Birmingham Christmas Market 2023

We went to the Christmas Market the Sunday after Thanksgiving. It seemed like there were fewer stalls but no fewer people than years past. Same old crap for sale, though, so there’s that.

There was also an outrageous amount of — I’ll play along and call it — ‘food.’ Bratwurst, pastry, gingerbread, more pastry, some deep fried pastry, vegan bratwurst, and tons of beer and mulled wine to wash it down with.

We made one pass through the German Market then retreated to the one at the Cathedral where there were several bars (including one at the base of the Helter Skelter) and a lot more food but with a bit of variety up this way. The crap for sale in the stalls seemed slightly more interesting, too, but by then we had been through a number of Jaeger shots, some artisan gins, and some beer.

Hamstead and Great Barr

The Badshah Palace is a lovely building and well preserved considering the delicate, 93-year-old brickwork. I reckon that some of it is replaced since I was unable to locate the cut benchmark on it ( and the bolt that constitutes Triangulation Point 18454 is somewhere, inaccessible, on the roof). Here it is in its original glory showing a Jean Harlow film):

It was a drenchingly rainy day but I did manage to find a couple of benchmarks, this one over on the Hamstead side of the canal on Rocky Lane:

It was right at the edge of the pet shop and the offie, shown below, but there were half a dozen others either lost to refurbishments or located on private residences.

The canal crossing, itself, was impressive though.

This was a section of canal I had run back during the lockdowns, well before the Commonwealth Games. Deep in the cut at the time I wondered where this bridge linked neighbourhoods.

That write up is here. It is dull and only there to show the canal furniture but if you want the crossing you’ll find it marked.

Of course, this trip also entailed a pub stop. Having started at the Beaufort Arms near my first unsuccessful search, the damp trek ended at the Towers Inn where the Cut Mark is still visible despite many layers of paint.

The area has built up quite a bit since this photo 75 years ago. As noted elsewhere, some of the customers this day were probably also here then.

Bilston Town Hall, Tech School, Library, and a switching station/Gurdwara

Not much to say about any of these…just some photos of our wee walk east of the Bilston Central tram stop.

Stopped to photograph the old Harthill’s Cycles signage and was confronted with the motor gang here. Live to ride, ride to live.

Bilston Town Hall yielded a Cut Mark.

Just above that we spotted the Blue Plaque commemorating John Freeman. We didn’t know who he was and I haven’t yet found his books in libraries but when I do I’ll give an opinion.

Along the way we passed a Gurdwara occupying an old bus and tram depot and the adjacent Wolverhampton District Electrical Tramways power station, c 1902. This was the generator building for the tramlines back then although they were superceded by buses within a few years.

The local museum and library (probably where I’ll have to go for the Black Country Sketches and Stories noted above) is another fantastic building. The landlady at the Trumpet told us that Bilston was an affluent town and someplace truly special to visit when she was a child. You can pretty well imagine it from some of these buildings.

The Bradley family made galvanized buckets in their Beldray factory, here (now luxury flats). Odd things to note: the automobile in the logo has nothing to do with the output of the plant and the name, Beldray, is the dyslexic signature of one of the children of the founder.

This listed yet derelict school is heartbreaking to encounter and I would invest lottery money — if my numbers ever came in — converting it to our residence.

The walls seem structurally sound but you can tell it needs the entire interior and probably the roof replaced.

Eleven years older than our house, we would know what to expect in these voluminous confines.

Oh well, dream on.

Soaked in Wolverhampton, Sightseeing Nonetheless

I was in Wolverhampton for an appointment one afternoon in October and rounded out the day with a nice walk around areas I had not previously visited. The rain was cold and relentless but I persisted in chasing OS marks with little success but the rewards of some new landmarks.

A few paces from the so called National Spiritualist Church (the most impressive bit from the outside was the ironmongery) were the famous Steps to Nowhere, an architectural feature I have run up on several times in the West Midlands:

Both of these were across the road from the Billy Wright Stand of Molineux Stadium which sits in the campus of the University of Wolverhampton despite being dedicated to professional sport.

All of those features were near missing marks I sought out and somewhat remote from the solitary one I did find over on Great Western Street, a lonely lane near some factories.

But, I had things to do the rest of the afternoon (including a stop for some dry clothes) and the brutalist clock I spied on my way back to Wolverhampton Station reminded me of transience, actual and architectural. Even in this backward locality.

Kidderminster Rainy Day

The first pedestrian subway I met in Kidderminster surprisingly didn’t smell like a urinal: surprisingly because of the quality of the graffiti and the young couple drinking beer at 8 in the morning.

However, the graffiti improved as the day progressed from the politically eloquent to some sublime Republican sentiments.

It was new TrigPointing territory, as well, and I found my first on Exchange Street as I hiked between the Swan and the library (helpfully highlighted in yellow chalk):

Peckish, I headed toward the Home of Souvlaki for a gyros and stopped by an old Telephone Exchange to bag another Cut Mark. But, I was also treated to a quite special post box (yes, I’m still doing THAT, as well):

The building also had a lovely Blue Plaque for the ‘instigator’ of Penny Post (so I got to triple dip at this tourism site):

The mark itself was somewhat anticlimactic:

Lunch done and the rain chucking it down, I worked my way back to the station withonly a modicum of exercise under my belt. Only one of the four Cut Marks on my list still exists, the one at 31 George St.

Soaked but safely back at the station, I noted an old horse trough (how 19th century of these people).

There is also an old but still operating Bundy clock there. When still used, there was a spool of paper inside and the bus drivers reaching this point would stick in a key unique to them and the time of arrival would be stamped on the paper spool.

