I hopped off at Trinity Way tram stop to walk over to the Prince of Wales for a Friday afternoon pint. A quick consultation with my benchmark database directed me to Holy Trinity church which has a nice one just around the right from the front door:
There is supposed to be a Disc on this building, TP18401, which was the Premier Inn when we moved here but was a BT building sometime in the past. The Disc is almost certainly gone: they look only semi permanent as it is and would probably be removed during some cycle of roofing maintenance. There’s an article about Discs with a photo at this link; essentially, in sites where a bolt would have fucked up the roof they put down a blob of asphalt and stuck the bolt in it. There are only 129 UK-wide, so I’ll keep my eyes peeled.
I wasn’t angling for another run in with the Scientologists (for photographing their weird little compound) and, since they have obliterated the Cut Mark on the stone wall out by the pavement, no incidents occurred. I don’t know what the rationale was in them destroying the mark, but it is a bit eerie the way their cross is made up of two benchmarks stacked head-to-head.
Like the Dianetics folks, most of the people on this run have more house than any of us needs and nicer ones than most of us can aspire to. My first success of the day came at #6 Serpentine Road after a miss on a bridge (water mains maintenance made it inaccessible) and a wall which had been replaced in recent years.
#6 also had a new, low wall — and the walls at #2, 4, and 8 have been screeded over — but the buttress with the mark was pristine if a bit worn:
Continuing up Serpentine, #21 was unlikely due to it being ON the house itself but was impossible behind the hoarding out on the pavements.
At the top of this hill, Serpentine runs into Selly Park Road, Selly Wick Road, and at least one other in a confusing intersection. I stopped by the sign commemorating an early protective covenant to regroup.
The same wall as this plaque was supposed to have a Cut Mark on it:
Which I found here at the bench:
But, as I confirmed my next stop I spotted another.
I don’t think this one is real but it is an odd bit of graffiti, nonetheless (probably one of the Scientologists contacting the Mother Ship):
Plagued by replaced walls and occupied residences, I found a plaque as I headed down toward Pershore Road. I vaguely remember Councillor Stewart’s obit not long after we moved to West Brom:
The house was at #15 which I found, upon consultation of the map, had this mark on the gatepost:
A zig and a zag toward the park and I had to skip a car dealership with wares all over the most likely locations of its purported mark. At the far end of Second Avenue on the kerb in front of #52 I encountered a rivet (a rare find for me)
Rivets are not the most obvious and the benchmark accompanying it is worn almost completely away.
I exited that park, was screwed by Scientology, and found the lodge to the arboretum nearby occupied (residence rules, y’know?). A few other misses including a long gone gatepost at the Avenue Road side of an adjacent park led me to a railroad bridge with the last one I would try for on this journey.
I had hopes, upon setting out, that the burger joint one tick counter clockwise on this roundabout was the site of the old Golden Cross public house but upon my return I looked up the archived StreetViews and found the above dated April 2010 (and missing one year later). Poop. The mark I was looking for would be on the side we see above down at the lower right corner.
Even if it had been the Fat Stack, there is metal hoarding over the SE corner on the south face:
This student housing monstrosity is what stands on the site of the mighty Golden Cross since August 2011:
I continued up Harborne Park hill NOT finding marks on #294, #262, and #220 for various reasons (private residences, building replaced, the usual). St Pete’s, on the other hand, was a rich font of trig pointing delights.
When we lived on Swinford Road down the hill from here, I spent a bit of time in this cemetery and at the Bell adjacent so this visit was sort of a homecoming.
Since the two points of interest were right there, I took in the detail on a window I had somehow missed. The vicar here is nice, so I should come by and ask about the identities of the heads.
But, work awaited and I needed to be cleaned up for a 9 o’clock meeting…just enough time to not find another CM (gatepost replaced sometime back) on the dash back downhill.
Actually, this was only one way to the Uni but from Five Ways. I caught the bus from the Med School after a lunchtime meeting and hopped off in Five Ways and joined the canal looking, looking, looking for benchmarks and bolts.
I got to the Somerset Road Bridge and, with most of the walls that ostensibly held bolts now heavily worn or replaced by metal-slat fencing, I can confirm that there is the dictionary definition of fuck all to find there. Up top, as well, there are signs of wall damage to consider.
At the bridge, there should have been two Cut Marks, one each to the northwest sides of the rail and the canal sections of the bridge. But, all I could find was the one boxed with highlighting (canal one) and the graffito bemoaning our ‘korupt’ system.
Determined to succeed if at all possible, I continued back to the labs along Edgbaston Park Road and spotted the faint CM in stone not far from where I turned on to the road (above and detail below).
There was another, similarly hard to spot mark across from the entrance to the campus hotel (listed as Hornton Grange on my old documents)…see if you can spot it:
If you said, “here” then treat yourself to a nice beverage:
Working on an approximately 30% success rate Benchmark Bagging, I expected at least 2 new finds this run starting with #135 Toll End Road. Along this stretch, unusually, the northbound/west side of the street counts up from 1 with both even and odd numbered houses and the southbound/eastern side counts down in the direction I was going. Regardless, all of the houses looked to predate the Second World War until I got to #135, a block of flats built sometime in the last twenty or so years. 1 down, 5 to go.
