Spirit of Place: Birmingham in 1965

These are stills from the 1965 film in the Look at Life series called Down Town. It sings the praises of rebuilt towns and cities and particularly can't get enough of Coventry (lol). Such short-sightedness, and a mere four decades later much of what you see here was demolished. Personally I preferred the Bull Ring shown here and had an experience in Manzoni Gardens with a bus driver. I see that I have previously written about the Bull sculptures (one of which you can see in the bottom picture) here.

And finally a classic depiction of Birmingham by Spitting Image, which I know will entertain Inexplicable.

Spirit of Place: By Tram to Wednesbury

Trams aren't a very Birmingham thing. Apart from the obvious implication that the Motor City with its urban motorways would lean towards road transport there is a historic reason for Birmingham's paucity of trams. In the early years of the twentieth century, bus services were run, by law, as private enterprises. Hence the plethora of competing firms. The only exception to this was where a tram route was planned, and then the council cut run a bus service until the tram was up and running. The City of Birmingham Corporation responded to this by producing the most extravagant and complex plan of proposed tram routes possible, thus leaving the road open for them to run the buses themselves.
It therefore seems rather strange that trams are up and running again. The project was plagued by logistic and planning problems from the start and ironically the route literally revives a previous tram route for much of the line (more at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midland_Metro)
Today I felt the need to go to Wednesbury near Walsall. It was in connection with a spell, so obviously the reasons must remain top secret for the present, but suffice to say that the tram was the way to go. To the person of Pagan leanings, Wednesbury is of itself an interesting proposition:
'The substantial remains of a large ditch excavated in St Mary's Road in 2008, following the contours of the hill and predating the Early Medieval period, has been interpreted as part of a hilltop enclosure and possibly the Iron age hillfort long suspected on the site. The first authenticated spelling of the name was Wodensbyri, written in an endorsement on the back of the copy of the will of Wulfric Spot, dated 1004. Wednesbury is one of the few places in England to be named after a pre-Christian deity.
'Wednesbury is one of the oldest parts of the Black Country. The ending "-bury" comes from the old English word "burgh" meaning a hill orbarrow. So "Wednesbury" may mean "Woden's Hill" or "Woden's barrow". It could also mean Woden's fortification, although the former description is often accepted.' (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wednesbury)
To the witch, of course, a trip to Woden's hill means at least a cock of the hat to Woden himself, and I made my little sacrifice as part of my spell. In my limited experience of him Woden presides over the initiatory defending of honour, certainly a theme which has been running through my life!

Spirit of Place: The Bull Ring in the 1960s

What a sense of sadness is brought to my mind by this film! I love the way the brand new 1960s Bull Ring is described so enthusiastically: it is a reminder that we can forget previous generations' aspirations at our peril. It is also a reminder that 1960s Birmingham was once brand new and squeaky clean.
Oh, I went into the pub shown on the film once. More than that I'm not saying.

Spirit of Place: A Brummy Ghost Story

My reduced posting here has been because of the amount of energy taken up by my new job. So in a seasonal spirit is a brief ghost story about the room which illustrates this post.
The room in question is in Birmingham Council House and is the office of the Lord Mayor. It is a naturally a frequent occurrence for Council House workers to enter the room and find the mayor sitting behind the desk. What makes this a ghost story is that there are repeated tales of them finding Joseph Chamberlain (died 1915) sitting in the mayoral desk chair!
In fact that is a busy corner of the city for ghosts. In addition to the workmen killed in an industrial accent and Charles Dickens, who haunt the Town Hall, visible through the mayor's window, there are rumours of a new ghost. It is that of a man in a 1960s-style suit, holding a plan, and looking around in a puzzled way for his library.
If I don't get to post again this week, a happy Winterval to all my readers!

