Silent Walking

The silent walk is a standard in the walking artist’s tool kit. It’s a great introduction to how effective live art can be and that it doesn’t always require a lot of preparation or even a budget.

The first one I went on was Kira O’Reilly’s Silent Walk which ran during Fierce Festival in 2011. She told me she’d adapted it from a Chicago performance group called Goat Island. The event was an aimless and leaderless wander as a group (or about 15 people) setting off from what was then VIVID’s space on Heath Mill Lane in Digbeth. Kira led the assembled group out of the door initially to give it momentum but after that it decided (without communicating) where it would go next and what it would stop to look at. An invisible group dynamic decides where to go next. Essentially, it was experiencing flocking behaviour in humans. I recall we stopped to look at a broken water main that was bubbling up through the pavement like a fountain, and the only time the the group stalled was outside the police station on Digbeth High Street. The group attracted a few glances but wasn’t regarded with suspicion – even by the police. There might be the occasional puzzled look as the group descended down an alley.

The second silent walk I went on involved walking round Chelsea with a similarly sized group, but this time gathered together by a large elastic band, about fifty feet long. This time the group did attract attention. People in the group took the instruction of silence as binding and questions, comments and interventions from the public outside the band were ignored. The wake of friction and confusion it left through the streets was almost as visible as ship churning up the ocean. There was separate dynamic within the group: who should support the band (it wasn’t attached to us) and how fast to walk, how to ensure everyone had enough space. At one point the group stopped and the two leaders left the band and set off in different directions. Who should we follow?

Each walking artist adds their own tweak to the game – and a slient walk should be a fun and intriguing expereince. Such a walk features in the Still Walking programme: Simone Kenyon’s Quiet Edges. It proceeds through some outlying streets around the Jewellery Quarter this afternoon, but this will not be about site-seeing. The locations will be unfamiliar to most. Simone will invite you to experience the city and the simple act of group walking in a way that may well be new to you. The first rule is “No Talking”. The second rule is lively discussion of exactly what you experienced in a warm, dry location with a drink after the event: I look forward to hearing your take on what happens!

Some tickets still available here.

Lost and Found // Iris Bertz

Still Walking sent roving reporter James Kennedy to cover the practice run-through of Iris Bertz’ walking tour of accidental art:

The trouble with being in a hurry to get somewhere is that as a pedestrian you don’t stop to look at your surroundings. It was iPod on and tunnel vision to the destination, a fifteen minute walk becoming ten. That morning, I walked from Bath Row, walking the length of Granville Street and onto Broad Street, and crossing the road into Oozells Square. Nothing really to see, a familiar walk through familiar territory, and besides, I wasn’t going to stop as I was late.

I stopped outside Ikon Gallery, which is where the walk was going to start. I looked briefly at the brief of today’s walk, led by Iris Bertz. In this walk, Iris would ‘explore the use of the accidental in art and focus on how it would be possible to see art everywhere.’ A psychedelic psychogeography; where accidents create multi-woven stories, challenging the city-dwellers perception of the mundane, challenging pre-conceptions and the imposed order of the city, making the city burst with colour and new-found beauty, instead of being a place to work, consume and go home.

Standing with the modern Royal Bank of Scotland building in front of me, I noticed a plaque on the floor underneath my feet. ‘Sculptures. Paul de Monchaux. Landscape Design. Townshend Landscape Artists.’ In front of me, a sitting area carved out of stone, a long bench, a seat with an archway over it, and two parallel rows of two seats. This was another aspect that the walk would cover – the lines blurred between what was art, what was furniture, and what was sculpture. Monchaux’s commission would play an accidental role in art, where the artistic became functional. Visions of artists and architects impressions of Brindleyplace (not ‘Brindley Place’) before it was re-designed in 1991. A utopian vision of multiculturalism, people coming and going, blurred faces and myriad fashions. ‘Exciting proposals for a high quality, mixed use development.’ Working, playing, engaging with the new designed spaces, here featuring ‘Sculptures’ by Paul de Monchaux, and ‘The Royal Bank of Scotland’ by The Sidell Gibson Partnership.

Behind me, the Ikon Gallery, formerly the Oozells Street School, refurbished and extended in 1997 by Levitt Bernstein Architects. When the walk started, we were told that we were going to see a very personal tour to Iris. This would not be a walk about truth or reality, instead, this would be an invitation to see how Iris saw. She recounted a tale of how, growing up in a small village with her artist mother, they were both stopped by a puzzled member of the community, who asked them what they were doing. ‘Photography’ they replied, to bafflement and bemusement. What on Earth were they seeing, that warranted them to stop and look in detail? On the front of Café Ikon, we were shown a dimpled window, which at first look seemed nothing out of the ordinary, but on closer inspection became an extended piece of art – an ear trumpet, where those inside the gallery could hear the outside. Without closer inspection and examination, this would have been rightly ignored. With new engagement – new possibilities.

We left Oozells Square, now facing Ken Shuttleworth’s The Cube, standing impressively, and as usual with Birmingham’s architectural decisions, gleefully controversially, against the skyline. Walking back to Broad Street, we walked past the Second Church of Christ Scientist Birmingham, as it is now known ‘Popworld’, (formerly ‘Flares.’) Crossing the road to the original Ronnie Scott’s in Birmingham, which in 2002 went into receivership and re-emerged as The Rocket Club, at the time having the dubious honour of being Birmingham’s 12th strip joint. Above the gaudy façade of a woman with her mouth hanging open in a pseudo-provocative manner stood a series of five concrete panels designed by John Madin, which together mirrored the idea of a gallery exhibition. They seemed fossilised onto the building, calling comparisons with Rachel Whiteread’s ‘House’ (1993.)

Walking down Berkley Street, noises from generators mingled with the smell of curry spices. We were now engaged with Iris’ notion of the artist as walker. Now, we would see how artists within the city engage with the many blank canvases they find, canvases being the barricades, the fences and weather-beaten panels, the bricked up walls and any available space for the marker pen, the stone or the cans of spray paint. Here, on a metal door barricading a private area, which obviously said ‘don’t look at this, nothing to see here’ the artist known as sky had been, signing their name onto the middle of the door, the ‘s’ resembling a ‘5’ and the ‘Y’ underlining the ‘s’ and the ‘k’. To the side of this, an symbol of a dot and a dash, the morse code for ‘A’ stood inexplicably. However, our assumptions and readings, led by the artist, would create meaning. Behind the metal door, plants grew free wild and knotted and twisted, as with the brain of the artist looking at this free canvas, and being mildly irritated that they hadn’t bought their pencils and paints with them, and making a mental note to come back prepared.

Beyond this, a car park was shown to us. Not as a Martin-Parr-in-action, our attention drawn to the markings, cuts and cracks on the exit floor, which resembled abstract paintings, or maybe that the artist Doris Salcedo had been commissioned to re-create her ‘Shibboleth’ installation in Birmingham, after its success at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. ‘Shibboleth’ was created to make engagers think ‘what was real and what was not’ much as we were thinking about these markings in front of us.

Turning around, our attention was drawn (note: we were not discovering these for ourselves yet) to a wire had been coiled in a too-perfect ring, and was hung on a hook in the centre of perfectly aligned windows. The sun was shining that day, and the roof’s shadow of the opposite building was halfway up the wall, an unexpected, accidental sun-dial.

Two arrows made out of gaffa tape were stuck onto the front of a door (sky had been here again as well.) Iris considered this as a piece of urban art. The arrows pointed to each other, one on each door. The question was, what were they there for? Inviting us to inspect this intervention made the familiar unfamiliar, and interfered with logic, common sense and intelligence. It also drew comparisons with the 1960s Arte Povera movement which makes art works out of cheap materials, and that of Vik Muniz’s photography and sculpture work with Brazilian catadores (garbage pickers.)
We were invited to touch the sandstone walls of the CBSO centre (by Associated Architects in 1997) and looked at the shadows which seemed to resemble crouching human figures, disturbingly like Hiroshima shadows. Gum flecks, wear and deterioration however, gave these shadows faces and expressions, and thankfully provided laughter to juxtapose against the worrying thoughts before.
Across the road, on a window of the apartment block Friday Bridge (architects unknown) was pointed out to us. A sticker vase containing sticker flowers in a window seemed innocuous enough, but Iris told us the vision reminded her of Holland and van Gogh’s ‘Tulips.’ The vase was also framed perfectly, with a blind pulled behind them, seemingly for us, the onlookers benefit rather than the exhibitors benefit.

Turning left onto Holliday Street, the sandstones were beginning to fade and distress, slowly losing their manufactured quality. This was a case of nature returning to what it was, turning its back on man. Under the aqueduct, water had eroded bricks, making nature the artist rather than man, resulting in canvases of ghosts and crying women.

A void faced us turning left onto Bridge Street. A building removed leaving a beautiful derelict space, an open wound, showing the back of the old Central studios. The Library of Birmingham (Francine Houben, very recently) took on a brazen, proud quality behind the rubble and the overgrowth. To our left, a derelict house, or what could have been a pub or a lockmaster’s house (with seeing, the possibilities are infinite) had been painted white, almost with the intention of blotting it out from view, in order to disguise its otherness. Boarded up windows and doors sealed the danger inside. Another nod to Whiteread’s fossilised ‘House.’ A standing stone behind the house offered us a look into the yard/garden/place of mystery and showed an overgrown mass of weeds and dead flowers, and a shack with a tin roof added more mystery to the proceedings. The Central Television Studios had been used themselves for the use of helping viewer’s imaginations – an Accident and Emergency sign made it resemble a hospital, not a television studio, and graffiti saying “Summer 2011: The clock is ticking” had been used on an edition of the post-apocalyptic drama Survivors (shown on BBC, not ITV.)

