band had split up. He also revealed where the album cover was photographed: in a disused quarry in Indiana. It’s a haunting black and white group portrait, the band floating dreamlike and disembodied in an expanse of water surrounded by pale rocky walls. The photo is given the ‘Cinescope’ black bordered letterbox treatment and has no accompanying text. Unlike many 90s bands I listened to, this album remained current for decades.

Skipping forward a decade or three, while planning a trip through USA, I realise I will be near the quarry at a certain point and decide to pay a visit. As I travel through America, I ask people I meet in various cities if they know Slint. Many are younger than the album. My Athenian travelling companion knows the band affectionately from the 2000s, when Post Rock peaked in its popularity. In Baltimore, at the Brian Eno obsessed Baby’s on Fire café, my enquiries draw blanks from the tabled coffee-sippers. Then as we try to explain Slint, we realise we are listening to it over the cafés’ speakers. The next day in Annapolis - an antique harbour town with some of America’s earliest surviving buildings - a record store we visit displays Spiderland at the front of an old crate in the window. Later, when I arrive in Louisville, my friend who hadn’t heard of Slint three weeks previously, announces that via his local music contacts, he has been able to invite two members of Slint over to meet me. Thirty years on, it seems the legacy of Spiderland is still there, if confined to the shadows.

The Bends (credit: Antonia Grousdanidou)

The quarry is several miles up the river from Louisville, too far and too hot to walk, so we cycle there. I love the neighbourhoods we travel through - every block has a haunted house, decaying grey weatherboards surrounded by trees. Turkey vultures circle overhead. Concrete defences for when the Ohio floods. We spot the bar we will return to: the garage of a large residential house has been transformed into a pub. Then towns of trailers and narrow houses, gardens planted with Stars and Stripes: this is Trump country. Vast trucks and pickups overtake us en route but we have our own cycle lane (more or less) throughout.

We follow the riverside pike out of the city until it turns past the Consolidated Grain and Barge Company; an imposing cluster of sun-glinting grain silos. Sheepish clouds graze gently across a brilliant blue sky. So much of America has a cinematic setting but this scene feels very familiar somehow…then all the elements suddenly clack together. This a Slint song. We are inside it!

Against the Grain (credit: Antonia Grousdanidou)

Past where the river bends

Past where the silo stands

Past where they paint the houses!

Red coal train (credit: Antonia Grousdanidou)

…as spoken - rather than sung - on Carol, from the band’s first album Tweez. The lyric, I realise after thirty years, is a map to the quarry. It is a revelation that comes from being in the environment itself. So what did the quarry mean to the band?

Further cycling through the quiet township of Utica allow a few answers to pop into focus. The quarry’s out-of-town location and landscape-preserving burrowing meant it must have been something of a secret valley to those that found it, or were told about it. As teens growing up and finding their own space, this must have been a key location for exploration, forming friendships and for romantic encounters. Swimming underwater in the darkness. Things that matter most as a teen

White House Painters (credit: Antonia Grousdanidou)

I know before I arrive at the quarry that I won’t be swimming in it. The area is now surrounded by a cluster of houses, huge even for American standards, and the quarry itself is sealed off with railings. It has been named Quarry Bluff: as in the vertical white walls of the quarry but also suggesting a sense of being a pretext, a false front. This private community represents the painted houses of Carol: after heading through districts of trailers and shotgun shacks, this is the aspirational, manicured part of town with something to prove. And that is what’s being expressed in Carol and immortalised on the the sleeve of Spiderland: a personal secret territory invited by another class and indeed is the wider story of gentrification. The narrator is initially angry about it but then becomes philosophical about the nature of loss.

Residents cruise slowly past in their tinted-window 4x4s, suspicious of this intrusion of their personal space. I ignore them, confidently enjoying the spectacular gulf into the white limestone quarry, beautiful blue water being fed by the Ohio river and surrounded by wild flowers and bees. Claiming the quarry for myself, if only for a few minutes.

The sun was setting by the time we left. After the garage pub and back at the hotel, exhausted by cycling miles through the sub-tropics, we play Spiderland on iTunes. It features a long extra track I didn’t know about: Utica Quarry, Nighttime, and I fall asleep to 15 minutes of crickets chirping and dogs barking.

Take away something that you know

The reason that you're always there

Use it 'til you're through

But remember when the time comes

You got to let go

Unravelling Plymouth Labyrinths

July 06, 2019

‘Plymouth Labyrinth’ was a recent multi-platform project, taking place over several weeks, treating the city of Plymouth as a mythological maze to navigate and decode with the aid of maps, an art exhibition, publications, games and guided walks. It was co-ordinated by Crab and Bee, otherwise known as Phil Smith and Helen Billinghurst.

I make the journey down to coincide with a guided walk led by Phil through the side streets around the RAAY Gallery exhibition space, that packs into its 90 minutes a bewildering array of games, stories, observations, discoveries, practical exercises with wool and clay, and magical rituals. Phil has the rare ability to draw mystery, meaning and intrigue from seemingly ordinary environments.

During the walk, Phil references an earlier excursion he and Helen had made to an abandoned rural village on the outskirts of Plymouth; large, modern homes that were bought out and emptied when the mining company Wolf Minerals reopened the quarry after a long period of disuse. A cluster of homes known as Drakelands (after the local Elizabethan explorer) now stand sealed up, their rose gardens and flower-potted patios now grown over with wilder flora.The company closed after a few years’ extracting tin and tungsten, leaving behind a devastated landscape and scarred community. Access to the houses is usually just a case of simply hopping over a fence and urban (or rural) explorers can have the disorienting but worthwhile experience of being in a pleasant domestic environment gone to ruin. These environments can inspire thoughts and feelings of time change, decay and impermanence and as such is best done with a friend, although in this case I didn’t. The friend is also useful in case you fall through the floor / get stuck somewhere / get caught by security. Phil cheerfully envisions bringing a refreshing gin and tonic to enjoy on the weed choked patio.

After the walk, back at Labyrinth HQ, Phil shows me where Drakelands lies on a map criss-crossed with a network of red wool, which represents key locations in the wider Labyrinth. Or rather, Drakelands lies just off the map. He provides a few clues about how I might get there and what to look for on the way, such as red wool, various forking paths and a decommissioned post box. The location is further than easy walking distance from the city, beyond the range of public transport and deep into the network of the sunken green country lanes that characterise the South West. All of these factors present Drakelands as an ever more attractive destination.

Later, I travel as near as is possible by public transport, then leave the main road on foot to access the maze of country lanes and footpaths that ascend through woodland over a mile or two, through to the quarry at the top of the hill. As the landscape becomes more rural, the houses become larger and the distance between neighbours greater. Along green tunnels cut through the woodland and past the curious improvisations and repairs often encountered in the countryside. A simple wire fence is bolstered by wooden inserts which prove to be the knotted tendrils of ivy creepers and strange, femur-like sections of a giant bamboo. The fence is purely functional, merely using the available material, but it has the appearance of a ritualistic warning to intruders. Later in a roadside ditch, a structure that takes me a few minutes to decode. Mossy wooden pyramidal forms glued to a board prove to be discarded schoolchild’s model of Giza, complete with gently rotting insulation foam dunes. It lies where a parent has thrown it from the car and where it will never be found. In Hemerdon, I note the local pub is called the Miner’s Arms - the first clue to the quarry’s existence.

The actual composition of the walls of these green lanes, the land they cut through, is something of a mystery to me. Some are clearly walls built up with local limestone but with many, the surrounding ground is level with the top of the wall, suggesting this is a channel worn through the land over time - a holloway. Now developed and tarmaced, the road level remains constant four or five feet below the surrounding fields. It can be at once comforting and disorienting: as with canalised walking, it can be difficult to assess exactly where you are. The vertical surface of these walls is a rather beautiful and verdant patchwork of greenery - the original living green wall. They occupy my attention throughout the walk: we don’t have them in Birmingham!

Further up Bottle Hill, Galva House provides another clue to the quarry’s existence: a mining chimney still standing near the entrance to a large sprawling home. This was a vent for the fumes generated by the mining process, dating back to the Victorian era. Near here, I rest for a moment against the gate into a field to survey the view back towards Plymouth. Soon after, a car comes to a halt behind me and a mother with three young children says hello and asks me if I’m local. I say no, just exploring and enjoying the scenery. ‘They’ve completely ruined it. I’m taking the kids to see where they could have grown up.’ It sounds like a long, painful story and I agree with her about the ruination, though I’m yet to witness the quarry directly. The family then whizz back to civilisation.

The encounter pre-empts a truly jarring revelation in the so far tranquil setting. As I follow the bend in the lane, the buildings and machinery of the quarry slowly sweep into view across the hill top horizon. Its arrival is so striking and transformative that it feels like a scene in a Sci-Fi film: the huge alien ship settling over a city, now in shadow.

Now that the quarry has announced itself, the effect the quarry has had on the landscape begins to be apparent. Just before the next house - High Post - a decommissioned post box set into the wall has been painted black to signal its demise: no-one lives here now. Suspicious gigantic boulders sit in the driveway in front of the closed gates of the now empty High Post. The rocks have been brought here by Wolf Minerals to ensure nothing further comes and goes through these gates.

The next house - Middle Drakelands - is accessed by a road blocked by a concrete cube and another epic boulder. This is surely Phil’s speculative G&T terrace. The house and garden arrangement makes the best use of the now-traumatised view across the valley. A sign warns that guard dogs patrol the area. I doubt the claim but as I prepare to climb over the locked gate, a man with a large dog arrives further down the lane. Instantly I feel like an intruder (which I am) and sheepishly shout a cheery hello. This gambit works, and I have a lengthy and revealing conversation with the dog walker about the nature of the disappearing residents and landscape, how long it has been going on, who resisted and the effect it has had on people. The big surprise is how short Wolf Minerals’ operation lasted: a mere four extra years of quarrying. This helpful gentleman also points out the location of other nearby empty houses.

