Tag: Wisemore

#365daysofbiking Haunted

March 30th – I had to nip to Walsall at noon. I was tired from a very demanding week, but the weather was nice and the riding surprisingly easy.

I don’t mind Walsall these days – I long ago resolved my conflict with my memories and learned to embrace the place anew. It’s never been a bad town. It’s just that many who live here hate it because it isn’t the same as when they were young.

Of course it isn’t – all places change, and what folk resent is not the change in the town, but the change in themselves, I find.

I pushed my bike up Church Hill and admired the view, I plodded around the town below aimlessly but enjoying it immensely. I stopped for coffee in the sun. Then out on the canal to call at Sainsburys in Reedswood, where I noticed the last (nearly) whole remnant of Reedswood Power Station – the old pedestrian bridge over the long gone railway, now orphaned and fenced out of use between a pub and and the retail park.

Walsall is haunted by it’s own past, let alone the half-imagined one it has projected upon it.

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March 4th – A horrid, horrid day: a very cold, icy commute to work, a bad day when I got there, and then caught in the rain without waterproof trousers on the way home. I got in cold, tired and soaking wet.

Walsall is hard to love in such bad weather. I was glad to be going home.

March 22nd – We’re in that interesting time of year again now with very curious, half-light dusks. It felt dark, but wasn’t; the sky was really quite light, and it seemed the whole world was in some curious interregnum between night and day.

I have no idea if this is a real astronomical thing or not; but it’s great for those Late Night Feeling type photos, like these, taken from the junction of Hatherton Street and Wisemore in Walsall.

August 3rd – Walsall Council seem surprised that the new Tesco hypermarket on Wisemore isn’t leading a regeneration of the town, and instead, seems to be sucking the life out of it. It’s obvious really. As this view from in front of the bus station shows, Tesco couldn’t give a toss about the town. The entire store has been built to face the new ring road, helpfully constructed by the council to deliver shoppers to the retail behemoth and take them away again without ever having to interact with the rest of the town. They haven’t even been bothered enough to put a sign on the rear of the building. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a development where contempt for the host community has ever been so wilfully incorporated in the design.

Presumably, the planning committee looked at the design and thought ‘Yeah, that looks OK.’. Bewildering.