More post-apocalyptic drama abounded on the site of the James Brindley pub, closed since 2008. To get to the pub you have to walk down a cobbled path, and we were invited the look at tangled ivy, that, in an attempt at removal, had woven a printed tapestry underneath the pub. Not just underneath, some of the ivy had spiralled up into two columns, an artistic accident recalling the work of Patrick Dougherty. ‘Someone who has tried to kill nature has succeeding in creating a bit of art.’ Iris, an experienced tutor in willow sculpture, showed us the twisted stalactites of twisted ivy, a superb piece of lattice work covering over what was seen as a monument to James Brindley, unfortunately being represented as a weed-strewn mausoleum. The pub had once been a vibrant jazz-friendly venue but suffered severe leakage, closing its doors in 2008. Those wanting to stake a claim in the pub were advised that it was unviable and unworkable, and the pub reminded shut, despite many efforts to rejuvenate the courtyard area. From death sprung life; a guerrilla garden patch stood to our right, and the canal-dwellers had had decorated their narrowboats with vibrant colours and on one, a narrowboat/Land Rover hybrid stood out from the crowd, complete with a fibreglass crocodile perched nearby.

Over the cobbled bridge past the Canalside pub, we saw more examples of painting and framing, creating accidental art. A hole in the wall contained a drinker’s stash of a can of lager and a fag end, and a ripped sticker on a boarded up window resembled the canalside crocodile, presumably created in a fit of ego. Through an alleyway adorned with sticker art and tagging (particular attention drawn to the Birmingham and Wolverhampton artist ‘NFA’) we got onto Gas Street, where we saw a repetition of the gaffa tape urban art phenomenon (this time pointing upwards and diagonally left.) To its left, yet another blank canvas, with this time, a ledge in which the painter could arrange their paints.

Over the road, a cast iron sign with a Victorian, Gilliam / Python-esque gloved hand pointed inexplicably to Broad Street. We were told that this wasn’t sticker art, and in fact was made out of cast iron, expensive to create, so possibly created by an artist or a marketing company (or both) with money to burn. The new ITV studios to our left, with their latest corporate branding (something which my inner anorak and nobody else at all got very excited about in 2012) on their brickwork, and we made our return back to Broad Street.

In between Mooch Bar the Quayside office block and Risa Bar we saw what was considered to be a public sculpture. A drain, ring-fence off with gaffa tape strewn across it and exposed, dangling wire. Fag ends littered the floor, and on closer inspection the earth underneath our feet was seen to be rising up. Office workers standing around having a well-earned fag and a chat eyed us with bafflement and bemusement. “What are you doing” they said? “Seeing.” “Right.”

Discover Iris’s full itinerary by booking onto her tour here. Tickets are selling fast so please don’t miss out!

Tom Jones WALK*LOOK*DRAW*KNOW

The Still Walking motto is that everything is worth looking at. If you set out expecting to find interesting moments in the city, they will naturally present themselves to you, because they are there. Simple!

It is always a joyful moment to be shown a new way of seeing the city, and Tom Jones event for Still Walking does exactly that. Tom teaches drawing and as an ex fine art student I know the adage that drawing is proof of seeing. If you take up drawing, it’s actually seeing that you learn first, and what a discrepancy there is between what is there and what we usually record, whether that means draw, see or remember.

Tom’s event for Still Walking will lead a small group through a variety of places and landscapes in central Birmingham and introduce them to the techniques of seeing: at this point, drawing ability is not essential. But the group will be drawing: micro sketches in pencil on small index cards. The point is not to create finely rendered depictions of the city, but rather to respond to Tom’s observations and guidance on what to see and how to see it. Whilst doing the practice tour with Tom this week, there were not only many moments of encountering places I’d not spent any time looking at before, but entirely new ways of seeing it too. I don’t want to give anything away about this beautiful walk – and every moment was valuable – but Tom will be able to show you a selection of English holiday destinations not five minutes from Brindleyplace.

This September, the Still Walking Festival focuses on how artists see the world and move through it, and Tom’s tour comes recommended if you want to learn how to do that yourself. All drawing equipment is included. Places are very limited and the event is already selling well so make sure you book well in advance.

Short Stories

A few weeks ago the Rep theatre asked me to talk about my work for their Foundry programme for emerging theatre practioners. Thinking of myself as a theatre practitioner doesn’t come naturally but a critical aspect of developing a guided walk calls for the journalistic ability to spot a story and then tell it convincingly.

I feel there are vast unexplored vistas when using the guided tour format; a lost plateau between the Blue Badge data-delivery polished standard and the its-behind-you high camp of the ghost tour. Uncharted knowledge, opportunities for new dramatic approaches, content and audiences. Ideal for the Foundry workers to get their teeth into.

I often draw attention to the fact that our urban surroundings are there entirely by design and as such, everything has a story behind it. The layers of adaptions, remakes and human detritus are further chapters or twists to the original premise. I accept that many of these stories are not fully developed narratives and in the context that I work in, they are more usefully thought of as clues. The usual city walking tour can feel like a highlights-of-everything experience: the entire history of the city and the top ten moments of civic, cultural or economic success. That usually means visiting the Town Hall, naming the various Lord Mayors and (in Birmingham) talking about how they’ve done the canals up now. This approach misses the sub-plots of ordinary people which I feel are often more accurate flavour of the city. Threading these together, with the occasional reference to mighty moments in history, is what I do. You can think of the urban backdrop as a stage and the evidence left by people as the story being acted out on it. The evidence can be very subtle.

The basic idea was to walk around Centenary Square and talk about what was there.

One direct way of witnessing the past is to look for plaques. The earliest of Birmingham’s blue plaques are actually rectangular and bronze (such as the one on Baskerville House) and they tend to merge unnoticed into the urban fabric. More recent ones are circular, bold and blue. Birmingham plaques are characterised by referencing something that used to stand here or even “near here.” This phrase alone tells a story: one of a city that is in flux. Birmingham is cognisant of its past but can appear unsentimental about it, as befits a city with the motto Forward. Sometimes an entire building, such as the Gothic fantasy that was Josiah Mason College will receive a memorial in the form of a plaque, which will end up propped up in a window of an unused alley. Elsewhere, utterly unobserved, a CCTV camera spike is dedicated to the memory of a former Labour MP who survived IRA attacks and the harsh summer of 1976. Two plaques independently remember the local radio soap the Archers. Our group takes several steps along Broad Street’s Walk of Stars, sensing the difference between plaques that merely commemorate a local name and those which celebrate a significance of that spot. Revealing the emotional moments of the immediate environment is what this tour is about. (I later confess to the group that I had to google many of the stars).

At the Municipal Bank we encounter more archaeological evidence. Firstly, the architect Thomas Cecil Howitt has signed his building at the lower right: not common for an architect to do this, but there was a fashion for doing it in the 1930s and ‘50s, perhaps influenced by artists’ signatures on their masterpieces. The foundation stone was laid by HRH Prince George in 1933. Now largely forgotten, this wayward ancestor to the current Prince George endorsed morphine and cocaine use and sired a son with local romantic heroine Barbara Cartland (according to Barbara Cartland). His death in an aircrash during WWII is echoed by a row of bomb blast shrapnel damage and patches to the Portland stone across the lower part of the building. Bivalve shells appear in the stone too, representing life from prehistoric times. 500 million years of history.

Into Fletchers Walk: an intriguing place with a faux-mediaeval name (arrow maker) demonstrating the post-war predilection for underground public spaces. Brutal overspill from the Central Library. Shopping here has quietened in recent years, though Zagora is still doing well, and a window display advertises the bottled craft beers available at Post Office Vaults. Both come recommended by Still Walking. On Sundays this useful shortcut to Broad Street is sealed off as it is not civic space. The mall has its own wild flower meadow: in the compact vitality of the city, people require both moments of liveliness and quiet. Weeds reduce aggression. A few years ago Fletchers Walk was rebranded, seemingly stealing English Heritage’s logo in the process. This design, we can see, has been borrowed from the original floor tile layout. At this point, I challenge the group with an apparently Sherlockian mystery: the shop unit behind me is empty and the sign has since been taken down. I ask: “I want you tell me the name of the man who originally put the sign up.” It seems impossible to answer: how could that moment leave any evidence? There is no trace of writing on the shop front. Then the group notices that the space above the window is not blank: the surface undulates in a specific rhythm. Someone sees the letter K emerge… “it’s Karl!” While piping out the adhesive, Karl created a short-lived tribute to himself. The subsequent removal of the sign revealed his name once more, albeit in reverse, and perhaps a testament to his faith in the longevity of his business.

Next door is a gun and body armour shop: gunsmithery is a long-standing tradition in the city but always a surprise for me to see such shops in reality. While I talk about this, I notice two new faces in the group. I’m interested in this moment: members of the public have every right to exist where they want to in public space, so following a guided tour (even if it had been a ticketed one) is well within their rights. One of them looked familiar too: it sometime takes me a while to recognise a face out of context but I later remembered a Flatpack volunteer who had ably facilitated my Invisible Cinema tour a year or two ago. Great to run into him again, and for him to want to be involved.

I then took the group through an unmarked door into the space that exists beneath the former Central Library. I explained I had no motive here other than to experience a lost part of the city centre with its own specific atmosphere. Stalactites formed in the concrete ceiling overhead and vernacular signs and warnings were stenciled onto the concrete walls. Doorways led to long extinct civic departments. I included some local history here: a large space which was build as a bus station but never used. The sheer height is the clue, and the dormant escalator shafts still remain, to take a theoretical public into the beating heart of the library.

We pause at a ventilation shaft to the Anchor Exchange and then we’re back in Centenary Square. The space outside the library is, by design, a wild flower meadow. I’m always on the lookout for seating in public squares in the city: seated people observe their environment and talk to each other. Public seating is a rarity in city centre Birmingham (keep shopping, is the general idea). It’s difficult to see from here but the new public space seems to have a deck chair… albeit made out of flowers.