The Lady will Provide

...and that is one of the ways the witch knows things are moving, when things inexplicably start falling into place. For example in the Acocks Green area of the city (the accent is on the long A, not the O, by the way) today, I not only found the box set of a TV series I've been looking for for ages, but also found my manager (pictured) staring at me in a charity shop window! Of course I had to buy it (the woman closed the zip saying he wouldn't be able to speak, but I closed it again, saying that silence is required) & then some pins from Wilko for the next part. This really is a gift from the universe, a case of more opportunities coming along if you make use if them.

Incidentally, apart from the inane grin & idiotic expression, I hadn't realised how like Zippy my manager is in personality, making it all about her & wanting to be friends, while ignoring other people's views & actual misconduct completely:

'...Zippy claims to be the best at whatever is being discussed, and always claims to be right. He loves to eat sweets, sing songs and tell his favourite jokes, and always has to be the centre of attention. For example, the other characters might be having a discussion, when Zippy would shout: "But I don't want to talk, I want to sing! I'm very good at singing! [starts singing] I'm a little teapot short and stout, here's my handle and here's my spout..."

'Due to his frequently loud behaviour and silly voice getting him into all sorts of trouble, other characters in Rainbow occasionally zip his mouth shut, rendering him unable to talk. On at least one occasion he unzips himself, although he appears unable to do so on most occasions.' (Source

Spirit of Place: A Moat in Birmingham?

Many of the bus routes from the south of the city decant on Moat Lane by St Martin's church, the perfect stop if you're going to the various markets. The name may seem strange, since Brum isn't the obvious place to find a moat, but of course it refers to the moat of the original manor house of the de Bermingham family, & true to form this has provided me with one of those little puzzles which then fall together nicely.

I love the modern slang use of manor to indicate your patch or area where you hold authority, a use it is given by both police & criminals, & ironically very close to the original meaning of the word. The site of the manor is variously given as on the current wholesale markets site or the Moat Lane car park site. The first picture shows the manor with its moat on the 1731 map of the city (assuming the pictures come out in order). The strange thing was that I couldn't find a picture of the manor anywhere online, & eventually found one in the book referenced below.

The manor was demolished & the moat filled in in 1815, & the then Smithfield market was built on the site. The succeeding pictures are two views of Moat Lane looking increasingly recognisable as today's view, & of a commemorative plaque on the previous fish market. Next comes a scanned newspaper cutting of the cleared site in 1973, in preparation for the building of the wholesale market. I have read that stones were removed from the site to Weoley Castle, which were thought either to be from the manor itself or the retaining wall of the moat, but no archaeological investigation was done. Finally, a picture of the market presently on the site, itself mooted for redevelopment in the near future.

(Picture credits: http://mydigbeth.co.uk/historic-digbeth/

http://birminghamhistory.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=27596

Simon Buteux: Beneath the Bull Ring. Brewin Books, Studley, 2003.)

Spirit of Place: Another altered sign & 'Rentboys' Corner'

I was ashamed, after my last post on altered street names, to find on Flickr that another street name, which is both near two of the previous ones & near my broom parking, is fairly routinely altered. I'm also ashamed to say I've never seen it altered to Bent St, & in fact made a point of wandering up & down it today, only to find all the signs say Kent St. I particularly like the older-style one, with another little sign added underneath for the addition of a new-fangled postcode.

Kent St is probably best known for being the site of the original municipal baths - I mean of the sort where you would actually go for a bath & would take your washing there too. In more recent days it forms part of the gay 'village', although I would venture to comment that the alteration doesn't compare to (C)anal St in Manchester.

It has also been host to the famous (at least in gay circles) Rentboys' Corner, which the internet has sadly left abandoned. That said, imagine my joy, when looking online for reminiscences of the corner, to find the escort whose picture adorns this post. It was taken in the courtyard of the building I live in!

Update 21/2/23 Very very gratified that some twat has flagged this post to Blogger as containing adult content. 

(Image credit: https://m.flickr.com/#/photos/ell-r-brown/6929454479/in/search_QM_q_IS_kent+street+birmingham_AND_ss_IS_2_AND_prefs_photos_IS_1_AND_mt_IS_all_AND_w_IS_all and https://mobile.sleepyboy.com/uk/midlands/gay-escort/Jamie20)

Spirit of Place: Altered Street Names

The Hedge is a pervading theme of this blog, & thus also of my witchcraft & life. By it I mean the particular setting of the witch - I suppose it needn't be a geographical location, it could be a time or group, for example - which both forms her & is worked on by her in a spirit of reciprocity.

