February 10th – A little way down the High Street, the pleasant church of St. John, another part of Walsall Wood that looks good lit up in the dark. I’ve always liked the elegant lines of the tower and church, before the hideous modern extension was added. This was a simple, understated design that has been utterly bastardised by the cruel abuse of the architects, who completely failed to understand the beauty of this church, as they did so many in the diocese sullied by their handiwork.
January 22nd – I passed through New Street mid-afternoon. The whole place was grey. It’s still chaos, and has been clearly designed with anything but the passengers in mind.
I stood waiting for a late train. Ever signal I could see was red. Sometimes, commuting feels like this.
To quote Dexy’s, tell me when my red light turns green.
January 14th – I had to pop to a store in Crown Wharf on the way home, Walsall’s retail park on the fringes of the town centre. I hate the place with a passion – built on a very inhuman scale, it’s horrid to walk or cycle around, and appears to be solely designed without any aesthetic merit purely to extract cash from consumers whilst doing as little as possible in the way of accommodating design.
At night it’s even more grim than in the day. A place utterly without redeeming features.
September 15th – I spent the afternoon in Droitwich. This piece of woeful, inexplicable cycling ‘infrastructure’ is precisely why we’ll never have nice things.
Do you think the designer gave any thought to cyclists going in the other direction?
(No, there isn’t a lane on the other side of the road; there isn’t even a pavement.)
May 19th – Junction 9 of the M6, and Wood Green, the area around it, is horrible. Heavy traffic, poor air quality, grime and an utterly inhuman, dystopian architecture all contribute to make this place awful. There is humanity here, and great buildings, in the backstreets. But in the immediate vicinity of the junction, there is little to credit this place, despite the fact that it hosts the River Tame, A major railway and a motorway side by side. The crowning glory of the inhuman design is the pedestrian underpass – dark, with 90 degree bends. Grey, filthy surfaces and forbidding outlooks that are dark and foreboding.
I hate this place with a passion.
26th August – Proof that the people who design cycle routes never bloody ride them. This, at the junction of The Broadway and Delves Green Road, in South Walsall, isn’t just unusable, it’s taking the sodding piss. That’s all.
August 3rd – Walsall Council seem surprised that the new Tesco hypermarket on Wisemore isn’t leading a regeneration of the town, and instead, seems to be sucking the life out of it. It’s obvious really. As this view from in front of the bus station shows, Tesco couldn’t give a toss about the town. The entire store has been built to face the new ring road, helpfully constructed by the council to deliver shoppers to the retail behemoth and take them away again without ever having to interact with the rest of the town. They haven’t even been bothered enough to put a sign on the rear of the building. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a development where contempt for the host community has ever been so wilfully incorporated in the design.
Presumably, the planning committee looked at the design and thought ‘Yeah, that looks OK.’. Bewildering.
June 24th – Another day, another wet ride home. The Arboretum Junction in Walsall is a dreadful design. A perfectly serviceable island has been replaced by a hugely complex traffic light controlled crossway. I often end up here, waiting 10 minutes at a time for the lights in my lane to turn green. I loathe this fiddly, overcomplicated piece of urban design with a passion.
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