For this month’s Halloween-themed Erratic we invite you to walk the Stirchley Skull with us. We created the skull last year by overlaying a map of Stirchley with a spooky skull and then walking it into existence on Halloween night. We were necessarily limited to six people due to plague restrictions but this time we hope a few more of you will be able to join us.
Halloween is a time when the veil between this world and the spirit world is at its thinnest and for one night only the spirits of the departed may return to walk the earth. It’s possible that some demons may get through too so for protection we recommend walking with a lantern. A limited number of jar lanterns will be provided on the night but please feel free to bring your own if you prefer. We shall also be providing home-made soul cakes, tasty baked treats said to contain the souls of Christians trapped in Purgatory.
This gentle but chilling walk will start at 7:30pm, Sunday 31st October, outside Stirchley Library. As long as we don’t lose anyone to the spirit world along the way then it shouldn’t last longer than 90 minutes. The terrain will mostly be pavement and roads, with a bit of grass and a gravelly track. Prepare for muddy conditions and incursions from the Otherworld. It’s a circular (or skull-ular) route finishing back at the library, at which point you’re free to leave or come with us to the pub to de-spook.
Although the Erratic walks are free to attend, booking in advance lets us know what sorts of numbers to expect and also makes it easier for us to communicate any changes or announcements.
On Sunday 22nd August we launched our new series of public walks with In Search of the Brumphalos, a journey to find the heart of Birmingham. The walk was devised and lead by Walkspace members Andy Howlett and Robson and was inspired by an article in The Guardian which revealed the precise geometric centres of the UK’s 10 largest cities.
There were seventeen of us on the day and we visited various sites that might be considered the centre of the city, some obvious, some a bit more esoteric, before finishing at the mathematically calculated “real” centre which turned out to be on a residential street in Duddeston.
Inspired by Greek mythology we carried a specially made “Brumphalos” stone with us to mark the spot. The original Omphalos (meaning “navel”) is a sacred stone in Delphi, believed to have been placed there by Zeus to mark the centre of the ancient world. Our Brumphalos was created by visual arts duo Hipkiss and Graney and participants on the walk took it in turns to carry it in pairs in a concealed crate. The stone was only revealed once we reached our destination, at which point we carefully placed it on a bed of ivy behind a railing where it shall remain until it is reclaimed by the earth.
We wanted to celebrate this overlooked landmark, its construction created the Motorway system and it is vast. We spent two years meeting up in Birmingham (we live in Edinburgh & Sussex respectively) and explored the site on foot throughout the seasons. We both grew up in the Midlands and Spaghetti Junction was part of our childhoods.
What we found was two Junctions. Beneath concrete superstructure lies an older, darker junction ,a network of rail line, river, canals and foot/cycle paths intersected by feral undergrowth.
The Junction is part of a wider series examining places of significance throughout England. We are working on a project looking at the Thames Estuary and in the future we want to look at the border with Scotland.
About the Artists
Emily Inglis and Rachel Owens go on walks and make art; their creative collaboration is based on a thirty year friendship and the interplay of tensions and class differences contained within it.
After the success of the first Walkspace Erratic last month, we’re continuing this series of public walks with a visit to Solihull where Walkspace member …kruse will be helping us to find balance.
The equinoxes are a time when the amount of sunlight and darkness in the day is equal. Can we use this time as an invitation to balance our own lives and find some equanimity to carry us through the long haul of winter towards the Spring Equinox?
This walk will leave from outside Solihull Station at 6:30pm, Tuesday 21stSeptember* and will take around 1.5 hours. We will walk from the station to a local wildlife area, home to all sorts of creatures, including reed buntings, owls and buzzards. The walk will finish back at the station.
Although the Erratic walks are free to attend, booking in advance lets us know what sorts of numbers to expect and also makes it easier for us to communicate any changes or announcements.
We are pleased to announce a new series of public events: The Walkspace Erratics. Once a month we will meet up to explore together in interesting ways and everyone is welcome. Although led by Walkspace members, an Erratic is less a guided tour in the traditional sense, more a testing ground for ambulatory antics.