Middle Drakelands

With the dog walker now out of sight further up the lane, I hop over the fence aided by another boulder. It is an eerie experience to sense the speed with which the home was switched off, a sense of the building not having fully lived its life. The quarry opposite is still active in a security-presence sense: powerful lamps on site are lit throughout the daytime; being possibly watched adds to the sense of unease.

Round the back of the house, out of view of whoever may be patrolling the valley, I find a way into the building. The metal plate covering a ground floor window has been peeled back like a sardine can by previous plunderers in search of their own valuable metals. Entering feels like a burglary due to the newness of the abandoned home: too soon? The house has nothing to offer other than space and curious peripheral lighting. My phone’s torch reveals the ceiling trauma from copper miners in search of pipes and wires.

The sealed rooms are in near total darkness. The daylight that seeps through the edge of of the shuttered metal windows is actually rather beautiful - you don’t notice the pure whiteness of light until it is in pinpoint isolation. Then several ambiently lit bedrooms, cupboard doors flopping open, never again to contain. On exiting, I find a clue to the former residents’ life here. A haunting photographic negative on the mantelpiece reveals children playing against the backdrop of the sealed up windows.

The next non-neighbour is a good half mile away down another leafy lane. A large abandoned house set into a hillside, again in alarmingly good condition. I decide not to follow the plunderers’ route along a conservatory roof to access an upper bedroom window, now smashed open. On an outbuilding on the elevated side of the grounds is a clue to the previous occupiers, in order of age and height. Jonathan Passmore and Terry Griffin 1 / 8 / 90. Their right handprints seal an expanse of plaster. A son and friend helping out over summer? Or is this an early record of the exodus?

In the driveway below, partially engulfed by unchecked flora, is a powerful emblem of decay. A white Morris Traveller is slowly falling to pieces there, one asset the family decided not to bring with them. It is a melancholic moment for me, for this was the same model and colour as our family car in the 1970s.

It was in this car that I experienced my first taste of the English south coast. Plymouth Labyrinths aside, Dorset, the Isle of Wight, Devon and Cornwall already have a mythical meaning for me as the destination of family holidays between 1977 and 1983. A five hour journey from Manchester on the sun-scorched leather back seat, singing folk songs with my family and arguing with my sister. The memories are fond and vivid, not least because my father, a professional photographer, captured our travels in a series of spiral-bound albums. The joy came also from leaving behind a landlocked, rainy Manchester. Seaside, Summer holidays, lighthouses and fossils made the SW a highly charged and much loved destination. Years later, when I’d learnt to drive and had my own income, Devon and the Isle of Wight were obvious early destinations. Seeing the car in this condition, in the somewhat fragile mental state of trespassing someone else’s past, was a grating moment. Every moulded curve, the slender steering wheel, the folded cardboard glove box interior and the other interior fixtures of the car were all intensely familiar. Treasured memories in ruins.

The true fate of the car - our family car - was that is accrued rust and dust in the garage: a restoration project that my father never completed before his death…or indeed ever really started. This sad encounter signals the end of my explorations and I begin to make my way back to Plymouth central, stopping off at the Miners Arms for an introspective G&T. The pub makes the best use of its outside space: a grassy terrace of tables affording a good view of the city. Ideal for miners.

There, some leisure Googling:

The name ‘wolframite’ is derived from German ‘wolf rahm’, the name given to tungsten by Johan Gottschalk Wallerius in 1747. This, in turn, derives from ‘Lupi spuma’, the name Georg Agricola used for the element in 1546, which translates into English as ‘wolf's froth’ or ‘cream’. The etymology is not entirely certain but seems to be a reference to the large amounts of tin consumed by the mineral during its extraction, the phenomenon literally being likened to a wolf eating a sheep. Wolfram is the basis for the chemical symbol W for tungsten as a chemical element.

Wolf Minerals’ curious name solved.

…Sometimes I think of a joke, make myself smile and then find myself thinking of all the times in history that joke has surely been made before, taking pride in being a part of that long but unprovable tradition. Before I leave The Miners Arms to make the last bus of the day, I think of the youngest employees from the quarry from years gone by, trying to get served here for the first time. ‘Sorry, we don’t serve minors’, deadpans the landlord each time.

————————————

In April 2011, I revisited the South West many years after those early Summer holidays, to attend the 2nd International Research Forum on Guided Tours conference at the University of Plymouth. I was on a year’s sabbatical, having quit my job with no clear idea of what I would to do next. That I attended this conference suggests I already realised guided tours might become something greater than the occasional local history walk I would do back home. That year, there was a sense of true freedom in my life: I’d resigned from an impossible job and now had the luxury of being able to set my own agenda. Not necessarily with future work in mind - just things I felt like doing. The last time I’d had this degree freedom was in childhood. The first event on the IRFGT programme:

West End Twalk: Phil Smith leads a ‘mis-guided tour’ of Plymouth’s West End, plaiting the everyday and the hidden into a local ‘mythogeography’. Weaving together different strands of the area’s history, everyday life and magical associations, the tour is a performance of the unexpected and the ordinary made extraordinary.

This walk / talk (the ‘Twalk' in the title) transformed the way I thought about my own walks and indeed all guided walks: the revelation that they need not be about sharing local history research, and the guide’s knowledge and interpretations could be creative and meaningful. Critiquing a charity shop’s window arrangement on New George Street: how would that yield anything worthy of inclusion in a guided tour? I remember thinking that. Phil revealed the subtleties of the window display creator’s design and intention, and the archetypes and mythologies they tapped into. A small but meaningful piece of theatre, and an affectionate appraisal of the creative gesture.

Later on the tour, the group was positioned on an elevated walkway, looking down into a vast second hand furniture shop, as from the balcony of a theatre. Phil framed the situation and activity below as being a deliberate and biting satire on the contemporary human condition. Since then, I can choose at will to make light of a difficult situation by entertaining it as a clever parody.

I make sure to revisit this shop during my P-Lab explorations. It is pre-empted by an encounter on Phil’s walk with The Old Morgue, an odd cafe, events hub, second hand furniture and nicknacks emporium with a chilling past. When a photograph of this curious old shop front appeared earlier in the exhibition, I presumed it to be a surreal photomontage. To encounter it in reality on the walk is astonishing; mythical Plymouth made real. Returning to the 2011 furniture store - housed in a former Toys ‘R’ Us - seems critical to the further pursuit of these myths. These days, it purveys a higher class of crappy furniture but sadly the elevated vantage walkway has been sealed off from the direction of the carpark. The walkway still transects the huge unused space above the shop floor. Arriving with a specifically theatrical outlook, I see all sorts of other narrow, arial walkways around the glass canopy over two stories that remind me of a set-piece from West Side Story. Presumably the walkways were installed for window access and maintenance but they would also be ideal to use in a live performance meta-satire of consumerism in a shattered, post Brexit economy. Wonderful!

Later in my Plymouth excursion, I experience the Fractal Harbour Illusion. A walk to the other side of a harbour often involves misjudging the distance. The unreadable scale and irregular shape of bay with various unexpected and uncrossable inlets mean you may end up walking maybe three times the distance you expected. The Harbour Illusion is a labyrinth that has caught out unwary Mancunians, Brummies and other land-locked lubbers throughout history. To solve it, simply keep the sea to your left and eventually you will emerge.

The next day, on the final day of the Plymouth Labyrinth events, I arrange to meet Crab and Bee to share my explorations of Drakelands and beyond. A nice symmetry occurs: by chance, the harbour-side restaurant I select is also where they first formulated the idea for the project and which has just come to a conclusion. A final clue that in this spot myth and reality are perpetually interweaving: floating below us in the marina, a yacht with its name lettered white on blue on the stern:

‘LABYRINTH’

Tags: Phil Smith, Hellen Billingate, South West

Post script: A couple of years after I wrote this blog, I received an email from Chris H who once lived in Middle Drakelands, described above. It was a curious moment to hear from one of the residents of the empty houses, where at the time no direct contact was possible, and the occupants were still ‘ghosts’..

My parents owned Middle Drakelands House from 1994-2004ish and it was my home for about 5 years in that period.

I often ride past it now, and it is so sad to see what has happened to it and all the houses up there and how destructive the mine has become.

The view from Middle Drakelands was fantastic especially at night with the city twinkling in the distance, it was very much my escape from some troubled teenage years.

My parents are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary in a few weeks, they now live in Sussex, and I am getting pictures of all the houses they have lived at in Plymouth.

Chris H

Street Gym - Reclaim the Streets

January 07, 2019

The first week of January can be a time of great change in people’s lives. Personal improvements for the better usually include: be more active, try something new and the universal get out more.

Street Gym - led by John Allison - is our only walk scheduled for January and combines all of these New year Resolution requirements in one event.

So what is Street Gym? Think of it as entry level Free Running or Parkour. Certainly it is not as extreme as that sport but it borrows the same creative rethinking of the urban environment and so is very much up our street. It doesn’t require peak fitness - if you can run a mile and complete a few push ups you will be fine.

Bicycle racks, railings, low level walls, stair cases and public art all become open-access gym equipment to the Street Gymnast under John’s guidance. Responding to bollards, borders, patterns on the ground…we were children the last time we paid attention to our environment in this way. Before there’s time to get bored, you are moving onto the next obstacle or challenge - no need to listen to music or podcasts to keep a Street Gym run engaging.

John fine-tuned his talent in the British Army, serving as a Combat Engineer. Regular obstacle courses aside, using available material and equipment to solve problems became second nature to him. He now trains civilians to use their everyday environment to suit their exercise needs. It can feel empowering to make a claim on the urban environment in this way - using things on your terms, then moving on. People watching a Street Gym session on the move often want in on the action!

Once you learn how to do rethink your environment in this way, you have a skill for life. And - if you want one - a free gym.

Limited places are still available. Enlist now!

Saturday 12 January, 11am and 2pm, setting off from Roundhouse.

