Bus Runs Route 79 West Brom to Wolverhampton

I’m tellin’ ya, folks, this bus run don’t get no respect.

I went out Saturday intending to finish the 79 route (see Bus Route Runs for details on the project) but an extra, new road on a roundabout and my general dearth wrt sense of direction left me with a little more to pick up on Sunday (18 Feb 2024) so there you have it.

The 79 is Jimi’s most hated AND favourite route as it is the only one he’s been on (he seems to like the bus) but it takes him to the vet. We might try a tram ride together sometime, though, just for the journey.

For me, the 79 is the easiest way to get back to the buurt when laden with groceries in Wednesbury, hardware in Hilltop, or when the weather is shit in central West Brom. So, I’ve never really seen a lot of the sites along the route above Darlaston.

The architecture — industrial, commercial, and residential — changes rapidly all along the path and winter makes it easier to inspect a lot of it. It may be worth revisiting some of it in the summer for comparison.

The map shows the first 9 runs to cover new segments of the route although 2 of the early ones would have been covered by the other 7 easily.

Soho Oak, West Bromwich (kebab)

We were both ill and not at all in the mood to cook and generally bored with our takeaway options. “The Soho Oak smelled great inside when I stopped for a beer a while back…how about them?”

That settled, I spotted the shish kebab wrap in a tandoori roti. Ugly but sublime and bordering on just the mild side of too spicy (like me!). Jackie went for a biryani and it was, from all reports, marvellous, too (but this is a kebab write-up…mission creep is a real thing).

The Prince of Wales, West Bromwich

Pub #2634:

I had hiked the short distance from Trinity Way tram stop to the Prince of Wales to find it empty save for the proprietor and an old Sikh playing video poker listlessly. I settled into my lager and a nature programme featuring some of the weirder members of the marsupials.

The owner seemed bored and started hassling me about what I was doing out. I told him I was hunting Ordnance Survey Bench Marks and rather than any of the more plausible reactions (I expected either, “huh?” or “get the fuck out of my bar!”) he starts telling me where some others are that HE’S spotted. A couple of them I had already logged and some that were, at the time, on my short list.

This world is endlessly strange.

Trig-ity Way

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.

Phil Lynott bust, West Bromwich

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.}

Tiger Trigging

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.

Hawthorns to the House Trigging

This is my second failed attempt at the Pillar in the golf course, which lies about 100m beyond the wall, above. This time, it was a Sunday around 8:15 am but still too late as the greens were crawling with maintenance dudes.

Continuing down the hill from there, I am pretty sure my next mark in the wall is obscured behind all that shrubbery. I opted to turn around here but the cemetery across the road was stunning:

Back up the Birmingham Road across from where Park Lane meets it, I picked off a decent cut mark in an old building:

Then, is was mostly a straight dash down to the High Street and homeward except I new of one intermediate stop to do…

I’ve looked this structure up before but this was my best excuse to prowl around it. It is listed as Arch Lodge on my database (there’s a Rivet on its benchmark) and was one of the gates to Sandwell Hall, a stately pile demolished in 1928, long before the motorway over the house and bisecting this roundabout was even conceived.

This side of the roundabout interior is something like a park and fairly clean largely due to the hazardous crossing. I spotted a fox and several wrens during my short stay.

There were a couple of misses from there and then I hung up the database to focus on building up a sweat before reaching the far end of the street market at St Mike and the Angels Catholic Church.

This was probably the door to the vicar’s lodge, but hiding away behing a rain drain pipe (I almost typed ‘Pope’) is the last Cut Mark of the day.

WE call it “the anaconda” (euphemism mode: on)

The newspapers are calling the beast loose in my neighbourhood a “12 foot yellow python” which I find flattering but it is actually more beige-to-pink.

Oh, hang on…I just watched the video. Honest mistake.

The Spinney, West Bromwich

Pub #2602:

Around the middle of an afterwork run, I popped into the Spinney for some relief from the hill climb. The food smelled wonderful and there must have been 8 large televisions showing the Ashes. All the regulars were bunched up together by the bar while, two tables away, it was as if I were in the place alone.

England was 191 for 2 and Australia were prematurely celebrating a wicket when the ref/ump/whatchacallit called the bowler for overstepping. Not wishing to do the same, I thanked my compadres after drinking up and hauled myself back to the streets…1 for 0 not out, but conceding early.

The Black Cock, The Hop & Barleycorn, The Tower Cinema, and some existing benchmarks

One of the joys of TrigPointing, so far, has been the historical aspect. The databases I use have been transcribed and largely not updated since the Triangulation Point, Flush Bracket, or Cut Mark were originally entered.

The church behind the clock tower is gone and another is obscured by the YMCA tower next to the old cinema site

The Tower Cinema was opened in 1935 (first film was The 39 Steps) at a location that is now a car park near the Carters’ Green Clock Tower. There was a pin — essentially a rivet that served as a reference point for the Ordnance Survey — that came down with the building in the mid-1990s after a name change to ABC Cinema (in 1961) and a function change to bingo hall in 1969 (last film was Hot Millions).

I’m certain the Black Cock pubs I’ve been in were so-called for different reasons

The humorously named Black Cock public house sat just around the corner on Guns Lane but closed for business in 2002 after nearly 150 years. Its first publican raised fighting fowl and had a breed of black cock that the pub was named for. It is now a semidetached house. Someone plastered/screeded over the cut mark in the meantime (should be about a foot above the pavement facing the street near the fence).

The former Hop and Barleycorn pub on Dartmouth Street is a very short walk away, but the cut mark on it was destroyed with the house. It had become a drug squat in the 90s and was finally razed in 2005 ostensibly to make a family home but almost immediately became the Masjid that is there today.

Same trip, I managed to find some ‘good’ condition cut marks, photos at the map markers: