March 10th – A sign spring is finally upon us happened this evening – I returned from Birmingham just in time to catch the remains of the daylight dying over my homeward commute from Shenstone station. This is always welcome, and it’s nice to photograph this beloved landmark in anything other than darkness and sodium light.
This is just the best station. A great place to depart and come back to…
January 10th – It seems the old Oak Park is finally coming down – after a sizeable fire in the derelict building last week, the council have at last acted decisively and it seems we will soon be rid of the old building and the antisocial behaviour it’s encouraging.
Built in 1974, it’s a bland, post Brutalist structure in pale block, but like many, I have memories here, and although we have a great new centre not 100 yards away, the change is tinged with just a little sadness.
It’ll be interesting to watch the building come down.
December 31st – I looped back into Brownhills, and took in one of my favourite night photography muses – Silver Street and the canal at night. I never get tired of this, the interaction of lights, architecture and water are always lovely.
Looking back to the flats, soon this view will change. The market place – deserted for 5 years – will be houses, and as the development towards the flats completes, life and light will return to the canal side, transforming the character once more.
Change is what I guess this journal is all about, and as ever, I welcome it, as I grudgingly welcome 2017.
Happy new year to all readers and followers. Here’s to peace, prosperity and happiness to you all, wherever you follow me from.
October 25th – I’d been to Droitwich to see a customer and get some other bits and pieces done, and noted that the Autumn there too was very special, with the wide main roads lined with a variety of trees in excellent seasonal hues.
On my return from the station, I slipped through Little Aston Forge and Bosses, where I spotted the crimson ivy gable wall, and the driveway bed of beautiful flowers.
The last few days really have been beautiful out there.
September 1st – As I arrived home in darkness, I caught sight of a critical milestone on the bike computer: Sunset was now taking place before 8pm. From now until November, the darkest will positively gallop onwards, and summer, with it’s warm and light evenings will just be another memory of a season passed.
How I hate the encroaching darkness.
March 17th – Something interesting will happen between today and tomorrow. Thanks to the GPS based bike computer I use these days, I’ve been keeping an eye on sunrise and sunset times to measure the progress of the seasons. Today, the daylight will be just shorter than the night; by tomorrow, the day will be longer by about the same.
This is effectively the spring equinox – when day and night are equal length of 12 hours. This isn’t quite the astronomical equinox, which this year occurs on the 20th, but it’s good enough for me.
Another milestone of the changing seasons and the ascent from darkness.
March 3rd – Birmingham, late afternoon. I’d finished for the day and needed to get a few errands done, and while I was about it, check out the slow death of Birmingham’s affair with architectural Brutalism.
This grey, colourless day was the perfect day to survey the wounds being inflicted on the skyline by the cranes, breakers and cutters currently removing Madin’s Central Library and 103, Colmore Row. The demolitions are fascinating, dramatic, conflicting. On the side of the library, soon to disappear, the mural proclaims ‘Todos eat posible’ – all is possible. Survival for that mural isn’t, but change is a certainty.
Until dusk, colour only existed in bright demolition machinery and the hi-vis of the wonderfully nonchalant crane driver; but dusk brought the lights and glimpses of the other Birmingham.
I don’t know what I feel. Uneasy probably applies best.
February 5th – Yet again on a Friday, I found myself cruising down from Shire Oak into Brownhills. The wind had indeed been evil, but was at least now more or less at my back. I had to stop to answer the phone on Anchor Bridge, and while I was chatting I noticed the view, from the very bridge I was contemplating the night before. This slope here is more or less continuous from Shire Oak, and the road here is wide. Where I was stood in years gone by would have been a toll house, and when I was a kid there would have been grim maisonettes here and over the road, a large tower block. Now, it’s new build and an old folk’s home.
These days, this view seems utterly familiar, but twelve or so years ago, it would have been totally different. It struck me as I put the phone away that change is ongoing, and so granular that one hardly notices it happening.
January 19th – In Darlaston’s Kings Hill, the former Servis domestic appliance factory site is soon to be transformed into housing. Once employing thousands, this ground was cleared after the company went bankrupt and lofty promises of new retail and leisure developments were made. But permission was granted for houses, which in fairness, we do need.
A few months ago, surveyors marks appeared on the nearby pavements and roads; then ground inspection bores were made. Now the heavy plant and high vis are arriving, ready to move rubble and earth and create a new neighbourhood.
Soon, you’ll never know Servis were ever here.
October 13th – Passing through Kings Hill, Darlaston today I noted activity on the site of the old Servis washing machine factory. This site – derelict for years, and once posited as the site of a new retail and leisure park by a prominent, diminutive Walsall Councillor – last year had a new housing estate approved for it. Like the Exidoor factory nearby, industry is being replaced in this area by houses.
I’m sure they’ll be nice, but it’s hard not to lament the loss of jobs and occupation.
Still, the drilling rigs are on site, and a surveyor has clearly been very thorough in marking out the subterranean hazards that lie beneath, judging by the spray-paint hieroglyphics all over the paths and road nearby.
BrownhillsBob's #365daysofbiking 