More info and booking here:

http://www.stillwalking.org/street-gym-rb

Sour Grapes

September 17, 2018

Giving the Fox and Grapes a send-off.

On Sunday morning, a scene unfolded that I’d been expecting for the last ten years. The Fox and Grapes pub on Freeman Street had been empty since 2006 but was now finally being levelled in the lead up to creating the concourse for HS2.

The pub occupies a blank spot in most people’s understanding of Birmingham city centre…. if you have parked in Moor St car park (now also closed) you may have been vaguely aware of a hulking, disused pub at the car park’s periphery, in the direction you were not going. You may also have walked past it on your way to active pubs and bars, for example The Woodman on New Canal Street or Kilder in Shaw’s Passage. If you did register it at all, it would have resembled many other broadly similar and forgettable disused pubs in Birmingham side streets: standing alone on the levelled block, windows boarded up, graffiti daubings and an unfixably burnt out roof space.

But the Fox and Grapes was an important piece of Birmingham history, as it represented the last building standing from Birmingham’s early days as a pre- industrial revolution market town. It was on the first map of Birmingham, drawn up in 1731 by William Westley - or rather the building that later became the pub. I’ve seen the date 1729 attributed to it, but a Archaeologist’s survey before it closed suggested there was late 17th century fabric in the structure. Westley also created a much-reproduced set of etching showing Birmingham from various ‘prospects’ a few years later: a hillside covered with small, steep gabled houses with tiny windows, surrounding a central Baroque church - St Phillips. It looks like an attractive Italian hill village.

One of the reproductions appears at The Ivy on Temple Row. I pointed out to a visiting group recently that only St Philips and the Fox and Grapes remains from this image - everything else had since been demolished (mostly by the Victorians) and that it was not usual for English cities to do this to their old town. Why had we done this? they asked. Nearly everything about St Philips physical make up has been replaced over the years and it is Baroque in appearance alone. This was much the same story for the Fox and Grapes.

The pub even had some mediaeval design about it: timber structures would soon be overtaken by brick built houses but in 1690 brick was still too expensive for most buildings. Not much had changed in house design since the mediaeval period, and the Fox and Grapes and the jettied floor design, steep sloped roofs, tiny single upper window and narrow footprint were characteristic of a much older style. As the centuries passed, the material of the Fox and Grapes would be replaced and improved, and the building expanded, but the overall appearance would remain the same.

It reminds me of the Christopher Wray building a few streets further on: an overlooked 1740 survivor which has been given listed status not for its age but for the Birminghamesque way the fashionable townhouses had gradually filled in their back gardens with industry as the land became more valuable for commerce than leisure. The city’s story and character being told not by the building style but by its various alterations.

The Fox and grapes was also a listed building and (until yesterday) told a similar survivor’s story. It originally appeared in HS2s Big Plans as being the subject of a sensitive re-integration of the building into the station’s larger design. It’s difficult to imagine how this might have looked next to Leon, Pret and the usual concourse suspects, but an example exists of the Eagle and Ball being successfully integrated into the student union bar at Curzon Building nearby. However, redrafts of the document downgraded the plans to the sensitive relocation of the building elsewhere, which also seemed unlikely. On the afternoon of Saturday 3 January, 2015, a fire ruined all three roof spaces of the empty building, signalling the end of any genuine notion of saving the building.

FireFox Credit: unknown - culled from Twitter after the fire

On Sunday morning, I saw a digger twitching next to the pub, and saw that the roads had been sealed off. I thought I’d have time to join Brutiful’s Spaghetti Junction walk and be back in time to see what was happening, but by 1 30pm it was too late: the building was a pile of rubble and timber.

The timbers would be interesting to get a closer look at: there should be some conspicuously older beams amongst the later woodwork, like these I found in a field in Rowley Regis.

In the decade leading up to the pub’s disappearance, I wondered how I’d feel when it eventually was flattened. I thought it would be strange for a city to remove its last C17 survivor from the old town and - unlike Central Library’s demolition for example - that it would happen without anyone noticing. I realised back then any preservation campaign would be unlikely to succeed. I know only myself who ever had a drink there.

As you’ll expect from a city who’s motto is Forward, Birmingham is certainly not sentimental about preserving the past, though there are occasional exceptions such as the Back to Backs or the Roundhouse Stages (both saved by the National Trust). Ultimately, demolishing the building was the ultimate expression of Birmingham’s architectural style.

*To try and cloak his disappointment and lack of success, he declared that he was sure that the grapes were sour anyway and not worth having.*

Knot Working

August 02, 2018

The city becomes invisible to those that know it well. If you know your way around, there’s no need to really look at it. Those who live and work in Birmingham usually have no need to refer to the wayfinding signs, but given the last eight years or so of Civic upheaval, their function has become more in demand.

The chrome spike signposts appeared about 20 years ago against a high-profile declaration of providing CCTV for safety and security of citizens, as well as pointing at key parts of the city. They were overtaken and updated in 2011 by the iPhone 4-esque totems provided by Interconnect, but bits of them are still in place, scattered like broken headstones, missing arms and cameras.

For some reason, I started paying attention to the one in Victoria Square a few weeks ago. I’d just been looking at the ‘Town and Country’ ghost sign recently revealed on the iron shutter of a shop at the top of new street - perhaps I still had my ‘urban revelation’ glasses on as I strolled past on the way to the Francis Alÿs exhibition at Ikon.

The signpost looked unusually scruffy, even in the context of a civic centre that is essentially a building site. The clear plastic weather-proofing over the signs is badly perished and peeling. The post itself looks like it was recently hit by something heavy, and now lists dramatically, like its former square companion the Iron: Man. Closer inspection reveals that many of the destinations the arms point to are no longer there, making its primary function redundant.
Most recently gone are the School of Music and Fletcher’s Walk. The School of Food dropped the Tourism & Creative Studies bit some time ago too. Central Library closed in 2013. The Visitor Information centre that once stood on the corner of Waterloo Street and Colmore Row has surely been closed for ten years or more (the city no longer has one at all).
One arm has been updated: white spray paint covers one destination, which on closer inspection turns out to be ‘Jewellery Quarter’. That’s still there!

At some point the Museum and Art Gallery have used the signpost as a beacon for their fluctuating entrances, with black and white chevrons pointing the way. It looks to me like this large sticker accidentally covered a sensor or secret camera at the top, below the New Street Station arm, then was covered back up with insulation tape, now hanging off untidily.

My first thoughts were: has this sign recently been uncovered somehow, like the iron shop shutters? A blast from the past, albeit a much more recent one? But no, this sign post hasn’t moved since the 90s, other than by a few degrees to the right.

Without getting into the meta-semantics of what this sign signifies, it feels like it is causing more problems than solutions. How many visitors have gone in search of Tourist Information or assumed the Jewellery Quarter is inaccessible? Doesn’t Birmingham want to look after its new residents, tourists and indeed refugees? What has gone wrong?

At some point in the last couple of generations, we have lost the ability to see ourselves from the outside, like a work desk that gets steadily more chaotic and untidy. WE know our way around by now and … hasn’t it always been like that?

Ben Waddington’s walk for Ikon Gallery - Knot Working - responds to themes of illegibility in urban design, invisible boundaries and the erosion of Civic Space in Birmingham and takes place on Saturday 11 August at 1pm. Advance bookings only at https://www.ikon-gallery.org/event/knot-working/. Francis Alÿs’s exhibition Knots’n Dust is on until September the 9th.

Update 23 August: this is how the sign looks now... still an eyesore but no longer directing anyone to the long - gone Tourist Information office!

Kong: Sculpture Island

February 09, 2017

The Birmingham Post ran an article last November on the back of an ‘Elvis Live on Screen’ roadshow that was about to roll into town, hosted by Priscilla Presley. Famously, Elvis never played in the UK but, surmised arts correspondent Graham Young, had he come to Birmingham during a key interval in 1972, he could have met the city’s own ‘King’ – namely Nicholas Monro’s King Kong sculpture in Manzoni Gardens. Priscilla must have been baffled but diplomatically agreed that it could indeed have happened. Further, ‘Elvis may even have visited your Bullring.’ As a piece of journalism it was drivel, made worse by missing the opportunity to report on a key event happening beyond Birmingham’s borders that week. Outside the Henry Moor Institute in Leeds, King Kong was going public after a forty year period of retreat.

Young’s hypothetical meeting highlighted the enduring and unshakeable fascination that the citizens of Birmingham have with the sculpture, decades after its removal. His was a game of conjecture and freeform nostalgic word association, being played to squeeze a further drop of cultural value from the work, which many perceive as being unduly cut short when it was uninstalled a mere six months after its arrival. ‘What might have been, had these two legends only lived a little longer?’

No other example of Birmingham’s public art works has been subject to the same degree of anecdote, speculation, false memory, hand-wringing nostalgia, campaign for return or shoddy research. The sense of loss seems out of all proportion to the immediately apparent artistic value of the work. Further, the phenomenon is not confined to those who were resident in the city at the time: new comers become absorbed into the myth. In the last few weeks I’ve spotted its likeness in promotions for a comedy club, satirical cartoons, store promotion and now in two separate exhibitions, one wholly devoted to the sculpture. It is as if it were still a current landmark, in a way that happens regularly for Gormley’s Angel of the North.

Why so much affection, by proxy?

In November last year, I met Kong for the first time, towering outside Henry Moore Institute. Looking for it on The Headrow, on the walk up from the station had the same sense of anticipation as seeing truly spectacular works such as the Uffington White Horse or the Avebury stone circle, or on holiday as a child, spotting the sea for the first time from the car. It’s a jarring moment to spot him through the Christmas funfair rides in the square outside. Seeing Kong back in a city setting, in broad daylight feels like he has been torn directly from the realm of fantasy, mirroring his cinematic counterpart who was forcibly removed from Skull Island to be enslaved in New York. Like the movie Kong, his fibreglass frame is scarred by unknown forces (arm crushed by a reversing works lorry? Scalped by a T Rex?) His hands and feet are more subtly rendered than is apparent in photos. He is sexless. His presence is having a powerful lunchtime effect on the selfie hunter generation.

