I left Birmingham back in the early 1960's and for all sorts of reasons have not returned at all until very recently. What on earth can I say? Talk about a stranger in a strange land. Nothing was recognisable. The city and suburbs I knew as a youngster have not only vanished but have disappeared so completely as to leav me doubting whether or not they ever existed.
I came to see where I had grown up. Unfortunately, although I could see me my Gran's house where I was born, my first home in Aston where my parents were placed after being bombed out has apparently long since gone and now lies somewhere under Spaghetti Junction. However the house I grew up in the quite side roads off the Bristol Road in Longbridge is still there. However it is now a security fenced bastion of middle-class insecurity. Where once we neighbourhood kids used to sit on the low walls and chatter there are quite literally security fences and electric gates protecting those within and their shiny cars.
So much for where I lived lets cross the Bristol Road and wander down Tessall Lane to the bridge over the river (Stream) by the railway track and the wild patch of land behind Kalamazoo where we used to watch steam trains as smaller boys and play our first clumsy attempts at tonsil hockey when we got older. What used to be so quiet is now a huge railway station. Presumably to serve the "Orstin" as we used to know the huge car works. But all that is gone replaced by futuristic blocks like the architect had a Lego fetish. Of course I knew Austin or Rover or whatever had gone, I had not expected it to be obliterated.
Hey Ho, off we go to Northfield. In my memory a sleepy town I walked through on my way to St Laurence's School with its awful outside toilets. The Church and the pound with its strange stone still remain. How we all wondered at school did a stone get into so much trouble it had to be locked up! The Northfield I knew was a grubby sort of place but it was just the grime that seemed to be everywhere in those days. It was otherwise well kept and litter free with interesting little shops and a decent sized Woolworths and two pubs, to show it was a place of some importance. In my time I remember a forge where the odd horse was still shod. Now it seems to have all been replaced by a huge centre that strangely seems to actually sell very little. Odd really, what is it for, who does it serve.
OK. I'll add more later if anyone is interested and continue my journey to a city centre which was so unrecognisable I knew not where I was.