These spirit of place posts tend to refer to a particular spirit of a particular place. In this case, while there are things which seem to be unique to the Birmingham spirit (for example elsewhere a suburb of a city will usually be homogeneous, while in Brum often one end reclines in the lap of luxury & the other rots in squalor) this one surely isn't unique.

It's just that these three examples tickle the Hound no end. I was delighted to pass along Fore St recently & discover the council have given up on the battle & replaced the sign with one where the words are closer together so that there isn't room to write 'skin' in between.

I've never seen the Rea St sign with additions, which indicates the battle of cleaning up after the vandals persists, as it does with Inge St. The only trouble is - you've guessed it - these three streets are now permanently their alternative names to my mind!

(Image sources: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tonyworrall/2952923152/ and http://flickr.com/groups/545366@n20/pool)

What I expect from the universe

Hedges need work

I was somewhat mystified the other day, when overhearing a conversation in a shop about how a man upset an observant Moslem by telling him he didn't believe in any god at all, to wonder how I would answer the question, 'Do you believe in God?' Not conventionally, is how I usually answer. But in reality my answer should be something more along the lines of, I don't believe, I know! While I don't buy the usual approach which is called fundamentalism among witches, which is a very literal understanding of the foundation myth of Wicca, I am really very fundamentalist about other things. The reason for this is that I know for the magic to happen, what is happening in my mind has to be identical with reality as I understand it. For example, I know for a fact that the ancient gods and goddesses were and are powers in the world. They are amongst other powers, which would include myself. I probably don't understand them in a terribly traditional way, but as powers which become entities in measure to how we acknowledge them. I wouldn't want to imply that the divinities are only humans' creations, but that the powers they represent are everywhere in the world and take a form or egregore which is frequently culture-specific. They are amongst all sorts of other powers, some of which are visible, some of which are known to our culture. I don't call myself a pagan, mainly because the pagan community irritates me intensely and I wouldn't want to be associated with many of the sort of people who call themselves pagan, but I suppose I am really. Divinity is initiated or recognised whenever anyone acknowledges one of these powers in the universe. 

Not only do we acknowledge them, but we come into relationship, or covenant with these powers, and this is where I tend to become very fundamentalist. I will not negotiate on the things I am about to say, because if I begin to cast any doubt on them at all, I break the covenant with the powers. The help that one needs will always appear when one needs it. That is a major one. For example, in the past seven months of being between homes, it is remarkable how often the exact amount of money I needed to pay a bill has appeared out of nowhere. The most recent case is that the returned deposit from the flat I was renting has been exactly enough to pay the electrician for needed work on the flat I have bought.

This is the sign that the witch is in right relationship with her hedge. I'm established in a very witchy hedge, of both personal (I used to go cruising around here years ago) and historical significance: it is round the corner in Gooch Street that the city of Birmingham started when the tribe of Beorma set up camp on the banks of the river Rea. Another sign for me is that the homeless people are getting to know me. I asked a witch friend recently why homeless people always greet me, and she said that it was because they recognise something in me, which she defined as a detachment from worldly things. I wouldn't phrase it that way, myself, but surely if you are reduced to being literally dependent on the street, that is about as close to the kind of relationship with the hedge I am talking about. There is one homeless man who has started saying 'God bless you', when he walks past me, and another wishes me a good day. They recognise there is a witch among them, my relationship to the hedge, and know that they are greeting a priest and witch (even if they wouldn't use those terms.