I’d tried to meet previously, while on an accidental holiday in Cumbria a while ago. I’d noticed the roadsigns to Penrith and made the connection to the sculpture’s current location, despite peripherally thinking Penrith was in Wales. How hard would it be to find him? The ‘in-the-know’ locational statement to claim for him was ‘lying on his back in a car park (or market) in Penrith’. Google maps confirmed this, his form visible on a railway embankment. He was no longer supine – and his broad shoulders were now white. His role at the market was as a meeting point for ‘lost granddads’. However, on arrival at the market he was nowhere to be seen.

Despite knowing his position was intended as a landmark, I scoured the outer reaches of the car park on foot for clues, but Kong remained a step ahead. Back in the realm of wifi, I discovered at leisure more recent images of Kong which placed him in a more rural setting than the market. This proved to be the garden of current guardian Lesley Maby… address not given.

A few months later I attended the Art Walk guided tour in Birmingham, which promised the current low-down on Kong’s whereabouts, and other public art insider knowledge. However, the two guides were afflicted by the same creeping mythologising that affects the whole story. Thus both the given original and current location of the sculpture were wrong and one guide remembered the sculpture as being bright purple. In 2017, placing where Manzoni Gardens actually was requires careful lining up of the few extant buildings and overlaying maps past and present. It seems right to place the exact location of the statue as somewhere beneath Footasylum in the west wing of the current Bullring. Curiously I’ve seen the colour miscall from other sources, most likely due to successively degrading reproductions of an original 1970s colour photograph. Kong was most certainly slate grey.

Peripherally, the Kong researcher will know that the figure has changed colour many times and worn many costumes, but the Art Walk demonstrated that Google and Wiki were now our default post-truth authorities, bolstered by folk-knowledge and our own hazy recollections. So to what source should the rigorous researcher turn? For the longest time, the dependable standard reference tool for West Midlands public art information was George Noszlopy’s Public Sculpture of Birmingham, published by the University of Liverpool.

However, about Kong, it is plain wrong. After being traced to Edinburgh in the 1990s, the sculpture is reported to have been ‘destroyed’. This slip is almost certainly down to the researchers reporting someone else’s ‘last I heard’ misrememberings and in the context of a University Press publication, it lends a gilded red herring to the legend. A recent New York Review of Books article on the exhibition gives the sculptor’s name as ‘Michael’ Monro, suggesting that the accepted larger function of the art work is now a deliberate effort to steer the subject into fantasy.

Inside the gallery, in the company of creator Nicholas Munro, owner Lesley Maby and the latter-day ‘Carl Denham’ Derek Horton, the various threads of the story overlap again, many meeting for the first time. Derek is the reason that Kong – and not a maquette – is here and not still cemented in place in Lesley’s back garden. His long term obsession with the sculpture has spawned its own The King and I show at & Model Gallery, across the road from Henry Moore. Listening to his accounts of its removal by digger, crane and lorry, Lesley’s insistence that he be given a new coat of paint for his comeback show and assorted chapters in the chronicles of Kong is fascinating, and all outside the remit of the exhibition. Lesley is happy to fill in the gaps too. At some point, the sculpture in its domestic setting became a memorial for her late husband. For most of its life, Kong has been the calling card, mascot, sidekick and brand mark of Nigel Maby, and his story, the one that’s most closely connected to an ownership of Kong, still remains to be told.

The fuller story of Kong is not its brief life as public art but rather all the identities and functions it has had since then. Of its 45 years of existence, only during its first six months was it intended as art. It feels like an experiment in understanding what art does, by setting the same object in different social conditions. In the setting of an art gallery, and the resultant conversations, several mysteries become clearer. A Hollywood legend such as King Kong, with 40 years in the public consciousness was always going to be popular. For the public to be told that this creation that the whole family was enjoying was in fact art – Pop Art – would have been received with surprise and delight. Children in the otherwise bland Manzoni Gardens would have had a moment of thinking ‘why is this here?’, only to be snatched away a few months later. It would appear in ever more remote locations around the city before disappearing for good. Derek announces to the gathered crowd that he is once such child – at 16 he saw the sculpture and felt that if this could be art, then he could be an artist. It’s surely every artist’s unspoken intention – to quietly hand on the torch. Nicholas is intrigued by all the attention, and almost apologetically has to say that none of the impact was intended, none of it had any deeper meaning. It was Pop Art. These days he’s a scientist and is in town to give a paper on anti-gravity to the University.

Outside another experiment is underway: for three months, Kong is meeting the citizens of a new city and a new generation of children. Certainly he will be more comprehensively documented than in 1972, and factoring all the social media Likes, Faves and Retweets, perhaps he will have an even wider audience than his time in Birmingham. Then he will again disappear. How will the children of Leeds remember him?

City Sculpture Projects 1972 is on at Henry Moore Institute until Sunday 19 Feb 2017

The King and I is on at & Model Gallery until 19 February 2017

Kong: Skull Island opens on Fri 10 March at selected theatres

Lost Rivers of London 4: The Peck (and Earl’s Sluice)

July 27, 2016

An epic 12 mile, two-river walk for the mid-point of the London’s Lost Rivers series of walks. The general idea is to programme the various Lost River walks in Tom Bolton’s book over seven annual outings to make the 100 or so miles covered more manageable. This July we met in Peckham Rye Park to follow the course of the Peck to an indistinct spot where it joins the Earl’s Sluice and then flows into the Thames via Surrey Quays, then to follow the Earl’s Sluice back to its source.

This was the first time we’d walked a river’s length in reverse – it was simply to reduce the already lengthy journey. The book suggests choosing either / or but we knew we wanted to do both! As it turned out, there was nearly no trace of the Earl’s Sluice either in it’s watery form or by its impact on the landscape.

The source of the Peck is an elevated wooded spot with an excellent view of the valley the water course takes. A concrete platform at the hill’s peak is revealed to be a First World War anti-Zeppelin gun placement, an East India Company telegraph beacon and an Admiralty beacon used during the Napoleonic wars – indeed the dais reveals traces of more recent fires too. Another nearby landmark: an oak tree that may or may not have had a royal stand near it (I always find it fascinating to see what info people feel is recording on plaques). We also discover some exceptionally solid looking iron boundary markers: ‘Camberwell’ with the first few letters covered by an advancing soil line.

Reservoir Temple (credit: John Clarkson)

Following the valley and looking for river clues of any sort puts us in a heightened awareness state – suddenly everything is worth looking at and we note the abundance of exotic tree species in this part of south London: fig trees seem especially common. At the foot of the hill we enter the park and the Peck (as in Peckham) is revealed. It’s a trickle rather than a river, and surely only on view at all here for aesthetic purposes, and we don’t see it again on our journey. A rustic bridge in the park makes best use of the river’s fleeting presence.

It is next possible to detect the river on a stretch of meadow : an unmown grassy island ahead signals two iron manhole covers, one of which (‘Silent Knight’) reveals the sound of the river’s flow. For this you need to be lying on the grass with your ear to the plate – it’s actually very soothing and as the day warms up, approaching noon, it is tempting to stay in the meadow for a while.

Several other local history elements punctuate the next few miles through Peckham before there is another river clue. Already the book (published in 2011) is slightly out of date, as you would expect with a dynamic cityscape. We have to double back after being promised a street bearing the most overhead viaducts in London, each more oppressive looking than the last. There’s moment of horror when it seems that a row of early C18 houses mentioned in the book may have been demolished to make way for a gigantic housing development – but no, they are safe around the corner just visible above the hoarding. Being turned into apartments can be a good sign: the spec means the developer will have to do good job of restoring the buildings.

We also find more of the super solid boundary markers: looks like we walked the length of Camberwell.

It’s an industrial landscape alright: viaducts are plentiful and their arches form the basis of a sub economy of small businesses and – in one district – evangelical churches. I want to find the River of Life Centre but like the best lost rivers it remains unseen. Best name: Christ Apostolic Church Surrey Docks District. …something defining the character of the area by embracing the docks in the name. Nothing references the Peck itself other than Peckham itself, which means simply ‘village by the Peck’. Various sauce and Pickle factories of old once occupied the railway arches.

One last glimpse of the river’s existence as it bridges a railway line, a seemingly colour-coded light blue conduit this one beneath ground level. We’ve seen this before when the Westbourne is piped through Sloan Square tube and the gauge looks similar: members of the group spot it before I officially am able to ID it in the book. We’re learning! At some point though, the river became the Earl’s Sluice.

Gradually there are more and more references to Quays, Wharfs and Docks, variously in Churches, Cafés and Newsagents and we approach our designated rest area: the Wobbly Wobbly Pub, floating in Greenland Dock. Sadly it seems this pirate ship of a pub closed just a few days earlier, so its a challenge for our various apps to find the nearest open pub on land. All our nearby options have a Whale or Moby Dick theme and provide a clue to what exactly Greenland was exporting.

We join another contingent of our group and – after refreshments – head out to the source of the Earl’s Sluice – the only river on our longer seven year itinerary named after a river’s artificial use as a drain channel. It provides proof that the Lost River walks are not about sight seeing (though there are many intriguing encounters) – the river is only evidenced by a return visit to the blue conduit and indeed around a third of the route is along the very noisy Albany Road. After a long period of sirens and relentless traffic we abandon the option of walking ‘quite near to’ the invisible river and go to nearby Burgess park for ice creams and a more tranquil setting.

So, no ‘Earl’s Sluice Bakery’ on this stretch, but there’s plenty to keep us occupied: tall green stink pipes, a completely unexpected urban stables, David Bowie’s 1960s rehearsal space provides the single moment of glam and most amazing of all, a dramatic sun halo arcing round the sun high in the summer sky. ‘What are you all looking at?’ asks a woman of our sky-searching group. I offer her my sun glasses to take a look. Its a great spot – would we have seen it if we weren’t so environmentally alert in our hunt for clues?