At this point the tour is done but no-one wants to leave. There are many observations, questions and comments. The walk hasn’t been like any previous experience of studying the narrative form. I usually experience at least one or two people sloping off midway through with an apology but today we ended nearly two hours later with a larger group than we set out with. Without any prompting, people wanted to get involved in Still Walking and further their walking experiences. 20 mins later I head off, thrilled with what might emerge from all this.

Lost Rivers of London 1: The Fleet

The lost rivers of Birmingham have merely been mislaid. Head to London for rivers that are truly buried.

Last year, I was given Tom Bolton’s wonderful book “London’s Lost Rivers” which describes the overland course above seven of London’s underground rivers. Each river has become lost by design: at some point during London’s growth, the need for new land has superseded the need for a river. The presence of the rivers can still be felt however. Bolton describes how the rivers have shaped the physical landscape and how town planners have capitalised on these contours (for example, a railway line will run through a valley). There is a cultural echo too, in building and street names, references to former bridges and banks and in public art. The river itself can occasionally be seen or heard through surface level grids and drains. The challenge as an urban walker is to discover and piece together the evidence.

The first lost river I knew about was the Fleet, running from Hampstead Heath through Kentish Town, Kings Cross, Farringdon and Blackfriars, at which point it empties into the Thames, so I decided to begin there. I invited a few friends to join me one sunny Sunday on an invisible riverside meander. The source of the Fleet is Whitestone Pond, near Hampstead Heath. This is London’s highest natural point and is marked by a trig point. It was a glorious day and beautiful electric blue damsel flies skittered above the surface of the water and bullrushes puffed yellow pollen in the breeze. As we consulted the map, a couple who were paddling in the pond asked where we were going. We explained were heading to the Thames, following the course of the Fleet. Learning that they were standing in the source really seemed to pique their imagination and there’s certainly an unquantifiable mystique about searching for underground rivers and seeing their influence.

The first mile or so of the river is above ground, in the form of stream flowing through a sequence of pools on the heath. Bolton charts the route to be as near as possible to the river and at some points that means pushing through brambles and overgrowth along a barely perceptible pathway. The real joy of walking the route is being given a reason to visit new places and make chance discoveries. The river has already set the route long before there was any city to walk through. The landscape and its contents take on a new significance through the filter of the lost rivers theme: a covered pool table at a caravan site seems to be making a poetic gesture. As the Heath ends, the river dips below ground through a grill and doesn’t re-emerge until the Thames.

At this point the guide book does something very interesting. Tom Bolton is clearly a Londophile and the walks are colourfully illustrated with local history, literary references and grisly crimes when the river passes by a significant site, such as the bullet hole riddled wall of a pub in Hampstead, the scene of the Ruth Ellis shooting. But because the river itself is determines the route, it means that large sections aren’t standard guidebook territory. The challenge then is to find something valuable in the available urban fabric and I feel there is always something to worth seeing or knowing about wherever you are: everything is evidence of something. On a guided tour, or a self guided tour, the world looks different. An internal switch has been set to “observe”, rather than the “destination” factory setting. Bolton annotates the backroad-zigzagging with relevant comments and unblenching observations.

Once back in the urban environment, the usually overlooked grids and vents in the road often afford a glimpse of the river and various utility installations hint at access to the underworld. An abandoned junkshop features a display of cobwebbed fishing tackle in the window, obviously after the fact but nicely fitting the theme. We passed the Fleet Primary School, Fleet Tandoori and Fleet Flats on Fleet Road – all named after the road primarily, but ultimately referencing the river. A local second hand bookshop shows a map of the Fleet in its window with a helpful YOU ARE HERE pointer, while depictions of the river through history appear in tiled murals and mosaics along the course. Tantalisingly, not all of these appear in the book, allowing river sleuths to make their own discoveries. We probably missed a lot.

The full route, including one false turn and recovery, took ten miles and a whole afternoon to complete. Once we reached Fleet Street, tremendously thirsty and completely wiped out, the Blackfriar became the ultimate destination, mere yards from the Thames. On a previous visit, I’d noticed access ladders that go from the path at Millennium Pier down to the river bank which I’d considered exploring but this will have to wait until next time.

There are six rivers remaining in the guide: a regular summer outing then, between now and 2019!

Blog the High Street: Cradley Heath

Still Walking asked writer James Kennedy if he would write a few words on this morning’s tour by Fran Wilde…

Saturday morning. I passed few people on my walk to Moor Street Station, passing only by those who’d come in for a spot of overtime, dressed scantily so they could lose their jackets at lunchtime and go for a drink and a nice sit-down in one of the public parks or bars. It was still early, not just gone 8. The Saturday shoppers wouldn’t be here for a while. If they were going to do anything, they’d stay in their own districts and perhaps brave the queues later. Today, I was going to indulge in a bit of district tourism. I would be going from my end of B15 – Lee Bank, Edgbaston, to B64 – Cradley Heath, Sandwell. I’d be seeing what the locals of Cradley Heath get up to on a Saturday morning. I’d be making new experiences out of their usual everyday routine, seeing the shops, the pubs, the areas of local interest, for the first time.

I was doing this because of the Still Walking festival. I’d written for the Still Walking festival before, exploring Birmingham’s Gothic architecture and its history of cinema venues, yet this was all in the centre of Birmingham where I have lived for the last few years. Still Walking was taking advantage of 2013’s good weather, and had curated a short micro-festival, including this walk entitled “Walk the High Street, Cradley Heath.” The idea of walking a high street would fit the re-mit of Still Walking exactly, the festival’s founder, historian Ben Waddington (B13, Moseley) says; “I love that everyday experiences such as the local High Street on its busiest day can yield surprising moments, clear traces of history and some cracking stories.” My only knowledge of Cradley Heath was only the excellent Hollybush Arts Venue on Newtown Lane, and that would be walking from the station with the express interest of going there in the early evening and coming back in the dark small hours. No time for exploration. Today would be different.

Meeting Ben at Moor Street at 0845, we got the 0855 in the direction of Kidderminster (still not been there yet.) If I’d been going to London Marylebone, I would have faced forwards, to get a view of the graffiti and the many flats as I approached the familiar sights I wanted to see. As chance would have it, we sat so we seemed to be going backwards, seeing things in retrospective. No anticipation, no pre-conceived ideas. Everything would already exist as we propelled backwards. Past the Jewellery Quarter and The Hawthorns, and further into Smethwick Galton Bridge the train banks rose on either side, making our journey seem like the final battle at the end of Star Wars, zooming through a green trench at hyperspeed. Langley Green and Beyond the Infinite. Down the corridor, a poster for the Severn Valley Railway implored us to ‘step back in time’ with their VE Day celebration, to its side, a poster for London Midland’s new smartcard, The Key, which promised us that we could ‘unlock the future.’ The green trenches subsided, giving us glimpses of houses in suburbia, their inhabitants waking up to Saturday, the houses getting bigger and smaller, cul-de-sacs, avenues, A-Roads. Into Rowley Regis, the trench rose up again, until we entered a long dark tunnel which took us as far as Old Hill station. The train drew parallel with the Dudley Canal, before being faced with the green trench again, which rose up around our peripheral before subsiding, leaving us flying above the houses and then back down into the factories and industrial units. We were now in Cradley Heath.

We met with local artist Fran Wilde, who would be leading the walk into Cradley Heath. She was standing in front of wedding parties and groups of men in shirts ready for a day out. Apologies were made for a local councillor who sadly couldn’t make the walk because of an ill dog, and we were holding our breath for the Sandwell Walking Officer and the owner of the Hollybush Arts Centre. Walking up the concrete steps (black walls, green borders) to the street opposite a level crossing, Fran showed us a photo that would get us thinking about the changing landscape of Cradley Heath. When and where was the photo taken, what era, and what was missing? We could see a level crossing, and Ben identified a car in the picture as being a 1976 make of Ford. Looking at the photo, we were able to contrast what was then, as with what was now. Chain-making factories, chain-making being the industrial skill attributed to Cradley Heath, were now car parks. The building to the railway station was modern, but had been born from a disused bus depot. There were now queues of people outside the station. People with heavily inked arms, showing constellations and galaxies, to surely provide a map home once they had finished their day out across the infinite.

More people joined our group, including a couple who were holidaying in Birmingham from Kent, who had read about Still Walking on the web. They enthused about their stay in Birmingham, taking in jazz quartets in the Symphony Hall and flautists at the Cathedral, the Universe of Sound exhibition at the Municipal Bank, and hopefully Rob Horrocks’ ‘Crossroads of Sabbath’ walk on Sunday in Aston (see the Still Walking website for more details!) They were walking guides themselves, and told us about the Wye Food Festival in Kent, where they would be hosting the ‘Apples and Pears’ walk on the 20th of June.

A countdown to 10, and our journey to the centre of Cradley Heath was about to start. Road safety precautions were advised (part of the walking experience is waiting for the green man to come on) and we dutifully turned right up the hill from the station, left at the zebra crossing, left again, then we headed up the hill with the car park/chain-making factory on our left. Our first stop was revealed to be the Mary MacArthur Gardens, named after a trade unionist and women’s rights campaigner who came down from Scotland to help with the strike. The gardens used to be a tip, before they were levelled into playing fields and sheltered accommodation. Ring-fenced by chains, which appear everywhere throughout the town, throughout logos, railings, and art, was a sculpture made by Walsall born artist Luke Perry of Mary MacArthur. The sculptures use of chains would signify a metaphor for the uniting of the people. Behind the sculpture stood the people, carrying slogans decrying the penny-squeezing middle men who they were fighting against; “Locked out for 2 ½ d.” “Support sweated labour.” “Stand for something.” This unification resulted in 30,000 people turning up in Cradley Heath High Street, so much that the street fell in near Griffiths’ family-run pawnbrokers on the High Street with the sheer power of the united people’s defiance.

