by Dennis » Thu Oct 22, 2009 12:22 pm
My thanks to San and the Team. Right then, let's go. This is the first of, I hope, a series in which a middle-aged exile - me - revisits the Black Country to find out what's still there and what's not. And so much has gone lately that it's fast becoming a heady mix of archaeology and Proust sorry, I used to teach French! What I mean is the way childhood places trigger vivid memories and emotions.
My usual route takes me in an arc from Halesowen through Dudley to West Bromwich and Smethwick. This time I'm crossing the imagined Hagley Road border with Birmingham at the Warley Odeon, now equally imaginary, since the magnificent white-tiled Egyptian style 1930s cinema and later 1960s Top Rank bowling alley where I used to meet my mates from Oldbury Grammar (including Martin Elliott, who later took that Tennis Girl poster photo, and Mick Aston, now of C4's Time Team) has vanished, replaced by an outstandingly nondescript office block. Onwards and upwards, into Quinton, past the parish church where our music teacher Mr Nicholas was organist and where there were good dances in the church hall back then, and past that most recent victim of Pub Demolition Virus, the immense and colourful King's Highway, why didn't I take a picture of it while I still could? (Story of my life.) At least the picture house is still there, the Cinema with Strange Names "the Danilo, the Essoldo, the Quinton Classic, currently the Reel Cinema [sic] scene of many a chaste (and brief) encounter in my youth. But all of this small-scale human stuff soon gives way to the grandest natural spectacle the area has to offer, the magnificent view as you tumble over the rim of Mucklows Hill and begin that fabulous descent into Halesowen, which I used to attempt on bike. In front of you are the twin hills of Clent, beyond is the obelisk on Wychbury Hill (a wooded Iron Age fort, full of bluebells in spring, and haunted (OK, another time...), distant ranges like the Clee Hills, Cannock, Great Barr, and of course Rowley graced with its elegant concrete radio mast (not).
Even the bottom of Mucklows doesn't disappoint, there's still at least one genuine factory chimney, at Walter Somers, I think, am I alone in missing them? Where have all the chimneys gone, especially the very old short square ones? and the non-existent station and railway line of my childhood that ran out past the Blue Bird toffee factory at Hunnington and in the other direction towards the Old Hill tunnel (don't get me started). I get a frisson every time I (don't) cross it.
Our first stop will be Haden Hill Park.