The sluice is finally visible in Ruskin Park, where it has its origin and we have our end, sun scorched and exhausted from a day’s unglamorous touring. This is home territory for one of our group so it is short work to head to the nearest pub once we’ve witnessed the pool and speculative discussion about 2019’s final lost river walk – current mood suggests we make it a short one ;o)

Mudlarking

July 21, 2016

Last week I went Mudlarking for the first time. I’d known about this curious riverside activity for a while but had never got further than thinking: ‘I wonder how they get down there’, and following one of them on Twitter.

Maybe twenty years of living in a city without a river has made me treat real ones (rivers not cities) with near mythological reverence – I deliberately seek out the courses of ‘lost’ rivers when visiting London and even finding the Thames from London Bridge usually involves several wrong turns, elevation miscues and back alley shuffling. From one point on my most recent ‘lost Thames’ re-orientation, I saw a sealed-off set of concrete steps leading down to the river bank itself; once I reached the walkway I found there was no easy way in.

Soooo… how did people find their way down to the riverbank? I decided now was the time to find out. I kept an eye open for entry points while walking and – hardly a mystery – it turned out there were several openable gates that reveal steps leading down to the river. A few people were using the steps as extra seating and then – at river level – there were the Mudlarkers themselves. Instantly it felt like entering another world – one which was happily unfolding on its own terms independently of anything else going on at surface level. I saw five or six people there, each with their own Mudlarking motives. One elderly pair had collected a selection of (yellow) brick pebbles which they were juggling to carry while another woman washed off her find in a trickle of water coming from a Bankside outlet pipe. Further on. a man lay on his side, gently scraping away from a plateau of mud that rose from the surrounding shale. A huge wooden sign mounted on the river wall reads BANKSIDE, completely covered in dripping river greenery and criss-crossed with chains weighted with stones.

I made my way slowly through this new landscape, gazing no more than a few feet in front of me. Not sure what I was looking for. I’d read recently about someone regularly finding bullets and even a (live?) wartime grenade so I fixed on looking for some UXB ordnance. There were plenty of shattered pottery fragments amongst the pebbles, much of it clearly C18 and C19th, and some rough looking, mustardy glazed C17 candidates. Some have the occasional tantalising piece of text or image – unsolvable jigsaws. There were any amount of shattered clay pipe stems and bowls. Animal bones and teeth. It seemed bizarre that stuff so old, even rubbish, is all still here, churning for centuries, the uncurated museum of human detritus.

People in this shoreside realm seemed content to exist independently – people don’t come here to socialise. No-one challenged me or even seemed to notice I was there. After I’d covered 100 yards (in nearly 30 minutes) an older gentleman asked if I’d had any luck? Maybe my exceptionally slow shuffle suggested I was an expert. ‘Just browsing,’ I responded, nonsensically. I doubt my lovely yellow brick pebbles would have registered as significant finds with him.

Most of the things I collected on the short walk I threw back – I’d gathered them for the experience. A few I keep: the yellow brick pebbles and a small selection of tiles pieces and pipe sections, confident this haul would compare closely with those of most first-timers. But I felt thrilled with my finds, far more valuable than any of the tat on sale in the Tate Modern gift shop (where I was now emerging). The nature of the tides means there is new stock in twice a day and I feel certain I’ll return for further browsing the next time I manage to find the Thames.

How to Be a Free Seer // walk and workshop for Birmingham Weekender

September 26, 2015

‘Brilliant and insightful’

‘We’re going to get arrested’

‘How do I convert to Free Seeing?’

Today’s Free Seeing walk had the feel of accidentally cracking open the universe and glimpsing the inner workings of its invisible interior. Still Walking events have had some great responses from guides simply sharing their view of the world but this was the first time a group has said they felt they were ‘changing’ or that by merely looking they were doing something that could get them arrested. Fascinating to think that the act of looking can invoke such a response.

Francis’s background is in film making and animation and his language in describing the urban fabric and our ways of seeing it borrows from a film makers lexicon. Our movement while walking through the city streets is described with pans, tracking shots and reveals. Beyond the transposition of techniques from screen to the real world are a host of games and experiments that engage the curious and willing free seer.

Free Seeing at Grand Central Station met outside Cherry Reds on John Bright Street but immediately wrong footed participants (and myself) by walking through the Birmingham Weekender festival crowds, Grand Central shoppers and Rugby world cup fans to a car park on Livery Street. Here the traces of Snow Hill Station’s grand former entrance still stands, an impressive gateway in glazed brick and terracotta, with rich ornamentation and ships in full sail but conspicuously bricked up in recent years and out of use – an instantly rebuffed invitation. A half-hearted preservation out of a vague sense of civic duty. An ugly large hole has been sliced through the beautiful glazed bricks which reminded Francis of the hole cut in the basement wall of the recent daring bank vault heist. Brutal, precise but presumably necessary to for someone to do. This old doorway was the portal to the Free Seeing walk: sight seeing of sorts but in order to see what was beyond this door (and to understand free seeing) we needed to be creative. To view beyond the wall, we ascended the bunker-like concrete stairs and emerged at a walkway at an upper level. The revelation of what lies beyond the doorway from above is banal – no secret garden or Narnia here just the meaningless, invisible inner stylings of the car park’s edge lands. But the act of being curious and planning a means of discovery is the real revelation. No-one was ever meant to see this space and as such is the ideal way to begin the tour. Next door, the overhanging mirrored surface of a building unintentionally reflects the rubbish accruing in a open topped buttress – what may have seemed dynamic and beguiling by the architect perhaps needed greater fore-thought. This is free seeing in one of its many forms – seeing inside the design intentions of the city and suggesting edits.

The next destination is a sight seeing tour staple: St Phillips cathedral. In all the guided tours I’ve been on, no-one has really explained how to look at buildings the way the architect intended. It’s not difficult, but it helps to have a guide to take observers beyond the process of merely identifying buildings for navigation means. The front of the cathedral invites the eye to move upward through tiers of decorative symmetry including the (then) fashionable rococo warping of normally straight lines into sweeping concave curves. Our eye is not allowed to stay still, but its movement is carefully directed by the architect. Francis’s free seeing technique is to be aware of these intentions and to contemplate it all from a horizontal position. Yoga mats are provided and the free seers lie in formation to get the ideal vantage – just you, the sky and the elevation. No neck ache from craning and the free seers relax into it it’s what this game is about: treating yourself, and the position of the eyes in your skull, as a flexible apparatus. Not being satisfied with the factory settings. A further wrinkle involves looking at the elevation as it is reflected in the back of a reflective owl sculpture set away from the building. A queue of free seers sit in position in front of the owl (there is only one vantage possible) to the fascination and bemusement of those in the church yard, and indeed it looks like a religious act of supplication. From their perspective, no explanation of this activity is possible.

Members of the group quickly adapt the techniques and volunteer ‘free sees’ as we move through the city. A gap between buildings reveals a sliver of the remote Cube, iced with a line of foliage, counterpointed by the Victoria’s C19th self surety and the framing anonymity of 1960s Birmingham Metropolita. This scene appears to have a title too: an advertising billboard reads ‘Nothing Artificial Makes It In’.

Naturally, we take in the reflective steel cladding of the new New Street station. I feel this building is the architect’s solution to the impossible task of sensitively responding to the environment here – the many ‘news’ of New St. There is no unified townscape, just a city cycling through styles, endless alterations, featureless brickscape, and brutalist expanses. The only way for this building to land comfortably here is to literally reflect its surrounding as a distorting hall of mirrors, throwing the buildings into fractured disarray while casting delicate rippling arcs of sunlight across the scarred urban surface. For the mobile free seer, it allows Inception-like overhead self-viewing in triplicate, a ‘free selfie’, backed by the city folding in on itself. This surely will become the TV or filmic establishing shot – you have now arrived in Birmingham. We note the absence, after even a few days of their arrival, of two plane trees positioned near the Eye Screen – it takes a free seer to be that tuned into the environment.

Mat or shiny

Inside Grand Central’s concourse, we reflect on the subject of watching, surveillance and the omnipresent CCTV camera. From one spot, we count 37 ceiling and wall mounted cameras in a 360 degree group pan. Our attract the attention of the station staff – can they be of assistance? ‘No thanks, just looking around’.

The walk is followed (after a break in the busy bar beneath the Evil Eye) by a free seeing workshop that devotes more time and considered practice into some of the techniques. It too is a success and allows a deeper understanding of the technique. Indeed Francis will lead one more of these workshops before the festival ends. Please join us at the foot of the grand staircase, Grand Central at 3pm on Sunday 27th September – we’ll be the ones with the yoga mats.

Naturally, the workshop is free! Book below.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/myevent?eid=18805630146

‘The Crow’

Shopping for Simulacra with Matt Westbrook

September 23, 2015

Matt Westbrook has been spotting owls around the city over the last few weeks – as have many Birmingham residents. But Matt’s owls are different to those appearing in the Big Hoot – they’re camouflaged against the fabric of buildings, nestling in the background, waiting for someone to notice they are there. Matt is leading a walk on Sun 27 Sept which rounds up various animal forms around the city centre: owls, fish and a selection of other wildlife. To find out Matt’s techniques and start spotting such simulacra yourself, sign up for the tour here.

A selection of Matt’s owls appear below – some are less shy than others and it sometimes takes a moment for them to reveal themselves fully. Matt is also producing a free postcard pack of his favourites – let us know if you are interested.

think it started in Tate Modern, whilst attempting to wander nonchalantly around ‘Poetry and Dream’ I was asked by a couple to take their photo. A bit awoken from my own thoughts and unprepared for what was to come I agreed but then immediately realised we were in front of Joseph Beuys’s ‘The Pack’, an installation of 24 sledges with blankets rolled up emerging from the back of a vintage VW camper van.