We walked on up the hill, past a Lidl and up and down the slopes of the park, formerly Slag Heaps, of which we could stand on and admire the vista behind us, seeing a mixture of independent shops and businesses, from Cutting and Welding shops, to old cinemas, tattoo parlours and fish and chip shops. Crossing over the road, we got to The Five Ways Island, which saw the roads splitting off into various streets, to our right, an old chapel had been demolished to make way for a hand car wash. Turning left onto the High Street, we were now invited to enjoy a myriad of independent shops, including Scriven and Thornton’s (est. 1972.) Inside, shoppers could buy hand-raised pies, kidneys, liver, shins and knuckles, in fact, if you were vegetarian it would have been your idea of hell – however, you would still have to admire the fact that this was not pre-packaged production line fodder, but at least had been shown care and decency, love and respect for the animal. Scriven and Thornton’s seemed to be a true original independent, and we would see more of it’s like on our travels.

The pavement widened and turned into a semblance of a square, offering a betting shop, an amusement arcade and bakers. This was the site where the street had fallen in due to the feet of the 30,000 united people, who were conspicuous by their absence. We crossed over the road and got to the Big Market, which reminded me of the old Swan Market in Yardley, and sadly, a much, much scaled down version of the Rag Market in Birmingham. We were told that in the 1970s, stalls as F Bonser & Sons, were twelve deep. Niche shops, such as the impressive sweet stall, featuring lovingly sourced sweets still got their share of enthusiasts and regulars, but today, because of high rates, Tesco’s and the ease and amount of choice presented in the Westfield Shopping Centre at Merry Hill had seen time-strapped shoppers disappearing, and the Big Market was rumoured for closure, to be replaced for re-generation and gentrification. A clothes rail with ladies’ bras stood in front of an empty counter which previously would have sold meat and/or fish, today, the stainless steel slabs were empty, and the bras hung untouched. Outside the indoor market, evocative marker penned adverts on coloured card (‘New Boots and Panties!!’ I mused to myself) boasted of hot pork cobs, Friday specials and ‘best ham’, and blackboard sandwich boards were placed outside these shops, which seemed to be doing slightly better than the ones in the market. The rates were too high indoors. It was cheaper on the actual high street itself.

On some of the empty high street shops, there were reproduced photographs of the bygone era, advertising the Black Country Living Museum, and, on the frontage of ‘Drapers’ which had been established in 1880, now closed, had a fake painted frontage which gave the impression of the building being used as a thriving bookshop, an idea which had been thought of as a good one by the local council. Instead, our attention was drawn to the carved inscription “The Louvre” – the architecture inspiring us to look up and use our imagination rather than the cheap display that was in front of us. However, Cradley Heath had a lot to boast about – a regionally important dentist’s practice with up-to-the-minute equipment was next to the artificial frontage of ‘Drapers’ and over the road was a selection of excellent independent and specialised shops which had moved on from the increasing rates of the Big Market and were now thriving on the High Street. ‘Patricia Ann Textiles’, ‘Brewmonkey’ (a homebrew suppliers), Marva’s (Lingerie*Cosmetics*Jewellery) and the Central Café faced the local Wetherspoons pub and the Tesco’s car park, trying to appeal those to walk a bit further down the High Street. The Tesco’s had been an old industrial site, and in 2007, Luke Perry had received £50,000 from the retailers to build a monument in reverence to the borough’s industrial heritage, which stands 26 feet tall as a permanent reminder to residents of Cradley Heath of their past and heritage.

We walked past Queen Street (in-between Prince Street and King Street) past a Lloyds Bank, ‘Floormaster Carpets; and a barber’s called ‘X-Treme Cutz’, letters spelt out in blood-dripping cut-throat razors, also specialising in ‘Crazy Colours’ and ‘OAP special rates.’ The intriguingly named and fronted ‘Eden’ (white background, black lettering) was shut, but its mystery was revealed to me by one of our group – ‘Eden’ is a beauticians. Two churches stood in front of us, Saint Luke’s Cradley Heath (160 glorious years boasted a billboard, however there are plans to have it demolished) and a Baptist Church, grade 1 listed with scaffolding around it. We walked into the graveyard at Saint Luke’s for a breather before continuing with the final leg of our journey (opposite ‘Fishing Tackle’ and ‘Sizzling Balti.’) Fran showed us a map of the area, and also passed around quotes from Cradley Heath locals about the potential of the area. The quotes were positive, showing a community wanting to get together and talk and be proud, a dislike of the ‘fake/virtual shop’ frontages, and acceptance of some decline, but enthusiasm for the future, with Cradley Heath’s history as it’s backbone.

On Reddal Hill Road, going past an intriguing variety of businesses including DP Ironcraft, a property developers, ‘Clothing Attractions’ and John Jones Footwear (est.1877) and a new library, Over the road is the Sandwell Liberal Club, with another public art sculpture entitled ‘Daisy Chain’, created by artist and blacksmith Ian Moran in 2006. Moran was also responsible for creating the 19ft ‘The Foghorn’, the centrepiece of West Bromwich’s based arts organisation Multistory’s ‘Forging Links’ project which was unveiled at 2011’s Sandwell Arts Festival.

Finally Fran took us into a shop called ‘TeeT Shirts’ which refers to itself as ‘The Home of Black Country T-Shirts and Gifts’ – a vibrant and colourful interior showed off the company’s ethos – to promote the district in a modern and celebratory way. We listened to the shop’s owner Stephen Pitts talk about the history of the shop, from its origins in the bedroom of his parents’ house, to scribbling down ideas in the pub with his business partner Warren Pitts, and finally progressing to a workshop in his friend’s garage. The breakthrough moment for ‘TeeT Shirts’ came as a revelatory moment, when a tornado appeared in Cradley Heath in 2009. Looking back, they realised that the tornado was a beacon of where the business was going to be – on top of Reddal Hill Road. A t-shirt was designed with the slogan ‘I survived the Cradley Heath tornado’ and soon, more business was coming in. At the time, Stephen and Warren could only print black lettering on white t-shirts, but they found that they soon needed to increase their expertise in the print-making industry! They created more designs and embraced social media of promoting their business – using MySpace and Facebook, and even writing songs such as ‘Black Country Alphabet’ which became a hit on YouTube (over 250,000 hits and country.) That year they were invited to appear on BBC Radio WM’s Christmas Show hosted by Ed Doolan at the Symphony Hall, but had to turn down the chance to perform due to the amount of business they were getting, now creating bespoke designs, mugs, and posters, anything that is to do with keeping the humour of the Black Country alive. Books by local artists and writers were sold behind the counter, and there seemed a constant invitation to view the shop itself as a gallery, as an exhibition.

Stephen told us that from its humble beginnings, ‘TeeT Shirts’ now takes business from overseas and designs have reached as far as Australia, Canada, the USA and Uganda. He is particularly proud of the fact that 2 hours of a working wage can be spent on a t-shirt that the company has designed and created, and that people are excited about the business and are proud of a company that celebrates its heritage. On leaving the shop, we all had a feeling that such independent businesses are a portent of how the high street is going to survive in the 21st century, with imagination and a new way of presenting business to its customers. One foot in the past, the other in the future. I left Cradley Heath add got the train back to Birmingham Snow Hill (facing forward) in the afternoon, and have spent the best part of the day finishing this piece off, inspired again by the journey into foreign and alien lands. I’ve been to Walsall. I’ve been to Smethwick, Oldbury Stourbridge and Lye. I’ve now been to Cradley Heath. I’m thinking Kidderminster may be the next stop, as apparently there’s a thriving music scene over there.

However I can’t go to Aston tomorrow for Rob Horrocks’ Crossroads of Sabbath walking tour as it’s my Mum’s birthday and I’m going to Tanworth-in-Arden. Maybe some other time…

Birmingham Architecture Festival 2013

BAF2013 ran last weekend: four days of celebrating Birmingham’s beautiful (or blasted) buildings in glorious sunshine, narrowly avoiding the drizzle and hail that has characterised the season so far. Kick yourself if you didn’t manage to attend any of the films, workshops, exhibitions or guided tours… or better still make sure you attend next time.

Perhaps this first outing of the festival will go some way towards laying to rest the myth that Birmingham’s buildings are a bore. I hear this claim a lot – from residents as often as strangers to the city. When pressed, they describe the slick, commercial spaces or the run down parts of town but seem not to know about the beautiful terracotta wonders, sandstone castles, mediaeval manors, decorative high-scapes or gothic industrial buildings of the city. We only ever see anything because we’ve been shown or because we found out for ourselves – if we’re not expecting to find anything, we probably won’t go looking.

“Take a Second Look” is the festival’s canny motto, and perhaps for many it was even “Take a First Look”.

For me, a festival highlight was the Re-awakening Lea Village tour by George Chiswell. For many Brummies, this is the station of Lea Hall, on the slow train back from London. For George, it is the home he has lived in for 74 years. Over that time, he has watched it alter beyond recognition. Lea Village is directly on the flightpath to Elmdon Airport and the tour was regularly punctuated by low flying 747s. George has never flown, and was perhaps the only local to still look up each time something huge soared overhead… perhaps a reflex learnt in wartime. I hadn’t been to Lea Village before and I’m always keen to explore unfamiliar neighbourhoods, looking for traces of the past. But despite its mediaeval origins, Lea Village has changed utterly. I’m always wary of creating a guided tour that is entirely about what used to be there, with nothing visible to still connect to it. Other than exercise, it may as well be a slideshow. Sometimes even a street name or a boundary hedge can be enough to open an aperture into the past; one that can be even more resonant than a perfectly preserved Georgian Square.

