Preview to Perry Barr

 Ann Leonard sent us lots of information about our selected place, Perry Barr:

Perry Barr is home to the
Birchfield Harriers - The UK's Premier Athletics Club
www.birchfieldharriers.net

More about Perry Barr here:
Perry - History of Birmingham placenames

Perry Barr was the northern half of the ancient parish of Handsworth lying on rising ground north-east of the River Tame; the other half, confusingly also known as Handsworth, lies south-west of the river. The boundaries at the north of the parish was marked by ancient roads: Queslett Road, the Chester Road, College Road to its junction with Kingstanding Road. From there the boundary followed the line of the Roman Icknield Street down to Hockley Brook.

Perry Bridge, popularly known as the Zig-Zag Bridge used to take the Aldridge Road across the River Tame. Built in 1709 this is a four-arched packhorse bridge in red sandstone which crosses the river with a span of 15m and a 50m long embankment which raises the roadway above the flood plain. The Roman river crossing was by a ford, perhaps paved, some 200m east of this bridge at Holford and may have been used as the main crossing until medieval times.

 Thanks Ann!

We will be posting a report of our trip to Perry Barr soon!

Our Mystery Destination

We will be visiting Perry Barr for our derive on Friday.

First I picked 15 places from the network that I liked the names of but had never visited.
Alsager
Kidsgrove
Stone
Oakengates
Shifnal
Penkridge
Perry Barr
Lye
Wylde Green
Polesworth
Danzey
Wootton Wawen
Tring
Woburn Sands
Long Buckby

Then I sent a text to Carole to pick a number between 1 and 10.  (She didn't know what I wanted it for.)  She picked 7.

I counted every seventh number and crossed it off, then continued counting and crossing off the seventh until only one place was left.

Kidsgrove.

BUT - Carole said this is where her partner's parents live! Strange coincidence.  So we tried again.  Carole picked 9.

We got Long Buckby.

Only one stop from Northampton, where we will be starting from.  Not much of a train journey.

We thought we would go further afield.

I repeated the exercise, having removed Kidsgrove and Long Buckby.

I got Perry Barr, near Walsall.  Neither of us have been there before.  That is where we will go.

Our Mystery Trip - where shall we go? It's up to YOU!

On 4th March Carole and Jo will be taking a Mystery Trip via rail to a station somewhere on the London Midland Network.  We don't know where we are going to go.  THAT'S UP TO YOU!

We are asking all readers of our blog to vote for where they would like us to go on the network.

You might know one of the places and think we should go, or you might just be intrigued by the name of the place and want us to find out what it's like there.

Please click here to look at the network map.  Choose a place and make your vote by leaving us a comment or emailing us at milesanddacombe@virginmedia.com saying where you would like us to go and why.

We will choose the best idea on Thursday 3rd March, the day before we go, and then we will write a report on the blog of what we found there!

Why are we doing this?  London Midland Network are doing a Great Escape ticket for only £10 for adults and £5 for children anywhere on their network between 19th February and 6th March 2011.  If you also go on a Great Escape, please write to us about your trip too and we will publish it on our blog.  Click here for more details on the Great Escape ticket.

On the Rails

During the Autumn and winter of 2010 I spent a lot of time exploring the delights of the Brampton Valley Way cycle track. It's a great route to cycle for those new to cycling (ie me!) with plenty of scenery and not too many hills. It runs along a former railway line and there is also a stretch of line still run and maintained by Northampton and Lamport Railway which has a team of dedicated volunteers who run the service, bookshop, cafe - you can eat on the station platform or in one of the stationary carriages. The volunteers also repair and maintain the line and restore the rolling stock. Near the entrance to the Brampton Halt and Cycle Track is the Brampton View Care Village.

I've been thinking a lot about the ways we get ourselves from A to B, there are huge and increasing demands on a diminishing energy supply, we have been encouraged to see the future as a seamless progression, societies moving forward, further, faster, higher. But what if the future requires us to visit older forms of transportation - could we go back? Is this why I am constantly drawn to canals, rails and pathways? What if cycling becomes necessity rather than recreation. My father remembers travelling from Kennington (with cycles) by train to Witney and then cycling with is father from Witney Station to Bibury to visit his grandparents. He cycled to work before the advent of Ada a converted Ford van (very early type). I remember riding on the crossbar of my dad's bike, on the way to the park in Edmonton - I always felt perfectly safe but he was roundly admonished by our GP for adopting this rather unsafe practice!

Cycling off-road certainly gives you the opportunity to move whilst dreaming - there are pitfalls and hazards, there are walkers, dogs, horses, children, potholes, mud, thorns etc to be mindful of, but there is enough space for everyone. There are benches and secluded lay-bys which seem to appear just at the places they are most needed. I wish I'd started cycling sooner, before carpel tunnel and bad circulation set in. Getting all of me the right temperature for the best possible ride, especially in the colder weather, has been a challenge.

The route is punctuated by a series of way markers and the journey breaks into neat segments

Rolling stock awaiting restoration. Photos by Andrew Rushton

The weather this winter has also made me think more about how we move through the country, I don't love driving in snow having once been caught in a white out. It took me 8 hrs to complete a journey which would normally take 20 minutes and I hated every minute. The promise of more snow before Christmas encouraged me to abandon driving and to take the train to Cheltenham to visit a friend from Canada. Things took more time, there were several changes, but it was all smooth. On the train from Birmingham to Cheltenham the conductor went and got me a coffee from the trolley detained several carriages up - a small friendly thing which brightened the journey. The trees in passing fields were laden with great balls of mistletoe, perfect, sculptural tangles against the greyed out skies.