My heart sank.
As they both began gooning for the camera in some sort of Pepsi Max pose, holding their hands in a VW hand signal, I paused and lowered the camera (it was an actual camera then not the now proliferate camera phone) and stared bewilderedly at them. ‘Really?’ I telepathically communicated. They stayed in pose and beckoned me to press the button.

Aware that I was now part of my own art gallery conveyor belt installation, with people almost queuing to get past, I shook my head and took the quickest of shots.

I was reminded of this incident recently whilst walking through Birmingham when I was asked to photograph a family in front of a multi-coloured owl, positioned close to an arts and crafts building full of detail and history.

It got me thinking about the whole experience of photographing yourself in front of artworks, celebrities, shiny ostentatious buildings and now owls, prompting me to find something else…

http://shoppingforsimulacra.eventbrite.co.uk

http://mattwestbrook.co.uk/

http://www.birminghamweekender.com/

Sights in Motion - a Pedal Powered Invisible Cinema - the reviews are in!

July 28, 2015

Last night at the Magic Cinema screening at Ort Café I asked Alan Fair (Small Heath-born cinephile and former MAC film programmer) to cobble together some notes about Saturday’s bike ride around the old picture palaces of Brum. Here’s his amazing essay less than a day later:

Alhambra, Essoldo, Tivoli, Rialto, these are names for the mouth to conjure with, as a child these words were the closest I came to exotica, these were words that ended in vowels that weren’t ‘e’ ferchristsake!

Of course and more importantly these names were the abracadabra that allowed me to see all those things and places and people that weren’t in the quotidian world of inner city Birmingham. Picture Palaces was such a wonderful term and it rang as true to my experience as did the dreams I woke from on summer mornings. The cinema names not only conjured the Mediterranean, the Moorish citadels of the Spanish plains there was also those reminders of closer to home but still no less exotic for these names revealed the class nature of British history, the grandiose harkening back to medieval times; The Grange, The Coronet, The Manor, those dreamy distant images rendered hyperbolic in the comic books I would read. Alas all it appears is lost, like the flickering shadows on the screen and the blue smoke paisley patterns written in the air above my head as the brilliant light of the projector was rendered palpable by the luscious lips of Rhonda Fleming, the impossible masculinity of Victor Mature. Open mouthed I saw in those brief gaps in the soot laden street of Birmingham 10 as the way to the stars, the sweeping staircase of the Grange unfurled onto Coventry road and beckoned me up just as David Niven was beseeched upwards to share a space with the demigods of European thought.

So mostly the names have gone, but thankfully not the memories or the architecture of those oneiric forms, saved but transformed by the changing moods and cheapening desires of the marketplace, where now not dreams but plastic buckets and paint and occasionally and more appropriately these buildings are still places of social gathering and community. It was armed with this arcane knowledge of what was called “Sights in Motion: A pedal-powered invisible cinema” that a group of us, signed up already to the inherent philosophy of the wonderful ‘Still Walking Festival’, embarked on a peripatetic pilgrimage pursuing these transformed halls of memory.

The mistake made by all urbanists is to consider the private automobile (…) essentially as a means of transportation. Such a misconception is a major expression of a notion of happiness that developed capitalism tends to spread throughout society. The automobile is the centerpiece of this general propaganda, both as sovereign good of an alienated life and as essential product of the capitalist market. (Guy Debord, “Situationist theses on traffic” 1959)

What became clear as we pushed off was that such a quest but not just the journey into nostalgia of a couple of old folks but was rather a wonderful pathway to the past in the present, a group of seekers buoyed by pneumatic tires and enthusiasm, men and women young and old and all sharing the common complaints of backsides on leather seats and the joys of cycling in the inner city, urban explorers reaching the euphoria common to those in tandem with each other’s thoughts. The first cinemas we came across, in Stirchley, had now been transformed into workshops, this became a theme of the trip, the city once known as “the workshop of the world” had rediscovered its heritage in the abandoned dreams of years gone by. Armed with the knowledge of our leader (literally) we began, as all travelers must, to discern these hard (crumbling?) facts of transition and history.

We must replace travel as an adjunct to work with travel as pleasure. (Guy Debord.1959 Ibid)

As the earth began to move beneath the sun’s warmth so to we moved across the built environment, also involved in our small way with a transformation. I wondered as we wandered how many people back in the thirties and forties had traveled to their local cinemas by means of a bicycle, how many patrons pushed forward on pedals while puffing on Woodbines and Park Drives, eager to catch the charismatic fallout from Errol Flynn, from Paul Robeson, from the transcendent Bette Davies? Through Small Heath and Greet, through Alum Rock and Washwood Heath, we dawdled alongside impossibly grand edifices, The Capitol, watched over with benign warmth by the patrons of the Muslim Community centre, who told us with glee about visiting the cinema in “the old days” to catch the antics of Bruce Lee, then further on to Malik & Sons Cash and Carry, still delightful in deep azure and startling white, the fascisti (sic)emblems picked out perfectly in their stucco rendition of imperial (another name often given to cinemas) Rome.

Even if during a transitional period, we temporarily accept a rigid division between zones of work and residence, we should at least envisage a third sphere, that of life itself (the sphere of freedom, of leisure – the truth of life)Unitary urbanism acknowledges no boundaries; it aims to form a unitary human milieu in which separations such as work/pleasure or public/private will finally be dissolved. But before this, the minimum action of unitary urbanism is to extend the terrain of play to all desirable constructions. This terrain will be at the level of complexity of an old city. (Guy Debord 1959 ibid)

What seemed, at first, like the ruins of the dream life of angels quickly became a celebration of the dynamics of the city, as our group of seekers learned to find, so did we begin to enjoy the city captured through the screens of our own desires, to re-map the city as an environment for sharing rather than dividing up. The lines of our drift through Birmingham’s car city presumptions made new byways of discovery, by ways that cyclists and pedestrians learn to re insert themselves into the urban environment where, what was clear to us was, we can once again celebrate the city as a place for people.

Thanks to all on the “Invisible Cinema” trek, it really was a day to cherish.

Photo: Mark Wilson

Alan Fair

Lost Rivers of Bradford – Cottingley Beck

July 27, 2015

Another lost river opportunity presented itself on a recent trip to Saltaire in West Yorkshire. I booked into a roadside hotel near Cottingley – a familiar from my The Unexplained reading days. There, in 1920, two cousins snipped pictures of fairies from a magazine, propped them up near a brook and photographed them as a joke. The results were accepted as genuine by adults and by the time the journos got hold of the pix, no backtracking was possible for the young girls. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s endorsement delivered the story directly into folklore for the next 60 years or so. Only when elderly did the culprits confess the caper.

This story is not really one of ‘are fairies real?’ but rather ‘why did people accept them?’ There is a contemporary parallel with modern meme / fave / like / please RT culture, with young photoshop whizzes tapping into our wooliest hopes and our darkest fears: see for reference the various post 9/11 smoke plume-dwelling demons. In the post Great War trauma, perhaps we needed something from a more innocent time to believe in again; Elsie and Frances were offering exactly that. The war itself quickly created more lost loved ones than Europe had ever experienced – their families all potential clients for the unscrupulous spiritualists of the day. Conan Doyle was one such customer. His endorsement may seem out of place given what we know about his most famous creation but we should remember that Sherlock was exactly that – a fictional character.

Interestingly, one of the Cottingley Fairies’ most vocal opponents was another Birmingham resident: John Francis Hall-Edwards – early adopter of X rays and all-round photographic expert.

I wanted to see the brook as it looked now and find what evidence there was of the fairies today. I mean, of course, evidence of their cultural resonance on the village’s fabric… though I was keeping an open mind.

The immediate problem was finding the location of Elsie’s house and the brook (or beck) behind it. Many sources quote the famous story but I could find only one local history website that included pictures of Elsie’s house. That site advises we respect the current owner’s privacy and helps us to do this by not revealing the address. However, Cottingley is small enough to allow the ardent sleuth to discover it by perseverance. Channelling the spirit of Holmes, I set out to determine the exact location that the fairy cut outs were made. The brook is too minor to appear on Google Maps’ waterways but an OS map I happened to have with me revealed the watery flow behind a series of houses. The pictures are described as being taken in the woods at the bottom of the garden (and perhaps this location gave rise to that particular fairy-realm phrase?) In the house photograph I could make out the door number, and reflected in the window, part of a street sign opposite: ‘N STREET’. Only one street on the map matches, and Google street view confirms that this is indeed the right place.

The brook itself is first visible flowing through a concrete culvert off the dual carriageway. It is an unpromising start to this mysterious watercourse but immediately behind this is a flavour of those Edwardian years: dense woodland and a gently babbling rivulet snaking through the dark trees. Access looks unlikely. The first sign of Cottingley village is a ground level stone carved with the town’s name obscured by flowers… the next sign is buried in tree foliage. For a moment, it feels like Cottingley may have something to hide. But the next sign I see is for Cottingley Tires and with this prosaic roadside garage the illusion of mystery evaporates. Near here is the hospital, whose gates are adorned with silhouettes of the famous dancing fairy picture. The next clue references the brook, flowing beneath the road and behind a row of stone cottages. ‘Beckside Fisheries’ is the name: the local chip shop isn’t a ‘fishery’ but it does confirm that there is indeed a brook at the back. The house next door is (or was) called Brookside, just visible in faded painted letters. Various access points to the beck present themselves but I have no intention of trespassing or even appearing to be sight seeing. I wonder how many oddball tourists have made there way here over the years – the locals must surely learn to recognise such outsiders quickly. I try to look like I’m visiting an auntie on a nearby lane – a subtle but real skill. I can see that a metal fence has been erected along the line of low millstone grit walls – it looks like a recent, deliberate effort to keep people out of the beck. A cottage here is quietly named Fairy Dell, as is a nearby (post 1920) street.