On Re-awakening Lea Village, George’s village was invisible but for his lucid recollections of school sports days, sweet selling scams and post-war rebuilding programmes. But something unexpected was happening all around: the village was manifestly still there in the people who would stop to say hello to George (he seemed to know everyone by name); the village bobbies astride mountain bikes, keeping the quad-biking duo in check with a well-aimed nod, and a well-attended village green fete, complete with revolving maypole and potter’s wheel. The local councillor and his daughter were also amongst our small group of walkers. I don’t like to isolate an area’s past from what is happening there now, and try to make visible this link visible. Making the village visible, past and present, worked effortlessly and as such was a triumph.

The village ambience, and local constabulary, came off worse in that evening’s screening of You’ve Been Trumped: the story of Scottish Highlanders being squeezed out of their homes and lives by the evil golf tyrant tycoon Donald Trump as he seeks to build the world’s best (= most expensive) golf course. Dunes were bulldozed, electricity was cut and tears were shed – on screen and in the audience. The film clearly demonstrated the true cost of this billion dollar development.

My favourite event of the festival was the Wild Walls tour by Ellen Pisolkar. A small group gathered on the green side of Saint Martins in the Bullring, where they were equipped with tiny lenses, instructed not to eat anything and then set off into the city’s mossy underworld. I marvel at how people see the world differently, and BAF has seen witnessed people being introduced to the various layers of the urban fabric: buildings, ornamentation, construction materials and, here, microworlds. We could have spent the entire afternoon exploring just the first car park we encountered: a levelled industrial area on Park Street. Any number of curious plants thrived amongst the rubble and empty Frosty Jacks bottles. Gesturing across the devastated landscape, Ellen made a bold challenge: “Is there a plant here you would like to know about?” – certainly she knows her stuff. Occasionally she would cross the road or double back, having spotted something that wasn’t there just a few weeks ago, including species new to the island. Many plants proved to be edible such as the omnipresent nettle, others seriously poisonous like the hemlock adjoining the new city park. Others went unrecognised: perhaps a new hybrid? Everywhere, unnoticed, tiny copses of trees pushed up through roadside crofts. I had fun with my tiny lens: propped in front of my iPhone camera, an Instagram-like filter framed the minuscule forms.

This tour is unique in the sense that each time it runs, different plants are in season. Wild Walls runs a second time for Still Walking on Sun 2 June.

I attended as many events as I could and led two tours myself. I’d crammed for the John Henry Chamberlain tour, expounding his Civic Gospel approach, having been granted rare public access granted to the postcard-shy School of Art on Margaret Street. In Material World I gathered and shared my favourite pebbles, ironwork, concrete, plastic sheeting, fibre-optic, fossils, bricks and sandstone. The pinhole camera workshop output was exhibited at 6/8 Cafe – some extra-ordinary result for such lo-tech equipment. Later, relaxing in BAF’s Rotunda penthouse, a chance to see the city as a whole as the traffic hummed and the sun dipped behind the Nat West tower.

Here’s looking forward to a second chance to look again!

Sabbath Day Out

Today’s guest blog is by Capsule’s Sarah Lafford:

Pose outside the Chelsea Hotel a la Patti Smith, visit the home of underground punk, CBGBs, or go to the ‘most famous club in the world’, the Cavern Club. Paying homage to the music we love should surely be an opportunity to display a certain level of coolness. Not so much if you’re a Black Sabbath fan. I don’t think it’s too brazen to state that Sabbath are perhaps Birmingham’s biggest cultural export: the originators of Heavy Metal, they’re adored globally. But the most celebrated music venue from the band’s early days, Mothers in Erdington (John Peel’s favourite club) is long gone, and the four lads from Aston certainly didn’t hang out with beat poets and literary heroes in cool coffee shops and bars. We’re lacking a hip hangout in which to pay homage.

Rob Horrocks’ Crossroads of Sabbath walk through residential Aston might sound an unconventional homage to one of the biggest bands in the world, but it’s perfectly fitting.

Sabbath’s sound is inextricably linked to their upbringing in post-war Aston, and their work in the ‘metal bashing’ industries that dominated the Aston landscape in the 1960s. During the Crossroads of Sabbath we can retrace their footsteps, from their childhood homes, schools and factory jobs with ease, as it becomes clear that not a lot has altered in the area.

After working closely with Rob on Home of Metal I was fortunate enough to be invited on a rehearsal of Crossroads of Sabbath. A small group of us (I should stress, fans and non fans alike) enjoyed the exercise of casting our minds back to our own childhoods. Crucial for me was the exploration of an area quite unfamiliar to me, yet a mere stone’s throw away from the city centre.

I shan’t give too much away, but I’ll share a highlight. Before Ozzy was one of the biggest rock (and reality TV) stars in the world, he was a pretty unsuccessful criminal. Rob shows us the shop he attempted to burgle (which is behind his own house), and the pretty painful looking measures people put in place to attempt to keep the likes of Ozzy off their property!

Crossroads of Sabbath runs on Sunday (naturally) 2nd June at 12pm and tickets can be bought here.

Walk the High Street, Cradley Heath

The Still Walking thing is to reconsider various places and themes as tourist destinations and to create guided tours to explore them. The idea came after being bored once too often by official guided walks – listing every lord mayor the town has had, how many windows there are in the Town Hall – and thinking where I would take people if I was an official guide. What was “my” Birmingham? (and why were those guides “official”?)

Over the last year or so, I’ve been amazed by the popularity of Still Walking tours, with visits to underground tunnels, abandoned cinemas, remote wastelands and lost rivers selling out in a flash. It seems the guided tour needn’t be a threading together of civic bombast, historic dates and economic data. So much of our city seems to sit there waiting to be noticed and I think it’s all worth looking at and talking about.

This year’s microfest visits a couple of outlying spots, though if you live in Aston or Cradley Heath they are of course local. Rob Horrocks will be following in the footsteps of Black Sabbath and over in Cradley Heath, Fran Wilde will be walking the High Street. Fran is an artist who settled here recently and quickly became fascinated by the area’s history, atmosphere, traditions and clear difference to Birmingham and indeed anywhere else. I love that everyday experiences such as the local High Street on its busiest day can yield surprising moments, clear traces of history and some cracking stories. The first thing you notice are the chains: they’re everywhere in design like they once did in industry. A famous anchor, now at the bottom of the atlantic, had its origins here. Like most High Streets, Cradley Heath has been adversely affected economically but I discovered a robust independent force still present in the town, with many shops seeming like a museum of my childhood. Even the hulking presence of Tesco Express hasn’t yet finished off the fishmongers, model shops, seamstresses, cafés, bakers, sweetshops, ironmongers…

Fran’s tour simply visits what’s there, looks at some local history, talks to the locals and reports back. Cradley Heath is shown to be a compelling area, still having the outlook of a small industrial village with its own unique and celebrated identity. Tesco carefully mirrors the high street with its in-house selection of chemists, barbers and opticians but will never have the high street’s local newspaper office, Black Country souvenirs, local delicacies or delicious local ales on tap.

It’s worth making the short train journey and having a guide to hand affords a rare opportunity. Recommended to anyone who has yet to visit the Black Country and also to those that have!

Fran’s tour starts at Cradley Heath Train Station at 10am on Sat 1st June. Tickets cost £4 and must be booked in advance, which can be done here.

Architectura Victoriana: The JH Chamberlain tours

Looking at Victorian Architecture can be like seeing evidence from an ancient civilisation, one far in advance of our own. Their buildings were designed to allow adaption and extension without spoiling an intrinsic harmony, but so often when we do, it is with an insensitive eye and clumsy hand. The new bricks don’t quite match in size or colour, ornamentation is courser, tiles and glazes duller and flatter. A gothic window may be filled in like an eyepatch, or a new entrance cut through a wall with none of the theatre or sense of occasion beloved by the Victorians.

It’s fun to watch tastes in architecture come and go, almost like watching a carousel. Arts and crafts touches are almost tidal in their acceptance and rejection. Times of austerity can have an effect on design but we have never quite ever dared to revisit the outrageous opulence of the 1890s. But we can reappraise our take on it: a tiled surprise beneath the hall carpet or intricate wood work laying dormant below a thin veneer of plywood.

I’ve always loved witnessing the playfulness that Victorian designers had, the fun the architects had is more obvious than any time before or since. I love seeing their treatment of factories and warehouses: many times presenting them as palaces or civic buildings. The Tolkien-inspiring Waterworks tower in Edgbaston is essentially a chimney disguised as an richly ornamented Italianate tower. Sometimes these disguises are to appease the residents of well-to-do areas but often it is for the fun of designing something wonderful. John Henry Chamberlain (who designed the waterworks tower) is surely the most flamboyant of Birmingham’s Victorian architects, continually surpassing his own benchmarks of decorative design, whether for industrial works, hospitals, churches or homes.

I was very pleased to be commissioned by Birmingham Architecture Festival to create a guided tour about Chamberlain. I regularly meet people (including residents) who express surprise that Birmingham can yield an architecture tour, yet the streets I walk down in the city centre are lined with astonishing work of a calibre to rival any other English city. And not lone examples, but entire blocks of beautiful brick and moulded terracotta. The Birmingham I picture is rich and red. We have been fortunate to be granted access to Margaret Street School of Art and visitors will see the careful detail present at every level, from stair posts to hand-shaped bricks to light wells. The tour will end at Ikon gallery and indeed take in all the Chamberlain work in the city centre.

Two tours are running at 3pm that afternoon (Sun 26th May) : Joe Holyoak will lead Architectura Victoriana: Brick and portray Chamberlain through an architect’s eyes, I will lead Architectura Victoriana: Art from the perspective of an artist. Tickets are free but must be reserved in advance from Ikon.