The year's ending seemed to be full of recurring motifs - station platforms and rail networks

Bicycles

The collision of new and old architectural details on station platforms

The sense of travelling through rather than traveling across

The weather reports were amazingly accurate and just as forecast, the snow arrived in Cheltenham on the morning of my departure, taxis weren't running so there was a hurried scramble to catch a bus to the station, then a train home whilst they were still running. By the time I reached Derby all signs of snow had disappeared, there were many conversations on the train between people in various parts of the country trying to get to London for parties or family gatherings, now held up in traffic jams and snow drifts. My friend's journey to London by coach was much more hazardous, the snow was falling thickly, conditions were treacherous, there were delays and detours and we were all keeping everything crossed that her plane from Heathrow to Canada would get her back to her family in time for Christmas. It did - many others weren't so lucky.

26th December 2010, back at Brampton Halt,

on foot, snow having become crystalline particles,

crunching underfoot, bitterly cold,

staggeringly beautiful

Frost forests captured on static carriage windows

remnants of the breath of excited children

after all the mince pies and Santa Specials had

rolled on for another year

Icicles and rust

hold-ups and signal failures

Mysterious Deer prints

and frozen blooms

lay scattered across the snow.

Punctuated by Cycles

In October 2009 I was given an hour slot on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square as part of Anthony Gormley’s One & Other, a year on and the book of the project was being launched at the Wellcome Collection

I was curious to see some of the other people who had taken part and the Wellcome Collection had intrigued me for some time so decided to make a day of it. 2010 was further year of reclamation & excavation for me – reclaiming things I had loved doing but somehow lost the knack of and excavating, well, myself. One of the things I’d lost the knack of was getting to London to see plays, exhibitions, meet friends, walking through the changing cityscape and exploring. There is something wonderful about having a day to fill your mind and heart with the industry and creativity to be found in a busy city and the day couldn’t have been better, bright with just a slight edge on the air.

There has been much press coverage given to the rise in obesity and until a year ago, I had fallen into that category, I had lost the joy in movement and the fun of dressing up. At the moment, I’m still a work in progress but I’m on the way to renewed fitness and one of the things that helped has been taking up cycling. Londoners have also caught the cycling bug, perhaps I was in the frame of mind to notice, but my walk that day did seem to be punctuated by bicycles.

A grid of shadow, an island of rest

By road & rail

A fragmentation

A gathering

I really wanted to walk across the floor covered with hand painted ceramic sunflower seeds in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, I wanted to feel them falling through my fingers, but alas, the floor was cordoned off. They were worried about the dust, the danger to people's lungs but I'm sure it would have been far too tempting for far too many people - could you resist scooping them up and carrying them off? They were very beautiful and highly desirable. The security guard told me that the seeds had been weighed and that Ai Weiwei knew exactly how many should be there, I imagine that it must be hard to picture such a sea as a number - The Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei

Containment

Captives

Almost abandoned

Tryst

We are all brief pinpoints of light

It's underneath our feet

A couple of things coalesced for me last week.  More maps, walking, networks...
 
On Monday I had a great time walking around Snibston and finding the footpaths that lead in and out of the site.  (There is now a Facebook page for the Transform project at Snibston.)

I also met with Nick at the museum, who was fantastic and spent lots of time showing me the maps of the mining seams and how they had been mapped from the mid 1800s until the 1980s, a period of almost 150 years of mining in the area.

Walking back through the fields I had this astonishing sense of the mapped tunnels beneath my feet, layer upon layer of seams cut through the earth, like the floors of a building inverted.

On the maps you can see that the mining seams are absolutely vast, stretching out underneath the town and neighbouring villages.

The maps themselves are beautiful, and incredibly complex.  Spiderwebs of tunnels that radiate out, the drawn lines mapped on top of other maps of the surface - the underneath layered on top, a very strange sense of parallel worlds that exist simultaneously in the same place.

Lines and networks stretch out everywhere, below and above ground.

A couple of days later I attended the New Research Trajectories event in Nottingham.  Bringing together research students from across the region, the event had a small audience who were also participants in exploring Nottingham on a walk, where we  encountered and took part in art presentations and happenings in unusual places.  (There is a great write-up and photos of the event on Heather Connelly's blog, scroll down to NEW RESEARCH TRAJECTORIES - Navigation in the City and Online Space event, Nottingham, 15th December.)

I met Jackie Calderwood who has done some interesting work on exploring spaces and walking.  She led us in an exercise on "Clean Language", asking each other questions in a set format which revealed deep levels of thought about our own research interests as well as producing extremely concise words or short poems.

We had to write our results on a sticker and also use colour in a grid pattern to express our research interests.  We then had to find a place to "disseminate" our stickers.

We visited the incredible Nottingham tunnels, we also experienced work in an old theatre and finished in a room above the Surface Gallery currently being used as a LAB for an artists' collective, where they served us an excellent minestrone soup!

My disseminated sticker ended up with the words "It's underneath your feet".  The colours on the grid represented the natural and the urban, reflecting how suddenly, by walking, you can cross from a predominantly urban area into a green stretch of land and countryside.  I placed my sticker on the bottom of a scaffolding pole, a place being refurbished which, for me, made it a transitional space.

Lots of connections with my walk at Snibston.  And a very fascinating day.

The 2010 Social Networking Map

A humorous map of social networks by Flowtown, including the Sea of Personal Information and the Rising Island of Google Buzz.  I particularly like the island of Youtube which can be found in the Sea of Desperation!


Click here to see the whole map