'Come on, universe, look after your witch,' has been my 'prayer' over the past seven months, and the universe has come up with the goods. Of course obligations come with the privilege of demanding that the universe looks after you, and true to form I'm a shit magnet still. But ones power grows as it is used, and sure enough, my boss curse has come to fruition. The boss I cursed is on his last legs in the business (he did something that was really very short-sighted for an executive and has ended up with egg on his face). My manager is on her way out: my observation is the work sphere is that things usually get worse before they get better. My prediction there is that my manager has obviously been explaining her ineffectual posturing to her superiors as indicating that her staff are unmanageable. What will happen next is a new manager will come in who will see the real situation. But that is on its way.

And how do I know? It is inconceivable that it could be any other way. This isn't a Christmas present list, this is the interaction of the powers of the universe. And we just have to… expect. 

Witch Quandaries and Freud's desk

I don't do clutter, myself. I find I clean more & get less stressed if there isn't loads of Stuff hanging around. What I do collect, though, is what I like to call Weird Shit. I always have either been attracted to, or attracted to myself, objects with what I suppose you would call a bent towards humanity's search for connection. As a child I had a museum of these things in my bedroom, & I remember reading somewhere about scarabs & badly wanting one. I once flatly refused to leave a craft fair without a statue of Shiva. My adult interests obviously appeared in me fully-formed at an early age.

This isn't in itself the cause of my quandary, which is actually that today my collection of Weird Shit has overflowed the shelf allocated to it! I'm not going to throw anything out, just let it carry on for now & see what happens. I want it to remain a collection of things significant to me rather than just random hoarding. I'm delighted to see that I'm in great company doing this; the witch's wide-ranging & (so to speak) often iconoclastic search for inspiration & connection was also carried on by the father of psychoanalysis:

'What you realise, standing in Freud's study, is that his theory is rooted in his feeling for the entire history of art and culture. The anniversary exhibition draws attention to a singular fact: whenever Freud sat down to write he was confronted by statues covering his desk.

'Freud's collection is truly staggering. He acquired hundreds of antiquities, including fragments of Roman fresco paintings, a Roman portrait sculpture and several parts of mummy cases. The cultural legacy of Egypt, Greece and Rome filled his waking hours; no wonder it filled his sleeping ones, too.' (http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2006/may/09/1)

I'm also pleased to find HR bought his antiquities from dealers. In the poor man's version, my stuff tends to come from charity shops; things demand to be bought when the time is right.

'The Study is also filled with antiquities from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Orient. Freud visited many archaeological sites (though not Egypt) but most of the collection was acquired from dealers in Vienna. He confessed that his passion for collecting was second in intensity only to his addiction to cigars. Yet the importance of the collection is also evident in Freud's use of archaeology as a metaphor for psychoanalysis. One example of this is Freud's explanation to a patient that conscious material 'wears away' while what is unconscious is relatively unchanging: "I illustrated my remarks by pointing to the antique objects about my room. They were, in fact, I said, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation.' (http://www.freud.org.uk/about/house/)

My sense that this act is different from the building of altars, which have a more specifically devotional or ritual purpose is heightened by the discovery of the book about Hinduism & psychoanalysis. On the other hand to the witch, for whom a major preoccupation is the crossing of traditional boundaries between sacred & secular, there may not be that much difference.

Pictures include (I can't guarantee they'll appear in this order) my weird shit shelf, Freud's desk & an installation at his house (credit: Freud museum website), & credit is needed to OUP India. The final picture is a collection of objects found the mud of the Thames by mudlarkers (presumably thrown into the river for ritual purposes, but another interesting example of the hedge taking & returning) - I've lost the source I'm afraid, but as usual will be glad to reference/remove if anyone asks.