Bloye’s Zone

There’s something of Sherlock Holmes about Neil Holland’s tour for Still Walking: Hidden in Plain Sight – The Sculpture of William Bloye. Bloye is surely Birmingham’s most prolific sculptor and the city centre contains dozens of examples of his work. But few among us would be able to identify his work if prompted. How is it we have largely forgotten one of the city’s great artists, who for three decades in the twentieth century was a highly sought after sculptor? Neil was hired by Still Walking to investigate the mystery.

Being personally introduced to Bloye’s work, as I was a few weeks ago by Neil, certainly helped throw light on this enduring enigma. I was able to join the dots between the work I knew about (Queen Victoria, the Golden Boys) and the curious figures I’d spotted peering down from plaques and elevated positions around the city. Bloye’s work appears across the city as sculptures in public squares, private courtyards, commemorative plaques and foundation stones, decorative panels, architectural embellishments and even bas-relief signs for insurance companies and pubs. Perhaps the sheer range makes it difficult to recognise as the work of one man.

Yet his style, once you start to recognise it, is certainly distinctive. Stylised, streamlined and slightly cartoon-like but with real depth, fluidity and rhythm. The ball of a thumb is carved as richly and as memorably as a face. Some of Bloye’s work is not really in plain sight at all: exquisitely rendered panels in the upper reaches of buildings are at a level noticed only by window cleaners. My feeling is that people used to do a lot more looking around them, and maybe that’s why we don’t see this sort of decoration on buildings anymore.

There’s a joyful moment in recognising a pattern – we’re always looking to make sense of our world. Hidden in Plain Sight not only highlights Bloye’s wonderful sculptures but also provides this sense of having a veil lifted from the world, that we’ve been fortunate to glimpse something valuable that was there all along. Neil leaves plenty more still to be discovered.

The tour runs at 5 30pm on Friday 31st May. Meet at the Golden Boys sculpture on Broad Street, opposite Centenary Square. Tickets are selling well but for the moment can still be bought here.

Living in a Material World

I like to introduce some of my guided walks with the observation that every square foot of our built environment is there deliberately. Someone has drawn, designed and created all of it (not the same person). It all has a job to do and the right – or adequate – materials have been chosen for the job.

It’s an obvious truth but one that’s so close to our everyday experience that it’s not always recognised. As a mental exercise, I also ask: how far do we have to go to escape the designed world? An area that exists in its unadapted, wild state? The countryside is something of an illusion of nature, largely created for agriculture. Woods and forests too are usually fenced off and manicured to a degree. Even rivers (especially the Rae) are culverted, re-routed and maintained.

Devising the Material World guided tour for Birmingham Architecture Festival gave me an opportunity to explore this one aspect of architecture: the changing use of building material over the years, and the reasons those materials were chosen. I wanted to ask why we rarely used our own local stone but would ship in expensive granites and marbles from around the world, if they had the right look. Architecture is prone to the same changing fashions as our garments: what seems current today can seem dated the next – and charmingly retro and worthy of preservation in the future. Fashions can also depend on availability: terracotta fell out of favour in the twentieth century as tastes for Victorian opulence waned – but also because huge projects like Victorian Law Courts seriously depleted the stock. Timber framed buildings are a rarity in Birmingham and when bricks became the dominant building material, wonky, draughty timber framed building became quickly embarrassing and old fashioned. I think of Birmingham as a “brick city”, but the brick kilns were being fired by the very woods that once provided timber for housing. There was no way to go back, even if we’d wanted to. Today, the city centre is entirely devoid of any timber buildings and those that remain anywhere are listed and command a high price for their cramped, unadaptable interiors.

Meanwhile brick has become a largely decorative feature, no longer structurally supportive in most buildings, but merely forming a “curtain wall” draped over a steel frame. The concrete revolution of the 60s dropped this pretense, with bold new shapes, structures and surfaces. On closer examination, these often revealed gentler pastel shaded pebbles and quartz added to the mix. Concrete had its fans and there will surely one day be the museum of the last concrete building in the city. And several decades on, concrete’s antithesis, the reflective glass skyscraper, still seems to be a classic theme.

I love the fact that buildings won’t stay still, seemingly as whimsical, vain, fashion-conscious and irrational as their human inhabitants. The uniform, logical city of Utopian vision is still, thankfully, a long way off.

Material World runs as part of Birmingham Architecture Festival on Monday 27th May (a bank holiday!) at 3pm. Places are limited and tickets can be bought in advance, which can be done via this link

The Still Walking microfestival is here!

Still Walking returns with a short programme of events to start the summer. What do Black Sabbath, Moss, The Golden Boys and Cradley Heath have in common? Possibly nothing, other than they’re all on the bill between Fri 31st May and Sun 2nd June (although do let us know if you think of a connection).

The festival is twinning with the mighty Birmingham Architecture Festival 2013, who unmistakeably share the eclectic Still Walking outlook: check their amazing programme of derelict buildings tours, pinhole camera workshops, architecture themed screenings, talks and events all celebrating the people, places and buildings of Birmingham. You may even like to back their Kickstarter project to help them on their way.

There certainly seems to be no end of subjects for guided tours in the city: this year we’ve been underground with Flatpack, lost in Selly Oak with Arts Soak and looking hard for Invisible Architecture with Birmingham Museum and Gallery. We’re planning even more events all the time so keep in touch with us on Twitter and with our mailing list and you’ll be the first to find out. Events can sell very quickly, so if there’s something you like the sound of, make sure you snap up a ticket now.

Happy exploring!

Ben Waddington
Director, Still Walking

Moss Garden – reasearching the Wild Walls walk with BAF2013

Yesterday I joined Laira and Ellen to walk through the moss tour which forms part of the Birmingham Architecture Festival. I’d been excited about the tour since I heard about it a year ago: it seemed to exemplify what the Still Walking festival is all about. There’s no curatorial policy as such, but the festival delights in revealing hidden layers of the everyday world – things most of us would walk past but to some are a moment of joy.

Watching Ellen discover tiny trees, once-rare lichens, poisonous herbs and explain the nature of the algae and mosses that often cover buildings, walls and urban surfaces was a thing of wonder. It was especially moving to see her discovering flora thriving in litter, dumped Shortlist newspapers and worse among Birmingham’s various crofts and wastelands. A crop of poppies poetically grew up around someone’s dumped works, but Ellen didn’t see any of this, she was too excited about the world she was showing us, and we were too.

At the church, we marvelled at how the algae and lichen used the foliate carved stone features as their substrate, rather than vertical bricks. Ferns grew from the tops of walls unnoticed as toadflax scaled the wall from below. Lichens grew happily on stones, daily trampled underfoot. Edible salad was everywhere it seemed, and round the year too. Why don’t we know any of this? Some cultures do as standard, it seems, and Ellen certainly knew the subject inside out. Not only the plants but their history, introduction, use and folklore. Everything was delicately connected and had a story. The moss walk was a voyage into the microverse but also a glimpse back the the earliest days of life on earth…many species of these “primitive” plants haven’t needed to adapt for millions of years. To me that sounds advanced!

A guided tour can changed your outlook of the world forever yet usually only costs a fiver or so. This one comes highly recommended but has very limited places. Wild Walls runs on Sunday 2nd June at 3pm, starting at St Martins in the Bullring. Book now! Magnifying lenses will be provided but the sensible footwear is up to you.

Selly Oak: Discovering Traces.

I led a very enjoyable Still Walking tour on Sunday for Art Soak: I stepped in at short notice to replace the scheduled local history run through. The timing was good: over the previous two days I had led the Subterraneans and Invisible Cinema tours for the Flatpack Festival and Discovering Traces now completed the trio of explorations.

There was heavy snowfall for all three tours. A large part of what I do involves widening the 21st Century gaze and by that I mean looking up and looking down at things. That weekend, looking up meant an arctic blast and face full of snow. Looking down revealed more snow. I arrived early and took a stroll round the University grounds, watching two snow vortexes whipping round Chancellor’s Court, beneath the huge campanile.

I introduced the tour to the eight hardy souls who had braved freezing conditions to meet at the University gates. I explained that they would almost certainly know the area better than I did, in fact I didn’t know anything about the history of Selly Oak. I’d even got the town wrong: this turned out to be Bournbrook. What I wanted to do was show my methods and approach to my subject. Namely, it all starts at street level and involves looking for interesting things. From experience, I know that most High Streets still contain plenty of traces, from old painted advertisements in gables to mosaic lettering in shop doorways. Once you expect to find something, it becomes easy to see. After the initial walk, you can then start thinking about what is is you have found, what it once meant and why it is still there. You can ask people about the buildings they live or work in. At a later stage, you can head to the library (if it’s open) and follow up your research there. But I never start there.

I started by talking about the heraldic meaning of the University of Birmingham Coat of Arms; I was always curious about the mermaid there, combing her hair. A passing ambulance’s siren provided the required sound effect for the subject. I introduced the group to Ordnance Survey Bench Marks, which appear throughout the city on buildings, walls and railway viaducts. The group were intrigued, and one man had actually been a surveyor in the 50s. “But how did I know it was there?” asked one gentleman. I didn’t know it was there, but I knew how to see it. It sounded like I was conveying something mysterious, but the reality of people’s passage down a familiar road is not to look at it. I liken it to going back along a stretch or road where you think you have dropped something. If you are expecting to find something valuable you will see the street differently.

One lady bemoaned a recent house demolition, removing from her life a favourite Victorian brick, stamped with the Diamond Jubilee dates. I’d seen plenty of these on Luton Road and was able to reunite her with missing brick, after we’d scraped off the snow from walls where I’d remembered seeing the bricks. The brick (actually a coping stone) was important because it helped date the building, gave an indication of then-contemporary events and also where the materials for the house were made (in 1897 bricks were still being made locally). I explained I was very interested in house names too, and had discovered a row of houses with a large terracotta crest with the name and date. The names began with trees (Elm, Birch and Ivy) then merged with girls’ names of yesteryear (Ida, Maud, Selina) and the row ended with a surprise: “George”. Was George the architect, and the girls daughters?

