Tag: interesting architecture

March 13th – This is about a death, or being present at the demise. 

I was in Birmingham for the afternoon, and had an important execution to record.

Fletchers Walk, the dingy, misconceived subway-mall near the Town Hall in Birmingham, leading under Paradise Circus and emerging at the foot of Alpha Tower, will soon be lost to the wrecking ball.

It is ugly. Badly designed. It represents some of the worst – very worst -aspects of modernism, utilitarian urbanism and brutalism. It is unattractive, badly lit, intimidating and dystopian.

I’ve always loved it.

In the 80s and 90s, there was a great record shop down there, one of Brum’s earliest computer shops, too. Some great restaurants. When it was alive, it was a curious, odd netherworld. I’d bet many Brummies never knew it existed. It often stank of sewage, or stale urine. 

Attempts to polish this architectural turd only succeeded in compounding the issue – that being it was impossible to build something like this properly in the space available.

Soon, it will be swept away, along with John Madin’s remarkable library on top, and replaced by a bland, steel and glass corporate space, which we will facelessly and safely drift through, like the insipid figures on developer’s pictures. 

We will be unchallenged as we do so – the architecture will not engage, neither will it be evident. There will be none of the apprehension. It’ll just be another glossy, transitory and irrelevant link between retail spaces.

That will never by my Birmingham. Fletchers Walk – with it’s memories of great nights out, obscure music finds and hurried dashes from grim menace – is my Birmingham. 

When it dies, a bit of my memory will die with it.

March 11th – It’s nice to see history preserved well. In Walsall, at the top of the old Bradford Street, there used to stand Walsall’s old, dingy general hospital. When that was replace in the 1990s, part of the building that was most historic – the Victorian Outpatients Department – was preserved. New flats were built on the rest of the side, and adjoined to the older, converted building.

Dark, foursquare and made of very, very red brick, it’s a imposing but wonderful edifice.

February 25th – Sorry, I won’t feature Darlaston again for a few days, promise: but the town is my current muse and I do love it so – and it looks splendid in the winter sunshine.

The curious, frustrating and utterly unpredictable flip-flop weather at the moment means last night’s rain was this morning a gorgeous, almost still, warm sunny winter day. Darlaston Police Station looked fine, as did Victoria Park. 

You can’t not take a photo of this place. It’s gorgeous.

February 23rd – A harsh day to ride to work into the wind. It started out sunny and bright, but it quickly became overcast, but then brightened again, It was hard work, and I stopped to take a phone call in The Butts, Walsall. The former school here has been converted into dwellings, and seems to have been done quite sympathetically. I think the exterior doors would have been better in wood or a darker colour, and the white boarded detail in the water tower jarrs; but otherwise, a great repurposing of a very interesting, surprisingly ornate building.

February 20th – When one talks about the excellent architecture in Darlaston, it’s easy to convey the impression that interesting and beautiful buildings are confined to a small area in the town centre around Victoria Park. While there are many fine examples there, the sheer joy of this wonderful place is that there are fine buildings waiting to be discovered all over the place, and this is really the story of not just Darlaston, but the wider Black Country, too, which hides many of its finest gems under its bushel.

This fine old townhouse – now bedsits I think – has the most remarkable circular ‘tower’ bay with conical roof and gorgeous gables. Everything about it is perfect, from chimneys to lintels, and it sits in a nondescript, unremarkable location on the Walsall Road.

Everywhere you turn, there’s another wonderful building.

February 18th – Next door to Kings Hill Park, the former methodist church is steadily being converted into flats. It will be interesting to see the result, and how well executed it is. In the meantime, the vegetation has been cut from around it revealing a rather interesting foundation stone. 

I hadn’t noticed before, but the lead has been stolen from the building and the roofs and gables are in a parlous state. That won’t be a cheap fix.

February 16th – No matter how grey, Victoria Park in Darlaston is always a joy to the heart – and since the Community Payback crew has been working here clearing the overgrown scrub, the surrounding architecture – itself remarkable – is now once again part of the overall atmosphere.

Thanks are due to Kate ‘Ganzey’ Gomez and others who pointed out that my wee, crumbling shed that I spotted last week – centre right – was actually for the town fire engine. Read about it here (scroll right down).

February 12th – Just a stones throw away in the wonderfully named Crescent Road, this odd… garage? Stable? Workshop? 

In similar red terracotta bricks, this crumbling edifice sits between the back of the Town Hall (itself a work of gorgeous red brick Franco-Gothic Victoriana) and the similarly grand Police Station. I never noticed this before, yet I pass it loads. I looks like a workshop or garage, I’m thinking possibly for a fire engine or similar. Anyone know what the roundel represents or signifies?

Sadly, the structure appears to be failing, and I don’t think those doors have been opened in a goodly while. I hope this is saved; it may be a lowly sibling of the grand architectural statements around, but in its own way a diminutive delight.

February 12th – Darlaston and its remarkably wonderful architecture are stunning, and a joy to the heart even on the dullest winter days. Passing Rectory Avenue – the cul-de-sac next to the Post Office – I was struck by the beautiful red terracotta brick townhouses here I’d not really stopped and studied before. Foursquare, bold, architecturally confident, these were expensive houses, but not overly flashy. Beautiful.

Beyond them, between here and the church, the mysterious and wonderful tower of the Columbarium. 

Such wonder in such a small, unassuming Black Country town.