Likewise well preserved was this Victoria Regina post box, on the short walk to the King & Castle pub in the Severn Valley Rail (historic steam trains here) portion of Kidderminster Station:

Day out in Digbeth

Jackie spotted a small poster for a vintage furniture place (the Moseley Vintage Hub) near Bordesley Station and, since we need a piece to put our turntable on and store CDs within, we headed down on a Saturday, mid-July. We actually had success and it was delivered a week later, but we’ll definitely be back.

We killed a few minutes going through the vinyl there while a rain outbreak passed, then made our way to the Rainbow for a beverage. We passed an enormous wedding party at a big venue on the way then, as we prepared to turn to the pub I stopped for a Cut Mark I knew was close (another one, on the pub, turned out to no longer exist).

Refreshed, we headed back out and looped by the central bus garage, a magnificent and massive building.

Jackie was really taken with the heraldry above the bus door, pointing out art and industry having a lean against the shield of, perhaps, the monarch or maybe the City or the County. The arm and hammer out of the parapet remains a mystery but I’ll update this if we figure it all out. FORWARD!

Voce Books was our other target, a small independent shop hidden by the arches just down from the cop shop on Alison Street. We could have bought the entire inventory, but settled on a couple of tomes we both wanted to read.

Jewellery Quarter Trigging

My Cut Benchmark database was fucking with me. Ten marks in a row were missing (like the one that should be on the arch to the old Jewellery Quarter Fire Station but was probably polished off the stones during conversion to flats). Tsk.

Don’t get me wrong, it is divine to wander the JQ with your eyes tuned to fine detail. I found a shop that specialises in antique/recovered stained glass and some odd engineering bits like the 3″ cast iron (?) feature marked ‘Talisman’ above…I think it might be for structural stability.

My loop nearly complete the last targeted CM of the day, on the Cemetery Lodge near the Rose Villa Tavern, finally lent some joy. Success!

Manchester Pre-Deb Trip May 2023

The last day before my vacation started — albeit still days away from wrapping up the Pre-Debra refurbs — I finally managed to reverse engineer the OEM controller for a laser we need at work for about 4 hours. At 10% power, this continuous wave beast made this pretty little hole in 100ms. That’s waiting for my return to work, now.

We went to Manchester the night Debra flew from Raleigh-Durham so we could meet her at the airport first thing the next morning. Manchester is just lovely and easily the most european city in the UK. We, on the other hand, dined in a Thai place in Chinatown (considering the Vietnamese place next door, Pho Cue, to have too cutesy a name).

There were pubs, of course, but mostly we just wandered about marvelling at architecture we’ve previously overlooked. Too little time, this trip, but whatthehell, right?

Walsall Trip Jan 2023

We went to Walsall to hit up a large Wilco but it had even less stock than the small ones near the house.

Fortunately the charity shops RULED except for some disappointing items we’ve already turned back around to other charity shops in West Brom (the donation being the wager we took on the — as it turned out — shit piece of merchandise, Short Record Review to follow). We had to skip one as a large area of town including one supporting an immigrants’ charity was cordoned off due to a murder investigation:

The best bit of the trip, though, besides the day out (of course) was the great deco and earlier architecture obscured and yet right out there in public.

Lions seemed to be a major theme (some detail snips below) and preservation of functional forms were another pleasant surprise:

The second best was the very much in public freak show that is put on, for free, by the Walsall community in its day to day, in public business. Absolutely golden entertainment . . . keep it up, weirdos.

Oh, and it seems to be a focus of missionaries. As we walked past the above mentioned crime scene we were serenaded by a middle-aged Korean couple with “How Great Thou Art” which was the only song they knew in (I’m guessing it was some broken version of) “English.” Later, we were preached at by some Geordie’s on the same spot that fire and brimstone was later spurted from a West African evangelist then, down the road, some street rappers harangued us and others about Jesus’ imminent return. We felt cleansed in the blood of the and rushed home to enjoy some of our purchases and talk about our adventures.

Later, we started watching a series called “Everyone Else Burns.” You should be able to predict the Short Review for it (if you are some sort of witch).

Day Trip To Derby

We took day off refurb work for our first trip (since the COVID-19 fiasco started) anywhere outside of the Wolverhampton – West Brom – Birmingham – Solihull corridor Saturday.  We went to Derby, new to both of us and full of surprises like the Black Lives Matter exhibit outside the old indoor market (above).

The DCFC mirror above the bar at the Merry Widows perplexed us.  Turns out that until recently The Baseball Ground was their football field.  Baseball rivalled cricket at one point around here and the in the mid-19th century the cricket/baseball pitch at the old greyhound track (note, we also went to a pub called the Greyhound).  Begrudgingly sharing the space with the footballers — who would haunt the lowest levels of Association Football until the arrival of Brian Clough — the football stadium that eventually surrounded the pitches took on this ironic name.

 

That field is long gone, like this fantastic nightclub we past on a shortcut over to the Friars Gate.

 

At St Peter’s, we were confronted with a grand house displaying four statues of locals-done-good.  Now a Costa Coffee, it was built in 1912 as a Boots The Chemist.  The statues are of John Lombe, the fellow who stole silk mill technology from the Piedmontese (eventually being poisoned by same); Jedidiah Strutt, an industrialist and philanthropist who also built the arboretum (see next photo); William Hutton, born here but eventually becoming a Birmingham bookbinder, poet, and also a keen walker (his account of his 600 mile journey to, along, and back from Hadrian’s wall becoming one of his many histories published); and, Florence Nightingale, a nurse of some note.

Killing time, we wandered neighbourhoods until time for our train and putting on over 8 miles hiking the city for the afternoon.  A longer stay is in order (so many pubs, museums, parks to explore — all less than an hour from our front door).