A highlight of the tour was an intact ornate lamp outside a former wine cellar: “Selly Grove Ale Stores”, a wonderful Victorian survivor. I guessed the building opposite was the associated pub, with its distinctive corner door and cellar, but some of the older members of the group remembered it being a shop. The tour had become a knowledge exchange…OK I got that one wrong! The tour also included a former bakery, now a car parts workshop, the lost river Bournbrook, ancient glass, a tiny house and a practicing saddler on Bristol Road. Once I’d earnt the group’s respect, I also talked about the recording studio used by ELO and Napalm Death (a former engineering shed) and the Chicken.com takeaway shop, whose name doesn’t connect in any way to the domain name chicken.com

The tour ended at the top of the hill with my favourite discovery of the tour: Selly Oak Water Pumping station. I had recognised the architecture was Italian inspired but could see no evidence of it ever being a church. This one I had to look up: I was thrilled to learn it was an industrial building by John Henry Chamberlain. Something Brum used to do very well was the inventive presentation of its industry. Since the construction of the Elan Valley aqueduct it hasn’t been used as water pumping engine, and the building now houses an electricity sub station. Of course, most of the locals knew this, but by the end all admitted they’d been introduced to several aspects of the town they’d never seen, even those who had lived there for decades and looked for such things.

I planned to end the tour at Selly Oak library, to mirror my belief that you should end your research there, not begin it. But it was getting colder and the allotted 90 minutes of walking had now elapsed. Looking is easy, but sustained looking can be tricky, as is remembering to do it at all. But on this afternoon, even a blanket of snow didn’t stop us.

SW Weekend 2: Radial Truths

So, another packed weekend of exploring the lesser visited parts of Brum horizons is over. Hope you learnt something interesting, saw something new and did something you want to do again.

Radial Truths set off from deepest Stirchley on Friday, with cyclist gathering from far afield to visit some to visit some of the former foundries of Brum bikes. The tour rides again on Sun 1 April, but this time Bike Foundry are organising it all and you can contact them about tickets.

…and more pix at our Stillwalkers Flickr site!

Sold Out! The Myth

One piece of admin I have enjoyed during the festival is adding the Sold Out! stamp to the programme schedule. It’s a great measure of the success of your idea, even before a review has been written. But perhaps it can seem too successful, as people regularly tell me they wanted to buy tickets but that everything has now sold out. Not so! There are still some great events that you can come to over the next two weekends. Here are two coming up soon.

Swanning around Erdington

I met Kerrie Reading at the Second International Research Forum on Guided Tours in Plymouth a year ago. There was a surprising mix of backgrounds at the conference: academics, artists, historians and even some tour guides. It was a great experience and if we ever do Still Talking: the conference of Blah Bah Blah I hope it will be as diverse as that conference was. Kerrie was a theatre practitioner with an interest in history and a recent graduate of the University of Birmingham. I told her about the festival. Was she interested in taking part? Yes she was! She told me about her work, which I recall involved children on a treasure trail being able to pick up objects from the ground – something they want to do but are always told is bad! I knew I wanted something like this in Still Walking – the festival is about being as inquisitive and exploratory as children naturally are.

Kerrie’s tour represented everything I wanted the festival to be about – it was in an unusual location (one of only two tours NOT in the city centre), embraced children and families, it looked at the history of the area and presented all that in an unexpected form. Until that point, I hadn’t known about theatre “promenades” – which is what this is.

You can still buy tickets for Swanning around Erdington at 3pm and 4pm on Sun 25th March

Eyes at Rest

Usha M is a movement artist based in Nottingham who I met in the Elan Valley last year. She is part of a dance duo called http://www.rundance.org/ along with Penny A although perhaps “dance” isn’t the word – it is one element in a mix that involves running, dance (obviously) but also spacial awareness, exploration and something close to parkour or free running. It sounded exhausting (and is) but I knew I wanted it in the festival. On this occasion it wasn’t to be, but Usha offered a gentler option of her own devising: Eyes at Rest. At first it sounded terrifying – blindfolded exploration of Brindleyplace. How would I market it? Just thinking about the risk assessments involved made me shiver. But I realised that this meant it should go in: if something was challenging my idea of a safe walk then I needed to include it in the festival. (The walk IS safe, I assure you – everyone has a seeing partner and the risk assessments are now – finally – all complete). I tried it with Usha a few weeks back and was amazed at how the world feels when you let go and experience trust, gradients, water, heightened background senses and Brindleyplace’s amazing chiming clock, which I’d never bothered to listen to before.

Tickets still remain for Eyes at Rest on Sat 24th March at 11am and 2pm.

In the Vale of the White Horse

This is a walk I’ve wanted to do for a while; or rather a destination I’ve wanted to get to, which on this occasion meant a long walk. The Uffington White Horse is by far the oldest of England’s hill figures, all the others are by comparison modern. Uffington’s white mare is about 3000 years old – compare that with the Cerne Abbas giant, which has the “feel” of something ancient but is probably 16th century. Practically every other hill figure is younger than this, making Uffington “the one”, by a long chalk.

I hadn’t intended to make the journey a pilgrimage; the plan was to take the train as near as I could, walk the rest of the way and back and then return to Oxford. It turns out there isn’t a train station for miles and the nearest bus drops off about five miles away. After an hour or so of working out the bus routes, bus timetable, bus stops and bus fare I realised I could still do the walk and get back in time for my evening event…just. The layers of complexity in getting there galvanised the realisation that I really wanted to see it.

My interest in the horse has been incremental. I knew about it as a child, during a “stonehenge” phase when I was ten. I remember 10 years ago, Channel 4 painted a huge Big Brother logo in the field behind it to advertise their well-loved series. I felt sure it was a computer graphic when I first saw it, as that would surely be quicker, cheaper and wouldn’t desecrate the site. It turned out they had sprayed paint onto the grass to create the effect. “Wait til English Heritage find out!” I thought naively; but it transpired English Heritage had taken a £2k bung from C4 to allow the ad to be painted. It felt then that something was wrong with the situation. What exactly was English Heritage’s role in safeguarding the monument? At that time, I wasn’t especially interested in history and didn’t attempt to get to the bottom of it.

A similar thing happened last year: Irish bookies Paddy Power staked out white polythene lines to the horse to create a jockey; an advert for their company around the time of the Cheltenham races. The advert, apart from committing the crime of not even being an original idea, didn’t seek permission from EH, who were outraged by the desecration. This time I tried to articulate my dissatisfaction: how would it be taken if I chalked a huge ad for Still Walking on the wall of Birmingham Cathedral, or of my local mosque? “Don’t worry, it will come off, and I’ll stick a tenner in the cannister. No harm done.” It would be an outrageous act, of course and would only damage the brand. How can “temporary” ever mean “acceptible”? I’m not sure how Big Brother fans felt about it, or Paddy Power punters, but there must be thousands who saw the images for whom the act did not feel right, regardless of religious persuasion. I think the neopagans specifically were unhappy about the religious aspects of the desecrations (and various other hill figure guerilla billboard campaigns since) but I think the root of my concern was in the sheer length of time this drawing has been there. It has to be maintained regularly and has been recut several times over the years, but it’s the fact it links us to the bronze age that I feel is the significant thing here. This horse was old when Jesus was doing his thing. It’s an unbroken link to our early ancestors.

So, I decided to visit it.

My first surprise was that Oxford Tourist Office hadn’t heard of it, or of Uffington (or able to help get me there). Uffington is about 12 miles from Oxford, true, but the area between it and Oxford is called the Vale of White Horse. In Abingdon, for example, which is about five miles from Oxford, the horse appears constantly on menus, teatowels, carparks, &c. Clearly it wasn’t enquired about often enough to provoke the response “it’s far, and it’s hard to get to”. Once I’d worked out the route, I was committed to a solid afternoon’s march. My first blunder was to leave my hat behind on the bus: the driver drove straight through the town I wanted to stop at and I scurried to the front, sans hat when I saw we were hurtling away from Farington. It was a cold day too. Within a quarter of a mile, I had turned my scarf into a makeshift turban.

I tried to get off the busy A road as quickly as possible. A sign indicated “footpath”, which I took. This turned into a bridle path, OK to walk on as a pedestrian, but usually chewed up by hooves, and today frozen solid. There was no challenge in locating the White Horse – it was instantly visible on a distant hill. Nice to not have to check the map at any point. Once off the bridle path, I encountered a mysterious ice pool by the roadside. The pool itself wasn’t frozen, but the splashed water created by passing cars was being frozen, in an intricate icicle arrangement on the verge and in surrounding bushes. Beautiful; but no real mystery: the mud in the puddle was keeping it from freezing and the action of splashing filtered out the suspended bits from the water. Nevertheless, a first.

Further up the road, in the tiny village of Fernham, I found a black hat sitting on a wall waiting for someone to find it. Good: it was beginning to snow.

The next village was Uffington: pretty, though not much there beyond than a Tom Brown School Days museum and some thatched cottages. George Orwell is buried nearby apparently. There are plenty of tiny villages like this throughout Oxfordshire, with just a pub and a post office. None here were doing the tourist thing: no postcards, t shirts, calendars or fridge magnets to be seen anywhere on the entire journey. The only concession to passing tourist trade was a jam stand with an honesty box outside a large home a mile or so from the White Horse, but unbranded with any obvious association. There were certainly horses here: many passed on foot, lived in fields or rattled by in giant horseboxes. Stables, riding schools… certainly this is the Vale of the Horse.

