Glaciermint, every time I revisit Brum I'm put off by the number of trees you see everywhere, not that I dislike trees (quite the reverse), but they really have taken over compared with fifty-odd years ago, when I lived there. As a kid I found the outer suburbs where I lived boring, mainly because the the trees were scrappy, being less than ten years old, and often planted on immense grass verges to decorate the City Engineer's new roads. There were some trees in Handsworth where I was born and where my grandparents lived, but almost nothing in places like Aston, Hockley, Nechells and Spring Hill, all of which I got to know quite well.
I may be a bit cynical, but I do regret that so many decent buildings were knocked down and replaced by grass and oddly sited trees. Trees just didn't belong there.
By comparison, I was walking round Southwark in London this morning, (a bit like Bordesley or Camp Hill in Brum), and was really charmed by the way so many tenement blocks have been either weeded out or refurbished, leaving a few open spaces, which often have huge old plane trees. I think the one saving grace of the London inner city is that roads were not allowed to take over.
But I am a confessed anti-road lobbyist.
Peter