The house itself is up for sale but otherwise unmarked. Further up from the cottage is a bridge crossing the brook, which is just visible through the depths of the dark woodland. A small boy plays alone on the steep grassy bank – in a small village such as this one can’t always find a play mate. By this point I’ve run out of village and head back to the hotel (via auntie’s). Later I go back online to look for the house for sale. Tepilo don’t miss a trick and make a big deal of the historic significance of the house, even leaving the mystery open for potential buyers.

Despite the confession in her twilight years, Frances Griffiths added another twist to the story when she insisted that although the photos were faked, they did really see fairies at the beck. Furthermore she maintained that one of the of the photographs did in fact capture real fairies in the background, their faces hidden amongst the grass.

I’m quietly pleased that Cottingley doesn’t ‘sell’ the fairies, but if you know what to look for, their presence can still be detected.

‘This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.’

Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire

Lost Rivers of London 3: the Westbourne

July 21, 2015

The Westbourne is the third of seven underground rivers in London whose above-ground course we have been following on annual excursions.

The source of the Westbourne took us back to the source of the Fleet, as explored in 2013: a dew pond in Hampstead Heath which also represents London’s highest point. This time I took the trouble to look up what a dew pond was rather than merely thinking ‘hm, dew!’ and leaving it at that. The lost rivers walks are intended to instil a sense of curiosity about the environment in the walkers…. by this point it’s working! (a dew pond is an artificial depression at the top of a hill made to collect ‘dew’ or more likely, rainwater).

Each river’s character is subtly different. The Westbourne proved to be the most elusive so far – we didn’t see it from ground level at any point, while the Fleet and the Neckinger occasionally revealed themselves. The dew pond apparently doesn’t count, and at this early stage all we had to go on was the shape of a valley and some reeds at the foot of a dip in the land revealing a watery presence. Residential gardens are described as being mossy and clayy, the book’s author pointing a finger at the river for this.

I like the experience of getting to know Tom’s character through these annual excursions. The walks we undertake are at once Tom’s published river walk, witnessing the changing nature of the landscape even since 2011, speculation about the publisher’s requirements for the book’s content, and seeing what is left out as much as what is included in the text. My favourite aspect of the walks is our group’s own responses and discoveries – my take is that this is why we are here. An early moment is spotting the name ‘Welbeck’ on a building: it’s clue for our greater consideration, rather than evidence of someone responding to the river’s existence. A watery term emerges a few hundred yards later: ‘Solent’ Way. The Solent is a strait rather than a river and its appearance may well be accidental. But it’s the moment of feeling that you may be reading / decoding someone’s hidden intentions that is the thrill of London’s Lost Rivers.

One such moment occurs at a right turn into an alley: decorative arches in a wall mark the presence of the underground river – ‘either by intention or accident’. The phrase splits the whole project apart: what are we actually doing here? As the ‘guide’ I’m happy to look for material myself and weigh up what it might mean, using the book as a prompt rather than a comprehensive authority. I’m happy for Tom Bolton to share his observations too rather than announce he is a river authority. I seemingly inconsequential feature such as these brick arches would be nearly impossible to trace or research the real intention of. Would we want that info to be included anyway? Certainly the publisher wouldn’t. It’s worth mentioning at this point that I skip most of Tom’s interstitial theatre history / crime site inclusions in the book – we’re really just here for the river. Occasionally I feed one to the group when there’s more than a quarter mile between grids in the pavement or effluvial valley evidence in the street layout.

Something else became apparent this year too, a clearer understanding of the purpose of the walks and how they sit within the wider practice of guided tours. I’d recognised that by dropping sight-seeing as an intention for looking at our surroundings, it allowed the group to focus on the ‘invisible’ aspects of our world. This could include the shape of geographical landscape, or shop, place and street names, drains and manhole covers and more. The format of Lost Rivers allows something else interesting to happen: essentially I’m acting as a very sketchy guide for the event by doing no preparation at all beyond bringing Tom Bolton’s guide book London’s Lost Rivers. I’m at once tracing the route, skimming the text for river related information and only occasionally looking up for evidence of the river’s presence – at this point I usually take the group the wrong way and miss key bits of the rout as it appears in print. The task of observer falls to the group. We suspect that Tom leaves some aspects of the river to be discovered by the dedicated walker – a reward for exploring from beyond their armchair. In the absence of a reliable guide, i.e. me, the group are encouraged to (and basically need to) sharpen their observational and interpretative skills to benefit from the walk. In some contexts this would be unacceptable behaviour from the guide but in this context it worked quite well. I’m merely inviting people to come with me as I negotiate the book and the unfamiliar city and I enjoy the feeling of being a group member of my own tour. That said, I think next year I’ll at least become familiar with the route we are supposed to take: this time absence of street name markers was incredibly frustrating.

At one point, I get the map wrong and lead the group along a street-too-far. It reveals the crazy PoMo architecture of Netherwood Day Centre but also means we come across some run-off water flowing across the pavement from a down hill section of the local landscape. Should we call this the Westbourne (or the Kilburn, as the river occasionally changes its name)? All rivers are essentially run off. We’d earlier consider the scale at which a stream became a river (there was no obvious answer).

There are two moments that haven’t appeared previously with our river pursuits. The first is outside a disused pub called the Bird in the Hand our attention is drawn to a battered hatch in the pavement, since replaced by a new cover. An enterprising member of out group recruits a nearby washing machine delivery man to loan him a screwdriver to open the hatch. With a group lifting effort, it’s surprisingly easy work. A brick lined shaft to a lower level is revealed along with a vertical metal ladder and an overwhelming pong of sewer. None of the group is brave (or stupid) enough to descent the 20 feet or so to the river’s edge, although it is clearly audible from street level. While we’ve encountered these access points before, this is the first time we’ve actually opened one up.

The second new encounter is the treatment of the Westbourne as it passes an unavoidable underground space: the District Line as it arrives at Sloan Square. Here, just above platform level, the river is channeled through a four foot diameter iron pipe. It is not obvious without the guide but we are at our nearest yet to this mysterious river. At an earlier juncture, we stop at Hyde Park for ice creams. Behind us is the Serpentine pond – seemingly an extension of the Westbourne. Indeed we look for the grate through which the Westbourne flows into the pool (as with the Fleet). There is none, as the river bypasses the pool. Underground pipes quarantine the stinky flow hygienically and aesthetically through the park.

Another phenomenon is the discovery nature of the changing city, more obvious with each annual excursion. Some of the back roads travelled by Bolton mean that it can be hard to use a handy landmark to show you are indeed on the right track. Grassy banks are mown and a car park barrier described as being red and white in 2011 has since had a slick, black makeover. A distinctive tiled pub included as a bonus feature of the river walk has been since been smashed (illegally) by a property developer. How might this travelogue read in 2051?

By the end, we are exhausted, blistered and walking for the sake of completion. I am reprimanded as to what I left out of the crime / dark local history sites: Judy Garland’s deathbed location is missed especially. Various blisters and sore feet are nursed – this was a longer walk than we expected. We also somehow miss the river flowing into the Thames – the only glimpse we would have caught of the water itself. Somehow this feels the correct outcome for the most illusive lost river yet.

Jane and the City: Jane’s Walks Come to Brum.

May 06, 2015

I learnt about Jane’s Walk about two years ago: citizen-led guided tours that anyone who cares about their locale can lead. Jane being Jane Jacobs, influential US town planner and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The tours are an international memorial to perpetuate her life’s values, all happening over one weekend. Alan Bain of JMP introduced me to Jane’s Walks and on closer inspection, they very closely paralleled Still Walking in many aspects. The key one being: arranging a temporary outdoor forum for discussing our surroundings and how they affect us.

It’s interesting to see which cities have a programme: it’s not always those which have an active tourist guided tour presence. In the UK, York, Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh have yet to run one but Birmingham, Bradford, Coventry and Stoke all feature prominently. Obviously, these walks are for doing something other than sight seeing.

The idea behind my walk along Bristol Road / Street was to experience at walking pace an arterial road more usually experienced by bus or car. Would there be anything worth visiting? Several people showed up after work on Friday to find out.

The moments which intrigued the group were unexpected. We debated for 10 minutes why the Ethiopian restaurant was called Shamrock: was it a sign of ethnic integration? Were there shamrocks in Ethiopia and were they lucky / edible? Two members of the group volunteered to dine there soon and report back. Another restaurant sign mystery appeared later: why was the drive-thru McDonalds sign a) green and b) tiny to the point of unreadable? There were more questions than answers. Two of the group lived nearby and were the only people present who had walked the full length of the road. This couple remembered the Superprix in the 1980s – a trace of which was still visible, spelling out ‘Birmingham’ in crocus greenery. In the private housing estate, we looked at some amazing sculptural details: goblins appeared to be offering a pig to a prone figure. Easter Island heads loomed over the entrances to the 15 blocks. We were joined by a member of the residents’ committee, curious about our curiosity, and able to provide details I hadn’t googled before setting out. Our final destination was a large but empty hotel. It advertised a fishing lake and beer garden, both of which would have been welcome in this ‘dry’ residential area. When I left the walk, several of the group appeared to be working out how to break in to investigate further.

The Saturday morning walk was another ‘long street’ showcase, led by Dr Dave Richardson. Dave works with the My Route project – highlighting the history and heritage of the first few miles of Stratford Road. A compact group gathered to find out more. The route instantly took us to unfamiliar territory: the former James Bicycle Factory – a well preserved Victorian delight in Lombardic Romanesque style. The famous Vale-Onslow motorcycle shop was next: the scaffolding and greenery in the brickwork suggested it was long closed but surprisingly it was still trading. Like the Diskery we visited yesterday, this shop had at some unnoticed point become a museum to itself. Similarly, the last stand of the Irish community in the area is represented by Bourke’s grocers. Its crucifixes, sacks of Irish potatoes (Rooster, Kerrs Pink and Golden Wonder) feel like carefully curated exhibits. What became apparent on this walk is how much I’d missed in the past – and I’m usually on the look-out for these details. I’d even combed the street with David earlier in the year. But being in a group, observing and talking seems to make features pop out of the urban fabric, and their meaning more apparent. Our walk ended at the Antelope – a beautiful Arts and Crafts former pub with a huge William Bloye relief panel of an Antelope. The building is now Hajees Spices, which whilst resolutely ‘dry’ still recognises and preserves the beauty of the pub’s decoration and ornate M&B lettering. No single moment better characterises the social changes at work in the area.