As you near the horse, it disappears. It is more a landmark from a distance than created to decorate the area. In the last mile of approach it isn’t until you are at its tail that you can see it again. Access by foot takes you to Dragon’s Hill, a mysterious viewing platform with a flat top below White Horse Hill. From here, you can make out some details of the figure, but it isn’t very clear. There is an area of exposed chalk here: the legend is that here St George slayed the dragon and the blood of the dragon killed the grass off.. forever! The last stage is steep and challenging. Sheep are all around. When you get to the horse, you first encounter its long tail, and it seems you have found a footpath. A small cordon has been put up, presumably to demonstrate you have now reached the horse: don’t walk on it. You still can’t see it all at once, you need to assemble its strange, disassociated shapes in your mind. The head has a strange beak.

There are many theories about the origins of the horse, and why it looks the way it does. One interesting theory is that the marks are recut as a horse figure from chalk exposed by land slippage. When you are on top of it, the lines do seem to sit on top of a succession of level steps in the landscape. But there is also evidence that the horse looked very different in even recent history. Sketches made in the last 200 years show significant differences, and it is clear that the various recuts over the years have created a kind of slo-mo animated movie, or chinese whispers. The prehistoric feel of the design is possibly just a result of successive well-intentioned but inaccurate retracings. Over three thousand years of constant weeding, it can’t be the same horse – merely maintain some degree of horseness. Some people don’t even accept it is a horse – it’s long tail and whiskers looks more like a cat or dog.

The actual chalk is regularly replenished by the locals, ground up and poured into troughs. A sign says don’t walk on the horse, but the dust is spread everywhere, by illiterate dogs. I picked up an empty can of Strongbow, and a packet of pickled onion Monster Munch, more as an anticipated duty rather than in outrage. The temperature dropped noticably, and the batteries of both of my cameras failed. While gazing out from the hill across Oxfordshire, I realised that the locals don’t want people to come and visit… local meaning Oxford. While I was there, the horse was visited by a slow but steady stream of visitors, mostly by car but also many cyclists. Most didn’t stay long, as if they visited regularly. The site certainly does feel important, but also very fragile. A horse postcard or guide book in the tourist office, or a bus link, would mean more displaced chalk, more motorists speeding through the tiny villages and more crisp packets on the site. The village doesn’t need the revenue: everyone there is already wealthy. There is only something to lose by increasing the flow of visitors. Perhaps the difficulty in accessing it naturally filters out the tourist deemed unworthy of visiting.

Turrets Syndrome – SW Walks to the Shops

The street I’m most familiar with in the world is Forest Road, in Moseley, Birmingham. I’ve been walking up and down it since 1994, possibly more times now than the street I grew up in. I think if you pace a street enough times, it becomes yours – your patch. This comes incrementally; when you devise short cuts to the bus stop, when you know if there is still time to get to the off licence, and when you can give directions to April Croft (Cul de Sac) when someone asks. In later years, you will refer to landmark pubs by their former name, confusing your new visitors. The towers, cupolas and crenellations of Forest Road and Woodbridge Road are a clue to the area’s wealthy past: these are the homes of Birmingham’s professionals in Victorian times.

My end of Forest Road is flanked by two towers: the opulent but decaying splendour of a rich terracotta house on the left, and a beautifully tiled tower without an apex on the right. Strictly speaking (and despite my punny title), these aren’t turrets, rising as they do from ground level, rather than sprouting from the building itself. Several of the terracotta house’s garden features have been jostled by the shifting soil over the years, and some coping stones lost. In 2005 an F2 tornado further bashed the rooftops of Moseley, and you can see the patched up roofline. The street sign on the right has been adapted (unofficially) by a local artist to include a forest motif in green. The octagonal towers and large windows behind the hedge offer an ideal spot to paint. I’m going to make an audacious claim at this point: the Forest in question is actually the Forest of Arden, which at one time stretched from Warwickshire to Kings Norton.

You could spend the entire walk down this road gazing at the upper reaches of the houses: every inch is considered and expensive. There are many architects involved in creating the street, each with their own style. Gables are enriched with shaped brick dragons, decorative brick courses and the exquisitely moulded, rich, red terracotta Birmingham is famous for. In most cases the bricks have withstood time (and tornado).

Individual bricks are worth your consideration too: when you get to this modular level, you know your street well! B W Blades was a West Bromich brickyard’s founder, a Mr. Brownlow William Blades. This is also what I’d call my street gang, were I to form one.

Ornate stonework exists along the length of the street, as with these carved corbells (a supporting architectural element) and bosses (the leafy, cabbage-like things). Another feature of the street is the later subdivision into flats, and resulting wealth of unnamed bell options on arrival at an address.

At Anderton Park Road, two more towers. The half-timbered look, fashionable for the day, have a Bavarian feel: coloured timbers in unusual patterns.

Two stone gate posts for Milton Grange, a former children’s home. The Grange no longer exists, but the name is just visible in the stone.

On the far side of Church Road, nearly buried in the holly, is more stone lettering: Moseley School. This was Arnold School, a private school for wealthy local kids. At some point after the school’s closure, someone has tried to fill the V cut letters with mortar. Beneath this, in coloured chalk, PITY EROL. This seemingly weatherproof sentiment appeared several years ago, part of a long-term, sustainable graffiti campaign centered around the railway bridge. The bridge currently has just one graffito: NO.

A wonderful doorcase: a lot of theatre and pride in simply entering your house back then. I remember walking behind an elderly man on the other side of the road who pointed one (quite grand) house out to his companion and said “that used to be a chimney sweep’s house”. He was either plain wrong, or this folk memory attests to the briskness of trade for the humble chimney sweep back.

Opposite the school, false window recesses complete with stone sills. The suggestion of windows make an otherwise bleak wall – possibly considered too close to the road – more friendly to the eye.

At this point, Forest Road becomes Woodbridge Road. The Patrick Kavanagh bar is my nearest pub. It looks great: ornate windows, multicoloured brick and Lombardic Romanesque style. I think the Irish poet PK looks like Larry David, who I like too. But the beer is rubbish and I never go.

I only spotted this Ghost Sign (lost painted advert) a few years ago, despite actively looking out for them. It’s in the alley behind the pub, and seems to say Chatwins, Trafalgar Inn (the former name of PK’s) and other letters I can’t read. A long time ago there was an ice rink back here. Outside the pub too are the dishevelled pipes that would once take beer around the pub…I sincerely hope they are “former”.

The long running bakery Luker’s finally closed a few years ago. The shop front is boarded up and painted (during Moseley in Bloom) with fauna and flora. The baguettes are still there on the sign above, as is the “Online Gaming” sign further back – too difficult to take these extinct business signs down. Ghost signs of a modern kind. Not long after completion, I saw an elderly asian woman plant a kiss via her fingers on the painted fox. Fascinated, I asked what the fox meant to her…did she like foxes? Yes, she said, she liked foxes.

Journey’s end: the final tower. The original parapet has been altered in the late C20th to a squat, octagonal layer, echoing the tiled house at the beginning. I remember seeing an old photo showing a wrought iron structure there. A dead off-licence below, and some ugly tiling. On closer examination this isn’t a tower at all but rather a scroll leading smoothly into the row of shops to the right. Not common!

I suspect Woodbridge Rd and Forest Rd still have secrets to reveal to me – and there are almost certainly features like this near you too. Why not go for a walk later and take a look?

SW visits the City of the Dead

When you know a place well, it’s a thrill to encounter a new detail or place you’ve overlooked. The discovery has a dreamlike quality – exactly how did it elude your notice all this time? It’s the stuff of secret gardens and fairy tales.

On Islington Row near Five Ways lies an abandoned Jewish Cemetery. It was known as Beth Olom which is Hebrew for “City of the Dead”. The walled plot of land is bordered by canal, railway and dual carriageway and is now essentially inaccessible woodland (though with excellent transport links). I’d heard about the cemetery earlier in the year and decided to pin point its location on a Sunday afternoon urban stroll last weekend, and to see if it was in any way accessible. I’d probably passed it unnoticed 20 times or more.

Five Ways station is the nearest landmark and we headed there to see if the view from the bridge afforded any clues. It seemed not, so Laira suggested asking the staff if they knew about the lost cemetery. “They won’t know,” I thought, and said aloud. But the ticket seller did know and gave us directions. A valuable lesson – it’s worth asking locally, if you want local knowledge, especially of someone in their advanced years.

The bridge spans canal and railway, and from a vantage opposite the station you can see down into a long strip of land. On first glance, this seems to be woodland, But to the right of the plot a box-like headstone emerges from the ground. On the left is a sealed-off doorway to a metal staircase, topped with a spiked rail. Climbing it is not recommended; it’s a sheer drop of 50 feet or so. We went in so you don’t have to do. In fact, I didn’t go in: Laira went over because my left arm doesn’t work at the moment and someone had to look after the bags.

I directed her explorations from my arial position by pointing to peripheral headstones and shouting. It seems nearly everything has been removed but there are one or two headstones still standing, as well as fragments of headstones. Silver birch trees and rampant ground flora have grown since its closure in 1869, so it isn’t immediately clear what remains.

Online, the British Jewry site records those interred here. The entry with the greatest amount of text relates to Simon King Marks, Chairman of the Burial Board. Mark’s wife Elizabeth is also buried here but beside the ashes of her husband – so maybe this is a monument rather than a tombstone. If so, it was merely erected a year before the closure of the cemetery and left behind when the others were moved to Witton Cemetery. A testament to the growth of the railways and a rapidly changing city.

Marks
Simon King
September 30, 1868
Erected (a Monument) by the Congregation in remembrance of the zealous and pious services of Simon King Marks, September 30, 1868. Aged 68. During life his services were ever devoted to the cause of humanity. He fulfilled every important office in this community, and for a period of thirteen years charitably discharged his duties as Chairman of the Burial Board.

Marks
Elizabeth
March 26, 1873
Here, besides the ashes of her beloved husband, Simon King Marks, lie the mortal remains of Elizabeth Marks, March 26, 1873. Aged 83.