January 21st – This is intriguing and good news. This new factory has been built from scratch on the Clayhanger/Walsall Wood border at Maybrook Road. This company have decided to move here from up north, creating real engineering jobs and bringing its business into the area. What fascinates me is that the occupiers have been moving in for ages now – loads of cranes and lifting equipment here every weekend. I don’t know what they’re doing here, but there must be a lot of heavy gear involved.
January 21st – Another day of challenging weather. Showers, wind, bluster. Just as well I had stuff to do in the daytime and wasn’t feeling that a cycling opportunity was lost because of my other commitments. Spinning out for a lazy bimble round at 6pm, I spun up through Clayhanger, and thought how dark and quiet the village looked so early on a Saturday night. Clayhanger has always had a slightly Midwich-ish, cutoff air about it, being a wee island in the middle of urban greenspace, but tonight it felt quite distinct. Odd.
January 20th – Spinning out a bit further, I headed towards Ogley Junction for the hell of it. I’m feeling better now and I wanted to hammer my legs. Coming along the canal near Lindon Road, this vista on the Anchor pub and bridge opened up. I love the colours in the reflections.
January 20th – Like most folk in Brownhills, I use the local Tesco from time to time. I hate doing it, but there are few easy alternatives. The store has no cycle provision whatsoever. It is housed in one of the grimmest 80’s sheds I’ve ever come across, with no natural light. It’s impression is tatty, untidy and gives the feeling of careless grubbiness which makes products you buy there feel secondhand and mauled. It is, however, usually rammed with people, and this Friday was no exception.
Tesco promise to change all this – we are, we are assured, soon to get a new Tesco, built on the site of Brownhills’ now derelict shopping precinct. However, having prevaricated for years, and clearly getting a good return out of the old store, one can but wonder if the retail behemoth will not bother now their share price and profits have taken a pounding. A new CHP power plant was recently installed on the roof, and the toilets have just been refurbished. A company as sharp as this don’t throw money at buildings they plan to demolish.
Tesco destroyed this town. It could at least look like it cares for us.
January 20th – Pottering around Brownhills, getting some shopping in and running errands on a wet Friday night, I wanted some night pictures, and oddly, headed for the canal. These flats near Cooper’s Bridge on the Watermead, looked warm and homely in the blackness. I’ve always been fascinated by the chutzpah of the developers of the Watermead. Built on what was a meadow around a decade ago, all the roads are named after varieties of birdlife eradicated from the area by its construction. Heron Close. Curlew Drive. Moorhen Close my bloody arse…
January 19th – I’ve been watching this piece of artwork develop under the bridge near Reservoir Place for a few days. First the wall was emulsioned matt black, then outlines appeared, and then filling in. Day by day, someone scuttles here and paints. The legend says ‘Welcome to Pleck’ and I have to admire the tenacity of the artist. He or she never leaves any rubbish, and it must take skill and planning to do that. And a sense of belonging. An interesting thing. Wonder if it’ll be finished when I next pass by?
January 19th – A wet, miserable commute. It rained as soon as I left the house, and stopped just as I got to work. The new Ring Road in Walsall was living up to its reputation – drains all along the stretch between Littleton Street and Pleck Road were blocked, and the road surface was awash with standing water, particularly opposite Smiths Mill. This led to a liberal dousing of spray with every passing vehicle. Remind me why I do this again?
January 18th – But flung into the modern age we were, for better of worse. This was once the site of a workhouse, so feared in the memory of old Walsallians that one elderly lady I knew, when confused and aged, swore she’d not let her family take her there. They were actually trying to take her to the Manor Hospital for a checkup, the older establishment utilising many of the workhouse buildings.
In the last decade or two, it all changed; first a new Accident & Emergency, then a new hospital, provided by the wonders of magic beans and PFI. This shiny new building, filled with wonderful staff and equipment, is somehow redolent of Art Deco in it’s night time luminescence, yet I fear it may yet, through its cost, render the NHS in Walsall back into servitude.
Progress, eh?
January 18th – One of my predominate emotions regarding the Black Country, and Darlaston in particular, is that of loss. Looking from the Walsall Canal at the James Bridge aqueduct, right on the Walsall/Wednesbury/Darlaston border, the much improved but still grimy Tame picks its way through abandoned brownfield sites and wasteland, past the gas storage depot and into the hinterlands of Bescot and the shadow of the motorway. Once, it wound its slimy way around huge factories, refineries and metal mills. IMI, Rubery Owen, FH Lloyd, GKN. Between this wind-blasted canal bank and those proud twin churches, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children worked. In vile conditions, often uneducated. The noise would have been deafening, unlike the gentle lap of canal water and wind rush I hear today. Sometimes, it’s as if their improved standard of living killed the place. They destroyed us for wanting better.
It doesn’t matter anymore.
You can’t put it back, as an old mate used to say.
January 17th – Some of Walsall’s municipal cemeteries are in a woeful state. Ryecroft can be a bit grim in the less visited corners, Queen Street is disgustingly neglected, doubly so since it’s the resting place of local nursing heroine Sister Dora. James Bridge is no exception – a large burial ground wedged inbetween former factories, waste ground and the canal, it was never a picturesque location. It’s sad to see recently that an adjacent building waste processing plant has expanded operations, leaving relatives of the interred to complain of masonry dust coating the graves. Today, it wasn’t hard to see why it was happening. Why on earth was that noisy, pollutant yard given permission to operate in such a sensitive location?
On a side note, the older sections of James Bridge are amongst the most densely packed I’ve ever seen. There are a huge number of graves here.
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