We’re kicking off the series with In Search of the Brumphalos, a meander around Birmingham city centre attempting to locate the midpoint of this sprawling metropolis. Does a city have a heart? A navel? A nucleus? How do you measure it? We’ll be considering these questions and visiting some of the contenders – some obvious, some less so. We’ll be finishing up at the precise geometric centre of the city as determined by science… and it may not be where you expect it to be.
The original Omphalos stone at Delphi, Greece
According to Greek mythology, Zeus attempted to locate the centre of the earth by launching two eagles simultaneously from opposite ends of the world. At the point where their paths crossed, Zeus placed a stone called the Omphalos (meaning “navel”) to mark the sacred site. In the same spirit we shall be carrying a Brumphalos stone (courtesy of Hipkiss & Graney) for the duration of the walk and we shall place it at the appropriate spot.
We shall be walking at a gentle pace with multiple stops and the total route will be just over two miles. The terrain will mostly be pavement, possibly with a few steps. We don’t want to give away the final destination but the area is well served by public transport should you need to dash off. If you have some time however we’ll likely find a nice pub to retire to afterwards.
Where?
Meet Walkspace members Andy Howlett and Robson by the fountain at Chamberlain Square, Birmingham City Centre, B3 3DQ
Although the Erratic walks are free to attend, booking in advance lets us know what sorts of numbers to expect and also makes it easier for us to communicate any changes or announcements.
What does walking mean to you? I guess, seeing as how you are reading this, walking is something you enjoy. I wonder why? What is it that you like about it? I wish you could tell me.
For me, walking is powerful medicine. Walking is what humans are designed to do and those of us who can do it will reap many physical benefits from it. Walking is also medicine for my mind and very probably for your mind too. Walking helps us think, improves our brain function, teaches us to be more alert and aware of our surroundings. But most of all, walking is medicine for my soul. I walk to enter my church.
My church is the land. I enjoy walking best in wild places, where that connection to the land and the other non-human people in it is vivid and strong. But even in the city and sometimes on agricultural land I can find that connection and take enormous joy in being surrounded by green, living things, especially trees. Trees are the pillars that hold up my church.
Have you ever planted and nurtured a tree? I hope you have because it is a wonderful thing to do. When we moved to our present house our long suburban garden was nothing but grass and a concrete path to a broken shed. Birds whizzed over our green desert but never stayed. So I planted two apple trees, a quince and three maples. The squirrels planted an oak and two hazels and the birds planted (deposited really) three hawthorns and came to visit (one year we counted thirty different species of bird here). The maples I grew from seed and they are now, at 11 or so years old, beautiful and tall young saplings. The apples and quince are also beautiful and give lovely fruit and the wild, squirrel-planted oak is a joy to watch growing. I hope it will become a mighty tree, but as we are only renting, I do wonder if it will make it.
But think of it, to watch the birth and growing of beings that might live two hundred, three hundred, maybe even as much as nine hundred years! To stand taller than a being that one day will be taller than your house, to see how the trunk and spreading branches begin their first tentative growth. It’s an honor.
In my church there are many cathedrals. Living temples. One might be a stand of beautiful beech on an old long-barrow, another might be a row of elegant limes on a city street, yet another might be a single ancient yew in a churchyard or deep in a wood. When I stand among these fully grown, mighty beings I am moved to spontaneous prayer, a deep joy and lifting of my soul. Only English cultural taboo at ‘making an exhibition of myself,’ stops me from kneeling or prostrating at these arboreal cathedrals, but it’s what I want to do. I am in awe of their age, of their form, that they are harbour and home to countless non-human beings, of their importance in the living cycle of Earth, of their deep-rootedness.
I love their many different shapes, leaf forms, leaf colours, blossoms, fruit and nuts. I love drawing their shapes with my eyes. I am grateful they are here in the city, bringing the church even into the street, car park, industrial estate.
So when Fiona Cullinan asked me if I wanted to make a contribution to the Urban Tree Festival I knew I had to do something that combined walking medicine with the church of trees. A Pilgrimage to the Trees is a set of instructions, a one page printable zine, that invites you to walk out of your door and go find a tree to admire and praise. The instructions in A Pilgrimage to the Trees ask you to observe some common things any urban walker is likely to encounter and use those things to determine how the walk will unfold. How these instructions work mean that every walk you do using them will take you to a different place and hopefully to a different tree.