Spirit of Place: Birmingham Central Library

It looks as if the demolition is actually happening now: the shops in Paradise Forum are closed, & there is an air of activity around the place. I planned this as one of the picture-heavy posts I sometimes do - in fact I've done a related one on Paradise Place - but I'm ashamed to say that while I normally try to be scrupulous about sources, all of the pictures used here are from various sources on the internet. I have been collecting them for years & have not made a record of where I got them, so please do contact me (using the contact form on this blog) if I've inadvertently used something of yours. In addition to the pictures I did have a few things to say, but I'll have to confess that wikipedia have done a perfectly good summary of the background to this post:

'Birmingham Central Library was the main public library in Birmingham, England from 1974 until 2013. For a time the largest non-national library in Europe,[1] it closed on 29 June 2013 and was replaced with the Library of Birmingham. The existing building is due to be demolished in January 2015 after 41 years, as part of the redevelopment of Paradise Circus by Argent Group.[2] Designed by architect, John Madin in the brutalist style, the library was part of an ambitious development project by Birmingham City Council to create a civic centre on its new Inner Ring Road system; however due to economic reasons significant parts of the masterplan were not completed and quality was reduced on materials as an economic measure. Two previous libraries occupied the adjacent site before Madin's library opened in 1974. The previous library was opened in 1883 and was designed by John Henry Chamberlain featuring a tall clerestoried reading room, this was demolished in 1974 after the new library had opened.
Despite the original vision not being fully implemented the library has gained architectural praise as an icon of British Brutalism with its stark use of concrete, bold geometry, inverted ziggurat sculptural form and monumental scale. Its style was seen at the time as a symbol of social progressivism.[3] Based on this, English Heritage applied and failed twice for the building to gain listed status. However, due to strong opposition from Birmingham City Council the building gained immunity from listing until 2016.' (Source which also has a history of the various libraries over the years, a detailed description of the never-fully-executed plan & the presently-under-demolition building).
Of course this is a witchcraft blog, so the point of this is really the spirit of place & how that spirit both affects people & is contributed to by those people's actions.
There are a number of things that leap to the attention in this tale of civic extravagance & wanton waste.
The first is an apparently simple statement that the new Library of Birmingham is actually the *fourth* municipally-owned principle library in Birmingham in a period around 160 years. One of these four was destroyed in a fire, but since then there has been an unending cry of 'we need a new library'. Think the Library of Birmingham is the last gasp? No way. It is a Birmingham thing, the relentless expansion, demolition, rebuilding. The pace has probably slowed down somewhat because there is less money around than there is, so I wouldn't like to put a time scale on this prediction, but this one won't be the last. I feel this one may be less vulnerable to the need for continually-expanding book storage, since major economies have had to be made to build this one & the council is cash-strapped across the board. Rather the Library of Birmingham will be vulnerable to the mistakes that have been made in building it (it's very fancy, but I doubt it's resilient), equipping it (whoever heard of a library where you can't access the stack) & the financial situation of the whole world. Birmingham City Council have a great track record of neglecting landmark buildings to the point where there is no return & maintenance is always an earlt financial casualty.
The second thing that leaps to the eye is that there is a great history of plans that have not been executed. The reality is that the central library site as it has been from 1974 & particularly since the forum was filled in, has not at all been what was planned. The building is additionally not what was planned - the council's cheapening use of concrete has made it an eyesore. Madin's architecture is largely vanishing from the city - it is wildly unfashionable, & his brutalist masterpiece was misunderstood & ill-treated from the start. In places where the original colour of orange nylon carpet remains, what made the council think that purple paint would be a good colour for the walls? Again, the council's lack of maintenance made the building worse - it was tatty, escalators didn't work towards the end, it was dark, tables were graffitied, & so on. Concrete is perhaps the world's highest-maintenance building material. The original atrium was abused by being filled in (admittedly it was a planning mistake). The central library was a grand dream that was never executed properly & then doomed by forty years of municipal ill-treatment. If anyone in the planning department reads this, please don't commission these white elephants that you can't or won't maintain.
The third thing that springs to the eye is how much the central library is loved. Without it, there is one fewer landmark building in the city. There has been a campaign to save it. There have even been attempts to list it. But it's clearly been doomed for some time. The conservationists may not understand that it's a Birmingham thing - we demolish all the best (using that word to mean a unique architectural statement) buildings in the city, replace them, then there is the outcry about their loss. So this is the witch's last prediction for today: it will start as soon as the nondescript development with too many shops that will replace it is up & running, but there will be cries afterwards that it should have been saved.
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