March 2nd – Fiddling with a next camera. After a brief flirtation with a Canon at Christmas – I hated it – I’ve just acquired the new Panasonic TZ70, the upgrade to last year’s TZ60. I’ll be twiddling with it for a while to find out what’s improved – and low light handheld images have definitely improved.

People often think I must carry a large camera around; I don’t – I just go for a little compact in my pocket, that’s easy to pull out and take spontaneous images with. I’ve tried big stuff in the past and find the size to be a hinderance.

No doubt for a few weeks I’ll be swearing at moved, changed or lost features – but having tried alternatives, I’m still resolutely a Panasonic chap.

As an aside, the works are very intense at Bentley Mill Way under the aqueduct – I won’t look at the plans as I want to gradually see the outcome. But that’s a very big culvert in there, I must say.

March 1st – I noted with some curiosity that earlier that day, the worst potholes and uneven patches in Brownhills High Street had been fixed by the council. This is good news – some of those potholes were so old and large, they had their own ecosystems. But it does mean that a full resurface, which the street really does need – must be a long, long way off.

Bugger.

March 1st – On a distinctly un-springlike day, I headed into Pelsall in the morning, and came back along the canal via Nest Common. The canal here is as stark and beautiful as it every is; a shimmering sky-coloured ribbon stretching off on three directions. However, the journey back – along muddy, churned towpath until I reached the better surfaced part at Ryders Hayes – was awful. 

Walsall Council and the Canal & River Trust are said to be investing, like Birmingham, in canal routes that don’t need surfacing, while ignoring spots like this and the canal through Rushall. It doesn’t make sense to me.

February 28th – Meanwhile, back in Brownhills, Silver Court Gardens, the site of the tenement estate that was razed to the ground a decade ago is seeing the start of operations to construct new housing.

This is a large project, and will be good for the local economy, without doubt. But more than that, it’s great to see so much lost, wasted land come back into use.

This is great for Brownhills.

February 28th – Another grey, dull day, with a worsening wind. I had stuff to do in Walsall Wood and headed up the canal to get there. Between Cathshill Junction and Walsall Wood Bridge, work has been ongoing since summer on the eastern embankment. First, it was strengthened with sectional piling at the Black Cock Bridge, and the level raised; now soil has been added to some thickness along much of the stretch, presumably to provide better security agains overtopping and to counteract weather erosion. 

I note that on the bend that was piled, staves have been driven into the bank, and reed beds planted behind, presumably to create a natural buffer against erosion in a particularly vulnerable spot.

Wonder if they’ll get round to fixing the brickwork and voids on the pedestrian side of the canal anytime soon?

February 27th – I had to pop into Aldridge on my way home and had ridden up Coppice Lane; not far from the gas turbine and leechate plant, another sign of a dirty underground secret from the past. This square compound on wind and mud-blasted wasteland, just off the rear entrance to the Ibstock Brick plant, is a breather for the mines underneath the area that were used as a dumping receptacle for millions of gallons of industrial toxic waste a couple of decades ago.

Inside this well-locked square palisade fence, a bulkhead is fitted to a borehole that goes hundreds of feet underground and allows gasses to vent to the atmosphere from the sludge within. The breather itself is from a tall pipe, well above human head height, up where the wind can quickly disperse anything nasty.

It’s sobering, and a bit chilling; and indicator that beneath this area there is an unknown quantity still requiring monitoring and care. But the ground it is in is surrounded in clay and favourable, and as time passes, the content should settle.

There are several of these installations in the local area – finding them is an interesting, if slightly unnerving challenge.

February 27th – A lot of the history of Brownhills, Walsall Wood and Aldridge is about what lies beneath. Coal, clay, industrial effluent and landfill have shaped particularly the borderlands between Walsall Wood and Aldridge. Where brick marls were abundant, soon voids in the ground where they had been extracted were too. Into these holes, we tipped refuse in huge quantities, as the remaining clay made a good seal against the contaminant waste.

In the early days, the landfill and waste disposal industry was unregulated, haphazard, and somewhat akin to the Wild West. Waste was put anywhere, and unmonitored. These days, it’s a tightly monitored industry that has to look after its dirty secrets. 

At the Vigo Utopia landfill site just off Coppice Lane, gas turbine engines run 24 hours a day, driving electricity generators from the gasses harvested from the decomposing rubbish. This produces significant amounts of power from 2 generator sets in converted shipping containers, employing gas that would once have been merely vented to the atmosphere. 

Nearby, a series of bunds and pools lined with thick rubber gather water and liquid pumped from deep within the mound. This poisonous soup is called ‘leechate’, and is allowed to settle out before being disposed of as hazardous effluent. Again, years ago, such concerns were not addressed and sites were allowed to pollute groundwater uncontrolled.

This is ugly, scarred landscape; but we are looking after it much better than we used to.

February 26th – Mind you, I say Birmingham is getting better at change, but… this is the real face of the ‘New’ New Street and the preposterously named ‘Grand Central’ project. This place constantly has leaks. Often when it hasn’t rained for days. To walk through the station now is to squelch through wet patches on concourses, platforms and passageways.

This cannot, in any shape or form, be a good sign.

February 26th – In Birmingham at twilight, I was without any kind of tripod, so practiced a steady hand. I used to pass through Colmore a lot, but in recent years barely at all. When I was here a lot, there was a Somerfield where the Costa is, the Waitrose hadn’t been built and the Sainsbury’s was a Marks and Spencer. It was never this handsome at dusk, either; several of the office blocks here are relatively new.

Like Walsall, Birmingham is not mine anymore; places I was familiar with, things I remember, bars, cafes and shops I haunted long gone. Yet I still feel at home here. 

Unlike Walsall, change has always been Birmingham’s modus operandi. And it’s getting better and better at it.