Tag: James Bridge

November 18th – Not all change is for the worse. Here at James Bridge, on the Walsall-Darlaston border, the road between the two crosses a river: the Tame, in it’s nascent stages. At Besot, a mile or so away, it’s in confluence with the Ford Brook, and becomes the major watercourse of Sandwell and North Birmingham.

This river used – even here – especially here – to be nothing but a foul conduit for industrial effluent; but the industry that discharged into it has either gone, or been forced to clean up it’s act, and the river now runs relatively clear.

Today, mallards drifted in the strong flow, basking in the hazy but warm morning sun. This was unthinkable even a decade ago.

I never thought I’d see this waterway clean.

October 15th – I hadn’t been down Station Street in Darlaston – at least the James Bridge end of it – for a while. What greeted me today was quite a surprise, to say the least. 

Walsall has developed some odd traffic calming and management systems in the last few weeks; traffic engineers have gone mad with the Shellgrip at Rushall, and two streets in The Butts have become one way. Here, the stub end of Station Street – a short cut through to Heath Road – has been blocked to two way traffic at the Heath Road junction. 

This seems bizarre in itself, but they have left a cycling lane open for us two-wheelers, although it’s possibly the most peculiar such arrangement I’ve ever seen.

It’s like an ability-testing obstacle course. I bet whoever laid this out hasn’t ridden a bike for years.

February 1st – This swan had me concerned for a bit. Sat on the frozen canal near james Bridge in Darlaston, as if he were trapped (I’m assuming it’s a he, how do you sex a swan?) I watched him for a while, fearing a stuck bird. As I started to whistle, he got to his feet, leaving small, melted imprints in the frozen canal surface. 
Birds seem able to be in contact with ice like this for indefinite periods, without their feet freezing because they have a very interesting feature in their blood circulation systems. At the top of their legs, the small amount of blood that flows to the legs and feet flows through a sort of ‘heat exchanger’ which removes heat from the outgoing blood and transfers it to the blood flowing back. Together with few nerves actually in the limbs, birds like these can stand for hours on ice with no ill effects and little energy consumption. All achieved through the magic of nature’s engineering hand, evolution. It surely is a wonder.

January 18th – One of my predominate emotions regarding the Black Country, and Darlaston in particular, is that of loss. Looking from the Walsall Canal at the James Bridge aqueduct, right on the Walsall/Wednesbury/Darlaston border, the much improved but still grimy Tame picks its way through abandoned brownfield sites and wasteland, past the gas storage depot and into the hinterlands of Bescot and the shadow of the motorway. Once, it wound its slimy way around huge factories, refineries and metal mills. IMI, Rubery Owen, FH Lloyd, GKN. Between this wind-blasted canal bank and those proud twin churches, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children worked. In vile conditions, often uneducated. The noise would have been deafening, unlike the gentle lap of canal water and wind rush I hear today. Sometimes, it’s as if their improved standard of living killed the place. They destroyed us for wanting better.

It doesn’t matter anymore.

You can’t put it back, as an old mate used to say.

January 17th – Some of Walsall’s municipal cemeteries are in a woeful state. Ryecroft can be a bit grim in the less visited corners, Queen Street is disgustingly neglected, doubly so since it’s the resting place of local nursing heroine Sister Dora. James Bridge is no exception – a large burial ground wedged inbetween former factories, waste ground and the canal, it was never a picturesque location. It’s sad to see recently that an adjacent building waste processing plant has expanded operations, leaving relatives of the interred to complain of masonry dust coating the graves. Today, it wasn’t hard to see why it was happening. Why on earth was that noisy, pollutant yard given permission to operate in such a sensitive location?
On a side note, the older sections of James Bridge are amongst the most densely packed I’ve ever seen. There are a huge number of graves here.