I have included a short poem in the zine that you can read to the tree as an offering of thanks (if you share my embarrassment of doing odd things in public the poem can be read silently. The trees will know you appreciate them anyway). And one day, if you are walking in a park or wood and come across a stout red haired druid person face down in front of a tree, pass quietly by. It’s only me saying my prayers.
For the past several years I’ve been working on a feature-length essay-film about Birmingham Central Library and the death of Modernism. The film is called Paradise Lost, History in the Unmaking and it could be described as a psychogeographical detective story in which I investigate the ruins of yesterday’s future in an effort to understand the forces that shape a city. If this sounds like your sort of thing then book your ticket to the online premiere now! The event is on May 24th as part of Flatpack Festival and is followed by a Q&A hosted by Christopher Beanland, author of Concrete Concept.
In an interview with Flatpack I talk about the film’s themes and give some insight into the creative process, including the central role that walking has played throughout.
Paradise Lost is essentially a feature-length video stroll. It’s structured like a walk, in that it sets out without a clear sense of a destination, and it meanders a bit and discoveries are made almost by accident. Bit by bit the story is pieced together and hopefully it all resolves into something satisfying by the end.
I arrive to see Andy walking from the side of Cocks Moors Woods Leisure centre. I know he is nostalgic for this place after visiting as a child.
Along the Alcester Road, over the bridge, past the Horseshoe pub and left onto the canal.
Andy comes this way on his bike but hasn’t looked at the boat yard before. Just as I mention that people live there, an inhabitant of the boat steps out and looks up. Perhaps the landlord of the Horseshoe pub that is being renovated? That or a pirate. Kids play on the piratical climbing frame in the pub’s play area and know more than their older counterparts of what lies beyond.
I interrogate Andy on where he has been cycling and it transpires that the other end of our walk is near where he grew up. Armed with this useful information I slide him down a muddy slope onto Cocks Moors Woods golf course. A stressful prospect for me as I am a nervous rule breaker.
I see my second butterfly of the day and am overjoyed. Brown with colourful spots – I think it is a painted lady showing off her freshly healed tatts. But later I learn it is probably too early for that sort of thing. Yesterday, I saw my first bumblebee of the year.
I hear a thwack! and eight… or maybe one and a half minutes later, a golf ball plonks down in front of us. I kick it absentmindedly before turning to see its owner. They are walking towards us – the golfers are attacking! How did that ball spend so long in the air? We barely make it out alive but there’s a bunch of club wielders on our opposite side. Flanked! I watch in dread as one of them hits the ball right in our direction…but then Andy points out a little egret.
The myth of the golf ball who transforms into an egret is a great one and sings praise to the resilience of the little bird. It mingles with some crows like ancient warrior monks and out of the tree pops a magpie! It finally dawns on me that a magpie is the lovechild of an egret and a crow. How naïve I’ve been all these years.
We come to what seems deceptively like a country road. As we slip through a hole in the metal fence (courtesy of a renegade angle grinder) I am wary of a dog walking family, but my hypervigilance is shattered as I say ‘Hello,’ and realise they are waiting to enter the golf course in a calm and seemingly well-rehearsed manner.
We cross the narrow brick bridge over the stream into Chinn Brook Nature Reserve. Two joggers go past, one struggling less than the other.
The sun is bright, bright, bright and the trees are budding.
Andy tells how his film about Birmingham’s lost concrete library is developing to be shown at this year’s Flatpack Festival and I’m excited to see it. This is where our existing nostalgia converges into a walking theme of nostalgia for things we’ve never known.
Andy asks if this brook has any link to Carl Chinn. I don’t think so, but I hate to assume. I mention the rap I’m writing which features Carl Chinn serving as a plot link between someone’s cuddly dick and Swingamajig festival via the Peaky Blinders. It’s for a drag act at ‘Valley of the Kings’, the informal night I run. Andy asks about it – little does he know I will later send him a poster featuring eight dangly testicles hanging out of a chastity belt – but what is life if not made up of these wondrous surprises.
