October 13th – As if to hammer home my point, Town Wharf, across the basin from the New Art Gallery. This is a new hotel. It looks like something thrown up in Tito’s Yugoslavia. It’s hideous, cheap and nasty. It opens in a couple of weeks – why not come and stay? Affording excellent views of the derelict and burnt out factory over the water, it’s sure to be a big tourist draw…

Walsall deserves so much better than this shit.

October 13th – My town, for better or worse.

I have a strange relationship with Walsall these days. Pass through it regularly, love almost all of it, but bits I used to know like the back of my hand are now alien to me. Certainly, shopping there is a grim experience these days. I was in town anyway, and wanted to see the Damien Hirst exhibition at the New Art Gallery. I like Hirst a lot, but the exhibition left me cold – I really wanted to see stuff like Mother and Child Divided again, yet what was here seemed to be the odds and ends of the artist’s work. The way it had been mixed in with the Garman Ryan collection was clever, though, and I did admire the guile of the people responsible for doing that, particularly the placement of the wallpaper.

I hadn’t been in the Gallery for a long while, and not on the roof terrace since the building opened a decade before, as when I’d visited, it had always been shut. Today, it was open, and I took photographs of my town – the place I once haunted like a skinny, music-obsessed ghost. I knew every shop, every bar, every alleyway, every cafe. Yet getting older dragged me away, and Walsall befell the same fate as other such post-industrial towns; ravaged by the inexorable rise of out-of-town and fringe retail developments, atrocious town planning and the encroachment of internet shopping,  it now holds little for me. The independent shops have gone, replaced by nail-bars, hairdressers, pound shops and money lenders. Many of the heritage buildings I could see from this view ten years ago are gone, lost to the arsonists that seem intent on depriving us of a cultural past. The bad planning goes on, the retail sheds obscuring or wrecking formerly decent vistas.

I still love this place with all my heart – as Bill Caddick put it, ‘Sore abused, but not yet dead’, but I fear I’m losing it forever. What’s gone, cannot be put pack, and there just doesn’t seem to be the breadth of vision, or cast of hand to build something new. Stuck in a kind of decay-limbo. I could cry.

I did what I always do at times when Walsall, and my past, makes me feel like this: I got back on my bike, cycled up to Caldmore, and reminded myself what community was about.

That’s my Walsall, right there.

October 12th – It was a beautiful sunny, golden autumn day. It wasn’t warm, but the sun shone and made everything precious. I was glad of it – after the soaking of the day before, it was blessed recovery. The day was beautiful both in Acocks Green, which I passed through on my way to Tyseley, and back at Shenstone and Stonnall on my return. A fine day, and we don’t get many of those at the moment. I’ve included some of the best pictures on my main blog.

October 12th – Not enough stations have proper clocks anymore. They’ve all got those boring digital things, but few have real, wooden cased analogue clocks. Come to that, few stations are like Birmingham Moor Street, and all should be. Spacious, airy, light, it’s a gorgeous place to wait for a train. Clocks of this style were mainly made by JB Joyce & Co., of Whitchurch, Shropshire, possibly the country’s oldest clockmakers, and often bore the name ‘Joyce, Whitchurch’. This leads to an in-joke amongst railway buffs who often use ‘Joyce Whitchurch’ as a pseudonym on internet forums etc.

They really should get out more.

October 11th – Coming back from Lichfield, the weather quickly turned grim. There was a real downpour, and without my usual armoury of waterproofs, I had no choice but to get wet. With every passing wagon on the A461, it was like being jet washed. I arrived home cold, wet, exhausted and thoroughly dejected. Why do I do this again?

October 11th – Working late in Tyseley, the service gets patchy after the evening peak. Leaving at about 8pm, I realised my nearest train was going from Spring Road, located on the road to Hall Green. Stoking it in, I made it with a couple of minutes to spare. Spring Road is desolate and isolated at night, and I didn’t like it much. It was drizzling lightly, I was tired, and glad to see the lights of the train…

October 10th – Birmingham New Street. This is Birmingham New Street. As the automated announcements chimed the usual jingle, my train was delayed. Gazing up the platform from where I was sat on the crash barrier, I noticed something darting about. A mouse, or possibly a young rat. He was doing what nature intended – hoovering up.

I’m used to seeing mice and rats in stations: New Street is alive with rodents. People eat whilst waiting at stations, so there’s a ready supply of dropped and discarded food. Normally, such animals tend to look unhealthy, but this fellow was looking quite chipper. Contractors have recently sealed off platform eight as part of the modernisation works, and I suspect Mickey here was displaced, as was the rat I saw at the foot of the steps on the same platform 10 minutes later. 

When the train came, it was too full and I ended up going to Walsall instead. Sometimes I feel I live in the station, just like the mice.

Sorry about the poor quality images. I won’t use flash in a station for safety reasons.

October 10th – I’ve been studying the detail of buildings lately. Small things. Architraves, chimneys, corbels, pediments, lintels. Airbricks, panels and frescos. Sills, doorways and sashes. There’s a huge variety of stuff in the everyday. In a quiet Tyseley backstreet, my gaze was caught by this ornate ventilation brick made from pressed terracotta in an otherwise plain factory wall. As I stopped to take a better look, I noticed the Ordnance Survey benchmark carved into the wall. A fixed datum at a measured height, these may not be used so much now, but they’re a real signal of permanence. 
The things you see with your eyes open… 

October 10th – At Acocks Green, I noticed this memorial bouquet of flowers has appeared. It’s sad, and bears no card; I suspect it’s in memory of a young man who committed suicide here a couple of years ago. I felt it’s poignancy today particularly, as it was World Mental Heath Day. Anyone can suffer, we’re all susceptible. Please, if you know someone who’s suffering, do your best to help. Every day is a good day to walk up to someone, take their hand and say ‘Hello, chum.’ Sometimes, we all need a friend to listen.