Day 1

Objective for the day: to avoid Orwell’s descriptive mistake, what Raymond Willliams calls, ‘Class … described mainly in terms of differences and snobberies in accent, clothes, tastes, furnishing, food.’

With this in mind we take an early train to Coventry. I feel ill, my lungs like a couple of bags of wet cement. We leave London as the sun rises weakly, achieving such an oddly precise departure that we ride the train back into the night briefly, Watford looking strangely like a city underwater.

Coventry city centre offers more terrain than your average and acres more space, indeed the city centre is all space, a mouth with all the teeth removed. It is strangely dead at 8am on a Monday morning. The city centre is pawnbrokers, estate agents, amusement arcades and ‘Peeping Tom News’ where a giant plastic helicopter bleeds out the sound of children’s laughter.

There’s a big collection of model cars in the window of Peeping Tom’s branded DAYS GONE, some sort of fresh joke at the expense of Coventry’s decaying automotive industry, still tragically betraying an attachment.

As if to further hurry the region’s industry into the past we soon come across the Transport Museum and possibly the most ludicrous piece of public art ever conceived. It looks like the city’s varicose veins on show, is too half-arsed even to contemplate here and we decide to move on to the next Coventry automotive landmark: the bus station.

We take the bus into Birmingham. Ted wants to do some shopping but we yomp through the city centre, through familiar asymmetric haircuts and out to the Birmingham – Fazely canal. It’s amazing how quickly the city disgorges you of its modern canalside apartment blocks and spits you out into the more satisfying world of Victoriana. The city’s modern façade is thus revealed as shallow.

Within minutes we are beneath overblown brick arches and peering into derelict ports where the factories meet the canal. Our progress is swift but after two miles we decide the view from the sunken canal is too restricted and escape up and onto an embankment.

There are views into yards where men shove containers around with heavy machinery; there is a digger, dug in high and moving on a pile of assorted dirt and waste. Everything is still very quiet considering the city here seems busy breaking things down/finishing things; the ultramarine canal lends the whole an unusual stillness.

Rabone Lane

This all changes as we approach Rabone Lane. Ted gets some great shots here as we try to work out the source of the noise which is basically a jolly green giant metal mincer over about an acre, chewing up car parts and old fridge parts and piles of filing cabinets.

Orwell has been accused of ‘an aestheticist sensationalism of the sordid’ and we need to be careful not to give in to this temptation here. It’s fair to ask why Ted and I are happy to discover industry on our walk even if it is a little scrappy and the answer seems to lie in the fact that a reassuringly public (noisy) mixed-use landscape belies a mixed economy long since consigned to the tip, has a certain societal honesty.

This sort of ragged spectacle has a novel and satisfying beauty for people living in cities where it’s often hard to make out upon what basis exactly those cities exist.

Further up Rabone Lane the brand names signify only to welders, a world of tatty low-rise units with men creeping around in dark yards staring at long objects in shrink-wrap. At Rabone Lane and Engine Street we suddenly find ourselves at an intersection Ian Sinclair would be proud of. Signs indicate: CENTRE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AWARENESS; MUSCLE MOVEMENT GYM; POTATOES AND ONIONS.

We eventually get out of Rabone Lane, pass the defunct sweat-shops and Probation Service buildings and out into Smethwick proper, to the Sikh temples and travel agents (Amritzar, Bangkok, Tehran) and our first residential section. Orwell writes of ‘the usual villa-civilization’ and there are square miles of it here, all the way to our end-point at Oldbury. This feels stultifying after the industrial areas and not even a few double-locked Transits on front lawns or the odd DIY CCTV system diverts us from our march.

We seem to see people for the first time as we edge towards the old Albright and Wilson factory at Langley Park, pensioners moving slowly away from the pubs and lanky teenagers texting at bus stops. This area is one you see down into as you speed along the raised M5 and I always wanted to encounter it on foot, the chemical chimneys and factory towns. We bungle a proper examination however as the rain begins to come down and we decide to make for our accommodation.

We finish for the day schlepping up the Wolverhampton Road searching for our Travelodge.

All Images © Ted Allen 2010