We walk some more, through a green alleyway where a lady is wearing a full-on protective mask. It feels like we are in the Russian film ‘Stalker’ and she knows that we should be throwing a sheet tied to a stone before proceeding into unknown territory.
We duck into an overgrown pathway where two dogs are admiring the first flush of ramsons. I have previously seen something exciting and cooing in these parts and am hoping it wasn’t a mirage. We squelch towards the houses that back onto this park and discover a batch of brown and white pigeons in a cage! They must belong to neighbours of the birds I am taking Andy to see. It would appear that pigeon fanciers are abundant in these parts.
Squelching forwards, a cage towers above us and we hear the purring of white pigeons roosting behind barricades and barbed wire. As I point them out, a big stick with what looks like a bin bag, thrusts up and hits the lumbering cage. The birds erupt high into the bright, blue sky and we are in a cloud of neon purple and pink as the surprising flappers circle above us. Flashes of intense colour nestled under their wings. We realise the stick must be part of a giant automaton that whacks the coop whenever someone steps over a trigger beam or panel, we should probably start throwing a rock with a hanky ahead of us.
It’s not the first time today that we will look up to nature at its most bizarre.
We watch the pigeons for a long time. Eight… or maybe one and a half minutes later, we emerge into a large field, Andy points to a stream and says – that must be Chinn Brook. I am confused then say “Yes”.
This happens again at the end of the walk which, funnily enough, might be the moment Andy realises that I am perpetually perplexed by shifting memories. Andy marvels at what a funny part of the body it is for a brook to be named after. I miss the humour of this as I try to remember if the nearby Haunch Brook, that looks like a bent leg, is actually named after a leg or not.
Anyway, I take him over to Trittiford Mill Pool to see the lonely bar-headed goose and the tundra geese. I tell him my fantastic story about how that bar headed goose must be an escaped convict and is the world’s highest- flying animal reaching 7000m. I refer him to the video on the BBC website of someone slow clapping a goose in an oxygen mask as it flies into a wind tunnel. Quite miraculous.
We stand and look at the geese and the gothically-beautiful, tufted ducks with their blue bills and are profoundly and simultaneously moved to start snacking. Andy has a nature bar which I suppose helps him adapt to his environment whereas I have some rich tea biscuits in a plastic poo bag.
Now we enter the most exciting part of the walk – if this were a graph we would be soaring up to the top edge of the paper.
It is the marshy reed bed formed from what I think is the River Cole and I am excitedly looking for the heron and little egret I’ve seen hanging out together recently.
Only slight disappointment to see there is nothing…BUT WAIT – two hulking masses almost too slow to be flying, lurch overhead with dangly legs like spatulas. They are circling the reeds! Then behind us – another heron skulking on a tree branch!?! What is happening? Are the parents of a teenage heron coming to check up on it? Is it a grand day in the Birmingham heron calendar? How many herons are in Birmingham? Three in one place seems worryingly excessive if you ask me! If only I’d taken the nature bar when Andy offered – maybe I would take this all a bit more in my stride.
So, we carry on after the absolute mayhem that is lingering herons.
Now we go to a bit I have only visited once before. The underworld of Solihull Lodge, an unkempt mess of fallen tree trunks and river twisting together. It really is beautiful. Then we are in Solihull Lodge and we talk about the nightmarish memories we have of Shirley and Solihull.
I overshoot the moment to turn right for the canal, but Andy exclaims “I KNOW HERE!” He has recognised a bend in the road not at all from eleven metres but with intense clarity from ten metres away! It is a jubilation! We turn around and Andy leads us to the canal.
It is a great walk so far. I am in vaguely unknown territory and congratulating myself for coming this far away from my house and being such a reliable tour guide.
On the canal, Andy talks about Desmond Morris for some reason, and pulls out a notebook with the script from when he reconstructed Desmond’s destroyed surrealist film by reading out the scene overviews. It is fantastic to hear him recite it with dramatic, yet dulcet tones and I expect to trip over an elephant’s skull at any minute.
