July 24th – The love affair with Acocks Green and it’s homely, suburban architecture continues. They have a fine, red terracotta police station, in the Birmingham style, and behind it, an ex-fire station worthy of Trumpton.
There can’t be many cop shops with cupolas, can there?
July 1st – There was a huge fire at a plastics recycling plant in Smethwick, on the Birmingham/Black Country border, caused by a Chinese lantern. As I went to work that morning, smokes, although several miles away, hung over Birmingham City Centre. From Tyseley, even further away, it had echoes of great disasters.
A terrible thing, and an environmental disaster. It really is time we banned the sale of these idiotic items.
May 31st – My unexpected commuting grief did lead to an unexpected visit to the throbbing metropolis that is Walsall. It was quite fortuitous really; it meant the wind was at my back on the ride home, and also that I could check out the damage caused by yet another derelict building fire in the town the previous night.
The fire was in an abandoned, derelict former leather works smack bang in the middle of the Waterfront development area. Immediately adjacent to a new apartment block, the old factory has been derelict for a few years, and I guess this will lead to another hasty demolition and yet another rubberstamped planning application. I circled the former factory, and noticed something about this development area I’ve never noticed before – it’s very shabby, in reality. New blocks of housing, both new build and renovations, are punctuated by derelict, rotting hulks of workshops, dark and forbidding. The planning here has been lousy, and I wouldn’t fancy walking in this area at night. Who’d want to buy a new luxury apartment next to a derelict drugs den?
August 16th – About the only positive thing to come from the fire at the former Jabez Cliff factory in Walsall was that the traffic was static as I headed into Walsall at 8:00am next morning, due to the Ring Road west being shut on safety grounds. This pretty much gridlocked the traffic fright back to Rushall, which allowed me to skip past it all the way into Walsall. Having the ring road to myself for the first couple of legs was fun, too.
August 16th – When I made my predictions last month for the next historically significant Walsall building to die tragically in a fire, I forgot about the former Jabez Cliff works. A beautiful victorian building, left to decay with lax security. It had become a magnet for vagrants and junkies, so I guess it was only a matter of time. Yesterday, it was pretty much gutted in a very large fire, the extent of which was clear as I passed this morning. By my return this evening, the beautiful frontage had been demolished. Still, it’ll be much easier to build new stuff on the site now that the troublesome old pile is gone… and with it, yet more of our precious heritage.
Why does nobody in power at Walsall care enough to stop this happening?
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