Tag: Brownhills

October 21st – Work was heavy today, and didn’t escape until the evening. Brownhills is very desolate at night, yet I kind of love it more like that. The shutters, sodium light and hard surfaces are very atmospheric. Silver Court fascinates me at night – this 1960’s promenade of shops and maisonettes is crumbling and needs renovation, and is one of the last remnants of the system building fad of the period. Once bustling, it’s now largely empty, even in the daytime. The driveway at the back would once have been overshadowed by the noise and bustle of the five tenements of Silver Court Gardens, but is now surrounded by an eerily quiet wasteland. Much of what ails Brownhills is concentrated here – failed town planning and lost community.

October 15th – A late afternoon spin around Brownhills, and my attention was snagged by the cellphone base station near the old cement works on Coppice Side. I recently featured a picture of Pye Green communications tower and noted that the microwave network was being dismantled. Whilst that’s true, Pye Green and others like it are still hubs of the telecoms network. Microwave transmission, rather than providing high bandwidth channels for live TV and suchlike like it used to, is till used for backhaul and interconnection purposes for the mobile phone network. The plethora of small drum antenna on this tower are pointing variously at Sutton Coldfield, Pye Green, Birmingham and Tameway Tower in Walsall. The shorter tower to the left is a Tetra unit providing support for emergency networks secure communications.

October 14th – A day working from home, followed by a couple of hours of frantic errand-running. On the canal near Catshill, just by Lanes Farm at 5pm, the light was mellow, soft and golden. This is mad, it’s like August; in two weeks the clocks go back. What gives? Still, I’m not complaining one little bit… after a grey start to the week, the is just the ticket.

September 25th – The fungi season is upon us. This fine example of Fly Agaric – the classic white spotted red toadstool – grows near silver birch trees and these were no exception, on the canal bank just by Wharf Lane, Brownhills. Widely considered to be poisonous, they are eaten in some cultures and are considered psychoactive.

After you, Dylan…

September 23rd – The old boatyard and basin at Ogley Junction have a chequered history, really. Once the home of a commercial boatyard, the truncated stub of the closed Lichfield and Hatherton canal is now being rented out for private narrowboat mooring, and is also in use as a work yard for British Waterways maintenance crews. Hopefully one day, the canal will once again extend from here to Huddlesford, near Whittington, but for now it stops at The Long Pound. Quite what’s going on with the half-car on the trailer is anyone’s guess…

September 22nd – There’s no excuse for this – it’s irritating the hell out of me. Gentlemen, I wish you success in your new venture, but for heaven’s sake please learn the name of our town. That’s Brownhills. With an ’s’. There’s something awfully off-putting when you set up a business, name it after the town it’s in and sometime later you discover you’ve spelt it wrong. Get a grip.

September 22nd – Taking a shoot round Brownhills, I saw that old Brownhills pub, The Prince of Wales, is up for sale again – I don’t know if it’s still open in the meantime or what. The parent holding company have crashed into administration. I’m hoping the pub finds a buyer soon – it’s one of the few traditional boozers left in Brownhills.

September 21st – catching up on the news feeds on the train on the way home, I picked up an interesting fixmystreet report about a field in Engine Lane, Brownhills being cleared of scrub. Since I had to pop into Tesco anyway, I thought I’d swing by and take a look. I was quite surprised to sees the field had been efficiently cleared and all the vegetation was now in a pile. There’s a blog article speculating on the possible reasons for this on my main blog.

September 19th – I remember when love was nothing more than a handful of sticky conkers. Come to think of it, it hasn’t changed much… It’s programmed into the DNA of every bloke in the UK not to pass a horse chestnut on the ground without picking it up. In Brownhills as a child, the only conker tree worth a light was by the bus stop at the bottom of the parade; come this time of year the poor thing was battered half to death. Little did we know that a couple of miles away in the lanes of Stonnall and Shenstone, the shiny nuts were so plentiful that they were lying thick on the ground. The Brownhills tree has since been lost to disease, but I always wondered if it recognised the kids torturing it. ‘I remember your dad. He was a lousy shot with a stick, too…’

September 15th – Returning to Brownhills late in the evening, I thought I’d practise a bit of night photography. With the dark nights coming, there will be lots more of this. 

I, like most of Brownhills, like Morris, the Brownhills Miner. I don’t think he was money well spent, and he’s done bugger all for the town except inflate a few egos, but he is an ingenious, clever sculpture. Shame about the hard hat, though – he wouldn’t have been wearing one in the time that Brownhills was mining, and that pick doesn’t look like any I’ve ever seen. The curious decision to illuminate him with gimcrack blue LED lights was also peculiar; it makes Morris look like a cheap Christmas decoration. Still, he compliments the lights on the hatchbacks cruising the High Street at that time of night.