We dip into some mud on the right of the canal and emerge into a picturesque cemetery. We are nostalgic over the Victorians who would picnic in cemeteries and have a healthier attitude to death. We remember the Victorians with their healthy attitudes to death, taking photos with the corpses of their loved ones.
We loop the church seeing the typical titchy-witchy back door and read the brilliant carved tattoo-like messages in the arch entrance where the benches have been removed. I suppose to prevent anyone from sitting there for free and drinking (maybe this church is sponsored by the local pub). We make a guess that we are in Yardley Wood Cemetery (it turns out we were loitering around Christchurch, the parish church for Yardley Wood).
On leaving, we see a group of teenagers ignoring a sign that has asked anyone who isn’t a mourner or is in a group of friends to stay out of the cemetery. I smile and say, “Imagine growing up hanging out in a cemetery”. Andy supposes they will have a healthy relationship with death.
On that mildly threatening note we climb down a firework strewn slope back to the canal.
Andy tells me about a film called ‘King Rocker’ and I start listing the 1990’s rock pop scene that I know of second- hand. Referencing Club Katusi and the many gig posters from promoter Arthur Tapp and the Catapult Club gigs at the Jug of Ale pub. Andy hasn’t heard any of these bands, so I make a mumbled promise to email them over. A small-town Andy and a big city, gender queer, depressive letting their musical memories converge on the edge of a grimy canal which harbours quite gnarly tree roots, big puffs of moss and some really jumpy fish.
I become violently bored (or maybe overwhelmed with memories and nostalgia for things I haven’t known,) so Andy advises me to stare at the path until I get home.
All I see are pebbles for the rest of the walk. Sometimes we look at the tumbling gardens of the canal side houses as they struggle not to collapse into the canal.
He asks me what I am doing and is absurdified to discover that I followed his advice (I think he is a surrealist trickster).
When we get back, I am knackered because there were a lot of pebbles, but Andy is full of excitement to try and glimpse inside his childhood leisure centre. As we walk around the building, I am overjoyed at the second or third time I have heard the story of the boy who put sugar instead of salt on his chips … wait for the punchline…and then cried as he ate them! Andy spontaneously giggles as he tells it. Childhood mischief bubbling out of his eyes like that poor boy’s hilarious tears. It happened here!
Blacked out windows illuminate the mystery of the dog walkers on Cocks Moors Woods. The golfers I’ve been so afraid of are the local community just moseying onto the field. I didn’t need to be worried but am glad I avoided being clonked on the head at the beginning of our perilous escapade.
I hear a yelp of delight. Where I had seen a wall made of plain old bricks, Andy has spotted a HOLE IN ONE! Reaching up to the tiniest of chinks in the brickwork I see the looping of the water slide. It looks much better than from the inside. The pressure out here is a lot more open, not so moist and the sound is less like a thousand bullets ricocheting off tiny sheets of glass.
Completing the journey by hopping over a fence to look into more abandoned areas, Andy collects his bike. I embark on the remaining fifteen minutes of my walk – absolutely exhausted and trying not to limp. Once safely home, I take a page from Andy’s book, writing our journey down. Without it I wouldn’t have been able to sort what happened out of the crumpled-up mess of memories and anxiety swarming through my brain.
But luckily, I did! If our walk was a graph it would have ended with us flying into the sky with origami herons and pigeons made of neon pink post it notes.
The excellent people at SOUNDkitchen have created another immersive journey of audio encounters, this time exploring the green spaces of the B37 postcode in Solihull. This self-directed walk can be undertaken at any time using the SOUNDwalker app.
“Discover the hidden sounds of bats and underwater life, listen to wind and rain on metal structures, learn to identify different trees and forage for food guided by local people passionate about wildlife.”
New Walkspace member Daniella Turbin has set herself the ambitious target of walking every square of the UK Ordnance Survey Maps. This sixty second animation documents her journey along the course of the River Severn and comprises sixty hand-drawn frames created from photographs taken on a 35mm film camera.
“The River Severn runs right the way from North to South Worcestershire, joining the village of Upper Arley with the town of Tewkesbury. As a walking artist I decided to take this journey by foot and create a video in response to this journey.”
Walkspace 