Tag: Brickiln Street

#365daysofbiking Greetings from the side street

Monday February 1st 2021 –  The year ticks by, faster than I’d have imagined, given the circumstances. My beloved spring will not be far off now.

On the way home from work I had to drop a letter coffin Brickiln Street, and as I returned to the High Street, I stopped to put my gloves back on, and realised the view was oddly Hopper-ish.

I don’t know what it is, it just appealed to me. These quiet side streets are still very much my Brownhills: I know them as well as I did when I was a kid, I frequently came up here to the long-moved Library, my second home, the site of which is still a vacant plot years from the old library’s demolition.

There was nobody around much on this Monday evening, but Brickiln Street was very much crowded with my memories.

I put the gloves on, had a wistful last look, and rode off, all the time wondering where all the intervening years had gone.

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March 21st – I hadn’t been up Brickiln Street in Brownhills for a while. I was quite surprised to see the old library is still standing – it’s been empty ever since its replacement in the Parkview Centre, Brownhills opened a few years ago. I’m sure I read a local councillor was campaigning to have it removed; certainly, the council have been trying to flog the land for a while. The building is boarded up, and the grounds locked.

It fills me with sadness, really, as I spent years here, as a kid. That small, dull building held everything I needed for a while – peace and quiet, headspace, and a world of possibility, learning and dreaming.

In there now is probably the ghost of an awkward young lad, chin propped on his hands, reading the local planning list, some map or the latest Bernard Ashley. That building – and what it held – had a huge influence on me.