March 7th – Meeting a friend of the train at Walsall to ride home together, the sunset was vivid and beautiful. This isn’t the most handsome of stations, trapped in the red-brick late 70s gap been brutalism and the utilitarianism of the 80s, it’s functional and a decent place to get a train or wait.
I don’t know why, but I love this place at twilight.
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 28th – Over the road at St. Anne’s Church, the architecture fascinates me. This is a building with a fantastic history, being the first church to be lit by electric light in the UK, powered by the coalmine down the hill, presumably in the interests of a mine owner’s place in heaven. But there is so much more to this industrial, engineering brick church, that looks so unassuming from the road.
Oh, the brickwork! I have never seen a church so obsessed with geometry in it’s design. Bright, bold, almost childlike… zigzags, mirror curves, crosses, diamonds, bands and profiles dance and decorate. It’s a constant delight and I spot something new every time I look.
If you can, please go see this wonderful building for yourself.
February 25th – I’m experimenting with night shots at the moment, and what better place than Catshill Junction to try them? Quite pleased with these.
Again, that seasonal light-not-yet-died colour was fabulous. Hardly and wind with a flat-calm canal. Wonderful.
February 23rd – After a bloody awful day that started well enough but slid rapidly downhill mid-afternoon, I just wanted to get home. I was cold, I hadn’t had enough to eat and I felt lower than a snake’s knees.
I hauled myself up the hill from Pleck as I didn’t trust my judgement on the ring road this evening, and rolled liquid through the centre of Walsall. Cutting down Darwall Street to pop something in the post, I was caught up short by the view. The bus station, the lights, something about it.
I was so cold, I didn’t stop again. Some times, you just have to keep on moving.
February 19th – Down in Stonnall on an errand, I noted the pubs of the village, the Royal Oak and Old Swan both seem to be doing well now. Both have been closed previously, with questions over their future, but both with new landlords, they both seem to be doing well now, despite being barely 150 yards apart.
February 18th – I passed through Lichfield just at the right time and had time to get this classic Lichfield shot. I think every local photographer has done this one at one time or another, but you really can’t resist such a gorgeous sight.
Lichfield, for a relatively flat place, does have some beautiful views.
February 13th – I wasn’t very well, so I only cycled out on a quick errand to deliver something in Walsall Wood. On the way back, I decided to hop onto the canal at Hollanders Bridge. There was little wind for a change and the canal was pretty flat. Even though it wasn’t late, everywhere seemed eerily quiet.
Walsall Wood, despite being part of the lumpen sprawl of North Walsall, is still lovely and retains a village atmosphere.
February 10th – A nice day, and on a mission to check out something at the Waterfront in Walsall.Amongst all the new stuff here as part of the cinema development – a few restaurants and bars – there is promised to be a Hungry Horse, a more traditional style pub. In an online discussion, we couldn’t work out where it was likely to be, so I swung past this morning.
It looks likely to be in the units closest the canal, I think: everyone loves a pub with a canal view.
Bit concerned about the unfenced paving to the canal edge, though: I can visualise something rolling off that before long.
February 8th – That all-pervasive sense of a world heading off home quickly was present in the Civic Quarter, too. Even the pub smokers, normally hanging around in small huddles here, were absent.
It just made the street scene here look beautiful.
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