Tag: ugly

January 16th – Scooting between Snow Hill and New Street to change trains on the way home, this snatched photo. On the left, the ‘new’ New Street, ugly as sin, dysfunctional, with a cheap, tinfoil gimcrack cladding that shows every careless dent and poor alignment in fitting. 

In the centre, Birmingham’s postwar Brutalist architecture, and on the right, something altogether older.

In the middle, people, lights and a city hiding and surviving beneath the rule.

I love this place with all my heart. Even the ugly bits.

January 14th – I had to pop to a store in Crown Wharf on the way home, Walsall’s retail park on the fringes of the town centre. I hate the place with a passion – built on a very inhuman scale, it’s horrid to walk or cycle around, and appears to be solely designed without any aesthetic merit purely to extract cash from consumers whilst doing as little as possible in the way of accommodating design.

At night it’s even more grim than in the day. A place utterly without redeeming features.

January 3rd – Ah, that prickly, uncomfortable time between New Year and starting work again. Once you get back to the grind, Christmas seems a long way off and life gets back to normal quickly, but in the interregnum between festivity and workaday occupation, things feel otherworldly and disconnected. I hate it.

The nights are opening out though, which is good; the weather hasn’t been great, particularly that morning, and I can’t seem to get anything done, which is a pain, but everything must pass.

I spun into town for a few items and some fresh air, and swung past St James, the parish church of Brownhills. I’ve always found it stark and austere, and the extension added in the early 90s (in the foreground) is, to me, hideous. But the church is the heart of Brownhills, or at least Ogley Hay, even if most of the surrounding community seemed to be Methodist.

The sky was a deep, azure blue and the moon was nearing full. It was quiet. Not a bad night to be out, but my heart was elsewhere.

I’ll feel better when I’m back at work.

23rd October – Sorry about the quality of the photos today, I did something horrid to the camera settings by accident and didn’t notice. Ho hum.

From the Walsall Canal at Bentley Bridge, the gas holders at Pleck are a landmark. No longer in use, the site they’re on looks likely to be redeveloped and these huge structures dismantled. I’ll miss them, really; they were a landmark for decades for miles around, and particularly from the adjacent motorway. 

But they are so very ugly…

July 15th – This journal illustrates many things, but mostly, it illustrates my ignorance. 

Three weeks hence I stopped to admire this horse chestnut tree in Festival Gardens, Lichfield, and noted how fine it was looking, laden with young fruit, and that it was showing hardly any leaf miner activity.

It is now. The leaves have been absolutely infested with it.

The leaf miner is a pain – it can cause early leaf fall and there’s speculation that this tiny moth larvae can cause poor fruit development, but otherwise, this infestation doesn’t affect the overall health of the tree. It just makes the poor thing look terribly diseased.

Next time, I’ll keep my mouth shut. Can’t help feeling I cursed my poor arboreal brother…

February 10th – I came home in the early afternoon, just as the rain was clearing. I’d had to call in at Aldridge, so found myself in the hinterlands between Walsall Wood, Leighswood and Stubbers Green. This is a very scarred landscape, mainly from brick marl extraction. The geology of the former quarries here is perfect for landfill, and for decades, as a site is abandoned by the brickmakers, it is adopted by the refuse industry.

Now at the capping and landscaping stage, Vigo Utopia was a massive hole in the ground when I was a child, but now stands high above the surrounding area. Bulkheads tap off the methane and pipe it to a generator plant. Eventually, this mound will be a public open space, but that’s some way off yet.

Of course, the brickworks are still busy, and there’s still marl to be extracted, and there will therefore be further space for landfill. A vicious cycle of blight and nuisance, it renders this landscape hostile, ugly and barren, particularly on a dark, wet and blustery February Monday afternoon.

January 5th – It was a thoroughly horrid afternoon. Windy, wet, dark. I went out with a heavy heart, and didn’t find much of interest in the immediate area, so I spun out to Shenstone down the very wet and muddy backlanes.

Visiting the church, I was again reminded what a gothic, ugly edifice it is. I’ve never liked it; it’s a perfectly competent architectural design, it’s just not to my taste. I find the dark grey sandstone, and heavy Victoriana dismal. Even the gargoyles look desperately unhappy.

Compare St. Johns, Shenstone with any other local church, say Hopwas. Hopwas is a place you’d feel happy to give praise in, to wed, to christen; Shenstone looks like a place to go and endure, repent and suffer – it’s full of foreboding.

More interesting to me is the old tower in the churchyard; crumbling, it’s the remains of an earlier church. Perhaps it would have been better left.

Down in the village,I headed to the Lammas Land – a strip of parkland along the Footherley Brook. On the way, I passed The Plough In, busy, bright, inviting. Newly reopened, it’s good to see. It had been derelict for a few years.

March 30th – Off to work early, and a return via Slowloaf in Mellish Road. Rushall Parish Chuch – that of St. Michael the Archangel – is fittingly made from local limestone, and is a handsome, Francophile church with an imposing, tall broach spire. It has a long history, although this incarnation is Victorian. History hereabouts of the village, the hall and environs go back to the Domesday book. All of which are somewhat impressive.

Reflecting on this, whatever aberrant demon possessed the architect of the modern hall, bizarrely erected in the churchyard really needs to be expunged. Sadly, the exorcism wasn’t undertaken quickly enough and similar architectural defecations occurred at many Lichfield Diocese churches in the 80s and 90s; Brownhills, Pelsall, Walsall Wood, Canwell. 

They make me think distinctly unholy thoughts.

November 29th – While we’re on the subject of architectural disasters, the new Premier Inn on the waterfront development near the art gallery looks better at night – mainly because it’s grim black colour and peculiar yellow window frames are muted by the darkness. Nearly ready to open, the lights were on and made for an interesting shot or two over the canal basin. Over a decade since development here began, the basin is still overlooked by derelict and unoccupied buildings. Not a great success story, it has to be said.