2 of 6 was the mark on the wall on the north side of Wednesbury Oak Road with the only issue being that there were no walls on Wednesbury Oak Road.
The third failure was the CM that was supposed to be on the Sunday School gatepost but appears to be worn away…classic Vicar of Dibley joke about 2 nuns and a bar of soap notwithstanding. The former Britannia Pub is now a residence across the street but my first pub stop was the Great Western a few dozen meters further along.
Refreshed and ready to fail, I did not find my fourth quarry in the undergrowth in front of the old school below. The fifth one also eluded me but cross referencing leads me to believe it might be on the side of pub two, the Triangle Bar and Grill.
The sixth consecutive out in this over is kind of a Leg Before Wicket fiasco. I left the Triangle out a different door than I entered and as a result ran south instead of east so my final one may be there but I will have to check some other time. One good thing, though, is the route took me to The Old Bush for a pub trifecta.
After this loop through West Bromwich in which no benchmarks or other triangulation points were accessible (a lot of refurb in de buurt), I uploaded the only photo of the day. A google query of homeboy (at least he was for a few days after birth) Phil Lynott cross referenced with search terms such as ‘benchmark’ or ‘pointing’ returns rich material but nothing I can really crowbar into a TrigPointing post — but I really like this sculpture so here is something else that fits in the blog.
Not a big Thin Lizzy fan, me, but I love their version of Whisky In The Jar (which apparently Mr Lynott hated). I, on the other hand, despise The Boys Are Back In Town. Then, there’s Jailbreak…”Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak, somewhere in this town.” Perhaps, and just hear me out on this, it might be at the jail? {Credit for this joke may be claimed by any number of Twitter Twats who use it without such attribution but I first heard it from one of Todd McBride‘s friends back in high school around 1979.}
There was an especially faint one at Walsall Street between York and Commercial on the side of an industrial building. Just down from this I got a clearer CM at the bridge over the canal:
Looking in vain for one at a canal bridge a short ways down, I found this derelict cargo crane:
Climbing the cut-free bridge, I found that the crane also had its own little wharf:
Of course, I was heading to a pub but I made a slight loop around to Raby Street to bag this nice one on the corner of #83:
Refreshed from the pint, the last one was on the corner of Steelhouse Lane and Jenner Street:
I caught the tram at The Royal tram stop and noticed a building — that I hadn’t really noticed before — was no longer there. Not as paradoxical as it sounds since what I really noticed were the neatly stacked bricks being recalimed from it.
I made a morning loop while waiting for the security gates to open at work — I can get in before 8 but the alarms are a pain in the ass to turn off. There were potentially 13 Cut Marks, Poles, and Rivets to find in front of the monstrously large houses along the way in the posh bit of Edgbaston; but, most, as you see, were Not Found (probably destroyed when the walls with integrated security systems replaced the old fortifications).
I had seen the Pritchatt’s Road mark from the bus a few weeks ago but the turn onto Somerset Road held only promise.
Up Farquhar I found one closer to the gate of #10 than it was supposed to be and, since the benchtop was nowhere near to horizontal, I reckon the wall had been rebuilt at some point.
The electrical substation is locked up and though it would be a simple fence-hop to access the structure the authorities take The Grid fairly seriously and I didn’t really fancy explaining my trespassing.
But, it was a pretty morning and I made the most of the other finds. About a hundred meters down from the BOOBS graffito, the nursing mother statue at the Women’s Hospital soaked in the sunrise.
I’m still hunting the meaning of LCE Tubular, but I found several of these plates on the older hospital buildings during the final leg of this journey.
I thought this was inaccessible, but Flush Bracket S1402 beckoned me as I passed on a run up to Bristol Road.
One of my favourite old buildings not least for the Art Nouveau relief, I fully expect it to be sold off to developers about 48 hours before it burns to the ground under mysterious circumstances.
Everything was coming up Tiger that day. I hopped off the canal on Tiger Road and a few turns later I was on another Tiger Road ahead of a stop at the Tiger Tavern. Weird.
In fact I had more luck finding these big cats than benchmarks, ostensibly the purpose of this run. I could actually see a bunch of them on houses but they all seemed occupied and no one wants to see a sweaty, middle-aged alcoholic run up on their property and start photographing the building. In most of the other cases I either couldn’t find it because I am unobservant or because the original structure is long gone (one of them was on the gate to a police station that was rebuilt about 10 years ago).
I nearly ran out in front of a cop car crossing to the first of two successes on the day. I have no idea what they made of the spectacle I presented next to them while they waited for the light to change but it crossed my mind that I would get hassled for this in the States. USA! USA!
The mark over at the Tame Bridge Pub should have been a cut at the centre of the bridge but as a reward I got my first PIN! Actually, this is an Environment Agency Bench Mark, but I’ll take it.
Endless British Pub Crawl (Part 3) 
