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#365daysofbiking I want to see the bright lights tonight

Sunday December 6th 2020 – I had something to do in Walsall, and went on a damp, grey afternoon with trepidation. With the Pandemic it’s become an oddly desolate place in retail terms: An already suffering town centre has become more desperate.

However, I took the new camera and a good friend, and we explored familiar places with not many people in them as night fell – and it was refreshing and beautiful. Particularly Church Hill and the Arboretum.

The Panasonic loves the dark, and is much more responsive to low light in a way I’ve never known previous Panasonic cameras to be. This is a revelation.

I loved the bold colours and the way it picked them up in night scenes.

Going to have some fun with this one! It turned out Walsall was far more beautiful than ever I might have expected.

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#365daysofbiking Something different, something the same

Saturday December 5th 2020 – A new camera to play with, I’ve kindly been lent: A Panasonic LX100M2.

Lots of controls and new things to learn how to use, and the picture quality is clearly remarkable. So what do you do first with a new camera? Try some familiar views – and thankfully, at Chasewater, there was a nice sunset.

That’ll do.

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#365daysofbiking A case of tinselitis

Friday December 4th 2020 – Heading home along the High Street, something in the dark looked different about John McKenna’s Brownhills sign.

Some kind hearted soul had decorated it for Christmas.

With things in the town a little grim for the season, with the pubs shut and the pandemic ongoing, this guerrilla act of festive cheer was welcome and beautiful.

My thanks to the beautiful soul that did this. Merry Christmas!

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#365daysofbiking Looking the other way

Thursday December 3rd 2020 – On an evening ride on a night as the sky was clearing, I headed along the canal to Ogley Junction, and stopped as I usually do on the bridge there, for a moment of contemplation. Normally, I take a shot of the canal back towards Anchor Bridge, but today I turned to the right instead.

Here, the canal continues in a lazy arc to Anglesey Wharf and Chasewater, but before that is passes a notorious area of Brownhills called ‘The Chemical’.

The blue factory unit over there is stood on the site of a Victorian chemical factory and later, an alloy smelting works that poisoned the land, polluted the air and led to it’s descriptive nickname.

The Chemical stood as wasteland for many years until six years ago when the new unit was built as an extension to a local factory. The contaminated soil was encapsulated beneath the new building’s floor, and held safe.

Given a few years, I doubt many folk will ever know why we call this place The Chemical.

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#365daysofbiking Spot check


Wednesday December 2nd 2020 – Nipping to Clayhanger on an evening errand, I took the ‘new’ Spot path – the footpath that goes between Bridge Street, over the Common (’Spot’) by the settling pools and comes out by Pier Street pedestrian bridge.

It’s the ‘new’ path as it was created in the early 1980s while Clayhanger Common was being reclaimed from an old refuse tip, and served as a diversion for a shorter, more direct path called ‘Spot Lane’.

Spot Lane was reinstated as a footway when the common was complete, but the new path remained, and I’ve always preferred it. It’s especially atmospheric at night.

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#365daysofbiking Halfway up the junction

Tuesday December 1st 2020 – As you come up Green Lane from Shelfield at night, through the darkness of Green Lane, you come to a small hamlet at the foot of the Black Cock Bridge, the bridge itself being named after the pub on its southern flank.

The hamlet is one of the oldest parts of Walsall Wood, once known as Bullings Heath, but now just part of the greater township. Bullings Heath itself stretches on up Hall Lane, and ends at the junction with the Lichfield Road in an area of factories and industrial units that were once the site of a sprawling slum formed largely of canal workers and ex-navvies.

The junction between Hall Lane and Green Lane sits somewhat oddly halfway up the slope of the bridge, now accentuated due to mining subsidence, but always pronounced.

Looking down it at night gives a wonderful village feeling, and you could be in almost any rural community.

I often thought about the dairy farm in Hall Lane, whose buildings and great barn are still extant – and how the carter must have cursed at having to drive his horse uphill to go back down immediately when going to Shelfield with his milk.

I often wonder how much milk got spilled there…

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#365daysofbiking Down amongst the derelict

Monday November 30th 2020 – The weather remained bad, and heading home late up Brownhills High Street, I stopped to check a text, and then looked to my left.

Ravens Court was never a success. Opened in 1964, this dystopian, anonymous shopping precinct was mostly empty until 1970. It enjoyed a period of being mostly fully let for about 15 years, then it began to go to seed. A failed development by Tesco and its acquisition by property speculators sealed the fate of this dingy, concrete shopping parade. It’s owners never re-let the vacated shops and for the best part of a decade it’s been deserted and decaying, right in the heart of Brownhills.

It’s shape as a plot is bad. It’s on a pronounced gradient. There’s a lot of demolition to do. The site is unattractive, and this is not a time for retail investment.

In private ownership, the council are powerless to duo anything, much, and to the town’s frustration, we are left with this rotting monument to opportunist modernism.

Hopefully something will change here, soon. But I’m not optimistic.

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#365daysofbiking Atmospheric pressure

Sunday November 29th 2020 – The weather was still awful, but resolved to make a better time of it, I set out with a good friend to try and capture the mist and light as best we could.

Sometimes, on the greyest, most horrible nights magic happens, and tonight, it did just that.

Mist and electric light can make the most industrial places look stunning – those swans are on a thin ribbon of canal between a waste transfer station and a scrapyard.

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#365daysofbiking Curtains


Saturday November 28th 2020 – A day of grim weather, and jobs and tasks going wrong. Things that were supposed to be half an hour, took three. The weather was lousy, headache grey and wet. It was a day to hibernate, and dream of a sunnier clime.

I left late and took a loop of Chasetown, but the weather was not conducive to good photographs. The High Street Christmas lights are up, but the rain and mist made photos pointless.

So I settled for a shot off the bypass Bridge on the old Paviours Road. I’ve never noticed before, but all the streetlights here are on one side of the road, which is unusual, but they do give a wonderful curtain effect on a murky, misty night.

As an aside I note that the lights on the M6 Toll where it passes near here and Chasewater have been turned off, which is interesting: It must be a money saving thing. Sad, really, as the lights made for interesting effects on a couple of the footbridges.

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#365daysofbiking Noir

Friday November 27th 2020 – I had been working from home but had to pop into work late afternoon for something that couldn’t wait the weekend out, so I grabbed the bike and went for it.

Returning in the early evening, I came along Green Lane and up the southern flank of the Black Cock Bridge at Bullings Heath, the tiny hamlet that was probably the genesis of the village of Walsall Wood – now a town of well over 10,000 people.

Bullings Heath, over a very high, daunting bridge from the rest of the urbanity it spawned still retains a bucolic feel and one of slight isolation at night; as you traverse Green Lane past Coppice Woods and Jockey Meadows where there are no streetlights, emerging into the sodium-lit hamlet is an almost cinematic experience, often replete with foxes, owls and bats.

Tonight, I stopped to hop on the canal and looked behind me in a moment when the moon was shielded by thick cloud, and there was very little natural light. It was really atmospheric and reminded me of a film noir.

It’s wonderful how moonlight, or the lack thereof can influence the feel of a place so dramatically.

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