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January 20th – Like most folk in Brownhills, I use the local Tesco from time to time. I hate doing it, but there are few easy alternatives. The store has no cycle provision whatsoever. It is housed in one of the grimmest 80’s sheds I’ve ever come across, with no natural light. It’s impression is tatty, untidy and gives the feeling of careless grubbiness which makes products you buy there feel secondhand and mauled. It is, however, usually rammed with people, and this Friday was no exception.

Tesco promise to change all this – we are, we are assured, soon to get a new Tesco, built on the site of Brownhills’ now derelict shopping precinct. However, having prevaricated for years, and clearly getting a good return out of the old store, one can but wonder if the retail behemoth will not bother now their share price and profits have taken a pounding. A new CHP power plant was recently installed on the roof, and the toilets have just been refurbished. A company as sharp as this don’t throw money at buildings they plan to demolish.

Tesco destroyed this town. It could at least look like it cares for us.

January 20th – Pottering around Brownhills, getting some shopping in and running errands on a wet Friday night, I wanted some night pictures, and oddly, headed for the canal. These flats near Cooper’s Bridge on the Watermead, looked warm and homely in the blackness. I’ve always been fascinated by the chutzpah of the developers of the Watermead. Built on what was a meadow around a decade ago, all the roads are named after varieties of birdlife eradicated from the area by its construction. Heron Close. Curlew Drive. Moorhen Close my bloody arse…

January 19th – I’ve been watching this piece of artwork develop under the bridge near Reservoir Place for a few days. First the wall was emulsioned matt black, then outlines appeared, and then filling in. Day by day, someone scuttles here and paints. The legend says ‘Welcome to Pleck’ and I have to admire the tenacity of the artist. He or she never leaves any rubbish, and it must take skill and planning to do that. And a sense of belonging. An interesting thing. Wonder if it’ll be finished when I next pass by?

January 19th – A wet, miserable commute. It rained as soon as I left the house, and stopped just as I got to work. The new Ring Road in Walsall was living up to its reputation – drains all along the stretch between Littleton Street and Pleck Road were blocked, and the road surface was awash with standing water, particularly opposite Smiths Mill. This led to a liberal dousing of spray with every passing vehicle. Remind me why I do this again?

January 18th – But flung into the modern age we were, for better of worse. This was once the site of a workhouse, so feared in the memory of old Walsallians that one elderly lady I knew, when confused and aged, swore she’d not let her family take her there. They were actually trying to take her to the Manor Hospital for a checkup, the older establishment utilising many of the workhouse buildings. 

In the last decade or two, it all changed; first a new Accident & Emergency, then a new hospital, provided by the wonders of magic beans and PFI. This shiny new building, filled with wonderful staff and equipment, is somehow redolent of Art Deco in it’s night time luminescence, yet I fear it may yet, through its cost, render the NHS in Walsall back into servitude. 

Progress, eh?

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 – Enjoying the ride to work today, I took a spin up National Cycle Route 5 from Station Road in Coalpool up to the Butts, in Walsall. This great cycleway runs mostly beside the Ford Brook, today flowing rather impressively. After passing under Walsall and picking up some tributaries on the way, the brook becomes the River Tame. Where the flow dives under Mill Lane, there’s a debris filter installed by the Environment Agency. Both they and the National Rivers Authority, their predecessors, have done much to clean up this formerly massively polluted waterway, not just here, but further south. I don’t know why, but I always find structures like this vaguely intimidating and unsettling. 

January 15th – Viewed from just below Meerash Farm, near Hammerwich, the sunset over Brownhills was beautiful, even over this normally ugly bit of the skyline known as The Chemical. Once the site of a chemical works, then the Superalloys military scrapyard, now the vents and flues of one of Brownhills’ largest employers, Castings, punctuate the factory roofs. In daytime, this view is at best, unremarkable and at worst, hideous. At sundown, though, precious. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

January 15th – Bimbling around the western edge of Chasewater, I noted the water level in Jeffrey’s Swag was rising well. The main lake also seems to be creeping up, but the smaller pool on the northern side of the railway causeway is critical. Topped up by several creeks and streams, once filled it will be key to the return of the main body of water, as all the overspill flows into it. It’s good to see the gradual restoration of this vital habitat to some kind of normality. Sadly, the replenishing of Chasewater itself will take an awful lot longer.

January 15th – I have to keep rolling. Despite feeling a bit grim, I embarked on a chilly ride around Brownhills, Chasewater and Hammerwich. The ice tyres made short work of the icy puddles and frozen track mud, and it was quite a blast. As I approached what has now been christened ‘Slough Railway Bridge’ in a sudden fit of bridge nameplate renewal by British Waterways, I noted something I’d been meaning to feature here for a while. Many folk don’t realise what the channel on the right of this flight of steps is for – it’s to push your bicycle up to the cycle track above from the towpath below. It’s only been installed in the last few years, and certainly makes the climb easier, and provides a trick challenge for the BMX kids. I see more an more of these about, and a fine thing they are, too.

I don’t care what British Waterways call it, it’ll always be the Cement Works Bridge to me…