On Sunday morning, Fin Skillen introduced us to the world of the Cycle Courier. The courier needs to know the city inside out but in a different way to taxi drivers’ (erstwhile) knowledge of street names. Short cuts, near misses and road network savviness in a city designed specifically for cars are all essential components. Fin explained the routes he took were against the clock and needed to avoid red lights whenever possible. During multi-drops, joining the dots meant understanding that shortest wasn’t necessarily quickest, required keeping gravity on your side and knowing where to chain up in safety. Fin showed us many snipped padlocks and wholly removed Sheffield stands – indices of where to avoid locking up. Cycling all day means a ferocious calorie burn and knowing where the cheap sandwiches are is critical. Samples and street-distributed freebies are common once you know where to go – our group were treated to the taste of new banana flavour Soreen, handed out in Centenary Square to the 10k race runners. This also proved to be a history walk: in the three years since he last worked as a courier, the city has changed significantly and many of Fin’s short cuts no longer are possible. Even taking a few days away from the fervent urban upheaval is enough to put you at a disadvantage.

Lost and Found: Sport and the City on Monday was Alan Bain’s walk of the lost sports fields of Bearwood – a curious cluster of these appearing along City Road. Alan played on many of these fields just 15 years ago but it must have felt more like 50 to see so many of them grown over and sealed off. Our first field was the Avery Sports Ground on City Road, a recreation ground originally created for employees of Avery weighing scales manufacturers. It’s been unused since 1979 1995 with no evidence of its imminent future reuse. The scale is epic and there’s a real atmosphere of loss and lost opportunity on tennis courts, cricket pitches and football fields still visible beneath the growth. Apart from the obligatory blue bottle of Frosty Jack at the gate, there is little evidence that anyone in using the space in any way. Another clue is the notice served up by GRC Bailiffs a year ago advising on horses that had been detained on the land.

Our next lost grounds has been built over completely. David Wilson Homes have convincingly recreated a village of six bedroom houses over the former sports ground: ‘Lordswood Gardens, Harborne’ (although we are still in Bearwood). Some space has been preserved as a village green effect and meadow. The national shortfall in new houses means sports ground become the equivalent of inner city green belt. We visit two other sites: a cricket field formerly belonging to the M&B’s Cape Hill Brewery in a transitional phase, and a football field overgrown but with goal posts and floodlights still standing. Street names reflect the M&B logo: Stag Road, Antler Way, Roebuck Road.

The final walk on Monday afternoon is more a survey of how street furniture has been adapted to confound skateboarders in Eastside City Park. Since the closure of the ramp at the Custard Factory in February, this is the skaters’ last refuge in the city. Even before the park officially opened, the skaters had been in and were waxing down the steps stone edges for their tricks. For this event I had invited Mark Preston from Ideal Skates to lead a brief walk around the area and show how various extra bits of metal were being added to the stone work. I’d spotted the metal knobs appearing but had missed a more subtle feature: lengths of metal inserted between stone slabs to deliberately scupper small hard wheels’ progress. Other park users hadn’t missed them: there were a few pedestrian stumbles from time to time. It appeared that skaters merely adapt their technique to the new obstacles. I had heard about tools created to remove the knobs and Mark confirms he’d previously discovered knobs which would simply pull out and could be replaced neatly after use.

Whatever your take on skating, there are many who come specifically to the park to watch their tricks and who may stay on in the area to do something else, economically. One problem in the park is litter. We’d previously identified the positioning of a large litter bin at the end of a low-level wall as a deliberate effort to thwart skaters jumping off the end. A chance encounter with a park committee member revealed the positioning was accidental – it was merely to make depositing litter in it more likely. The true situation is that the young skaters hate the bin and won’t use it to protest its presence. This Jane’s Walk revealed the subtle and unknowable rhythms, rules and intentions of city space and how making them overlap by public forum, even on a small informal scale can yield beneficial results.

Digbeth Listening Walk – David Prior

April 04, 2015

A great mix of people gathered at the bronze bull in Birmingham on a sunny March Friday afternoon ready to utilise both our walking and listening skills.
This walk is an ear opening experience that gave us all a very different ‘view’ of Birmingham. Lead by composer David Prior (one half of Liminal, along with architect Frances Crow), we are encouraged to listen – really stop and listen – to the sounds surrounding us.

The first lesson we learn is that perhaps we hear the noise surrounding us because that’s what we expect e.g. cars and people, but what are we missing? On the first exercise stop outside Bullring, I noticed a can of drink being opened – a soft sound heard in possibly the noisiest part of Birmingham! Thereafter, David devised exercises to help us work out how high and how far the sounds we hear come from. Instruments are handed out to amplify the sound world: basic ear trumpets transform the environment and while the stethescopes are usually silent, when they work they really work.

Aside from our newly honed listening skills, we are treated to a slow walk through Birmingham’s markets and into the Fazeley Street area of Digbeth, streets we otherwise wouldn’t walk on without a specific purpose. The most treasured fact I learnt was how an “owl’s head is a spoffle”. “If you ever get a chance to poke an owl’s head…” suggested David, and went on to describe how the owl’s head is largely feathered, like a BBC fluffy outdoor microphone. If you are flying fast through the air but listening out for the mouse on the ground, your head needs to be a spoffle

David has an archetypal analogy for all the acoustic spaces we move through: Bullring was a canyon, St Martin’s a cavern, the indoor market a forest… other spaces were their own analogy: viaduct tunnels and open brushland. Walking through Birmingham without noticing all these sound conditions will now be impossible.

(Rickie Josen)

A Wray of Light

December 31, 2014

A few weeks ago I had an extended mooch around the Christopher Wray building on Bartholomew Row – this you may remember was the lighting shop not far from Masshouse Circus that closed about ten years ago. Everything that once may have served as a landmark in that area (Rosa’s Café, Los Canarios restaurant, The Railway [pub]) has now gone and its current geo-markers (Millennium Point, Hotel La Tour, Eastside City Park, BCU Parkside) have all appeared in the last few years.

For all it’s modern context, it turns out the Christopher Wray building is perhaps the oldest in the city centre. Or rather part of it is, as this industrial complex has been extended for different purposes over nearly three centuries. Whilst browsing the glitzy chandeliers and uplighters back in 1998, I hadn’t realised that this was more than merely a sales outlet: all the elements for the various lights fixtures were actually being cast and pressed out the back in workshops and in the basement foundry. That metal casting tradition stretches back to the earliest days of the building, developed by the brass founder, William Bache in 1749.

For Birmingham, especially the city centre, 1749 is ancient. There’s really only St Philips that predates it, and a few C17 timbers in the Fox and Grapes. It’s worth getting excited about – especially knowing that (unlike the fox and Grapes) this building will have a life beyond the HS2 developments.

Over the years, the workshops here have been used by pearl button makers, tinners, millstone makers, cabinet makers and engravers. Additionally, most of the properties would also have had their own brewhouse and the complex was developed in the C19 by a ginger beer maker. The buildings later formed the epicentre of the Italian Quarter, offering accommodation for Italian immigrants. Rosa’s café, demolished in 2009, represented the last stand of a long established Italian connection.

There are two surviving townhouses from an initial row of 19 house on what was then called Carrow Fields: 9 and 10 still remain, albeit in a much altered form. When compared to the Georgian elegance of many C18 Hockley survivors, this is pure Digbeth: chopped up, modified for work, bashed around. It’s actually this factor, the uniquely-surviving industrialisation of a domestic townhouse plot that has led to its being listed. The actual shop floor of Christopher Wray is a modern creation, little more than a lean-to shack, but I sensed there was more to be discovered behind the crumbling brick facade of the domestic dwellings. Property developer Simon Linford agreed to show me around.

In what is now the site office (for the building is on the verge of being redeveloped by Linford’s) I discovered the number plate from Christopher Wray’s Merc, propped up on a mantel piece: L11 GHT. Later investigation reveals him to be a showman from the beginning: an established magician, stage performer and occasional Doctor Who actor. In the name of research, I watched the entirety of the Pertwee era Sea Devils to watch Wray (briefly) in action. The bric-a-brac he assembled for theatre props were later sold on at a market stall, the beginnings of his lighting empire. Sadly, Simon revealed that he had died just a few weeks earlier.

The buildings are in pretty bad shape and there are several places upstairs where it simply isn’t safe to walk. In many places, the rain has entered the building unchecked. The plot is extensive, and at every turn there is evidence of its former use. Boxes of lighting fixtures are piled up everywhere, hanging from wall mounts and flowing out of drawers. The stencilled wooden storage boxes look familiar: Simon confirms that the provisions shelving that I’ve seen in Lewis’s deli in Moseley originated as recycled ammo storage sourced by Wray in the 70s, sold on via eBay. In the domestic areas, patterned wallpaper show the changing fashions of the years. The labyrinthine basement areas extend some way under the street itself. Check out the recent Birmingham Post Hidden Spaces supplement for a more comprehensive description of the interior…and indeed better photos.

What’s fascinating here is that it’s possible to go back to regency Birmingham in the city centre – but no-one knows it’s here. It’s invisible. Even the ultra-rigorous Pevsner Architectural Guide to Birmingham misses it. While pub landlords know the value in staking ‘oldest’ claims – however dubious the claim – the city manages to miss a trick here. This is odd for an industrial city that could widely be celebrating its creative industrial and scientific past (like Manchester does). However, it’s a thrill to have found it and exciting to think what Linford will end up doing with the place, given its listed status. Rumour is that the workshops and ateliers will have a creative output once again…