Category: Posts

What is Walkspace three years on?

Post author By FionaC
Post date 22nd Sep 2023

1 A community and a regional hub

The main benefit of Walkspace – and the reason for starting it – was simply to gather weird walkers together. After attending a walking conference in Plymouth, we figured that between us we probably knew enough people in the Midlands who might be interested in walk-based arts, too. So we made a list and reached out to people across the region.

We’ve had a pretty solid response from that original seed. In three years we grew from three to nearly 50 members (now back down to 30 committed members) and formed a central hub for anyone interested in walking as a creative practice.

Our community of creative walkers hailed from all kinds of backgrounds, reflecting the universal act of walking (or moving, since not everyone walks). There are, in the group, artists, writers, poets, photographers, filmmakers, academics, conservationists, ethnoecologists, horticulturalists, sociologists, journalists, mindfulness teachers, musicians, performers, producers, curators, pavement plant chalkers and long-distance walkers.

All we asked as entry criteria were that members:

live in the West Midlands region (so we’d have a chance to walk together)
use walking in a creative way
share what they were up to with other members

We don’t want there to be a hierarchy. Anyone can run a walk (a Walkspace members walk or a public ‘Erratic’), write for the website, social media or newsletter, pitch ideas to the group, or ask for help, support or collaboration. But for practical reasons, there is a small committee to keep things semi-organised and think about overall direction .

In three years, it’s become a functioning community of quiet lurkers, dip-in-occasionally types and more regular interactors. It blooms into life seasonally with ideas and projects like desert flowers, but also hibernates for days and weeks at a time. And that’s fine.

The point is, we are no longer alone in our various weird walks. We’ve found fish of the same stripe.

2 A place to find collaborators and audience

What’s been interesting to see is the forming of various collaborations. Many of us have now met in person on various members walks or at online member salons where we’ve shared what we’ve been doing walkwise. There’s also a group WhatsApp for everyday chat. Getting a sense of people beyond their member bios has created a lot of connective tissue, inspiration and friendship.

The first time we met up, for example, I vividly remember long-distance walker and artist Daniella Turbin getting out her highlighter criss-crossed OS map on a beer garden picnic table and impressing everyone with her plan to walk in every single kilometre square. We then visited her on her walking art residency at the New Art Gallery Walsall, went on a walk together and virtually tracked her year-long walk around the UK – which was documented via Daniella’s Instagram. In the background, we also acted as an informal online support crew should she need us.

That’s just one journey within Walkspace. There’ve been plenty more examples of mutual support and collaboration happening as a result of Walkspace. For example:

Filmmaker Ben Crawford found a key interviewee in Kate Green for his film From The End of the Road (Ben also roped a few of us into a Dazzle Walk to serve as a visual thread through the film – pictured above).
Interdisciplinary artist Kate Green called out for a team of willing testers for her WalkCreate commission – and so, on a day out to Leominster, we wandered in non-linear ways to understand the challenges facing people with dementia.
Artist …kruse and photographer and mindfulness teacher Laura Babb responded to a call out for walks for Birmingham’s first Urban Tree Festival that I helped organise for a tree charity.
Visual artist Andrew Howe, musician Bethany Kay Hopkins and walking artist Andy Howlett came together on a funded project as Walkspace to celebrate a Dudley nature reserve.
In Parallel Walking, we embarked on a walk-based cultural exchange between Walkspace in Birmingham, UK, and Jalan Gembira collective in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, funded by British Council.
Ultimately, in June this year, we held our first group exhibition, – Walkspace 23 – showcasing the works, walks and creative practices of 20 Walkspace members.

It’s been great to see members joining up and doing their thing – individually, together or even en masse. And, of course, many of these walks and projects are publicly oriented, interacting with other arts orgs, reaching different communities and introducing different ways of walking to a wider audience.

3 A support system and a resource

Walkspace members group walk through Handsworth

Originally we thought Walkspace might become a peer learning platform. And that has happened to some extent, although in informal ways. With many different experience levels, skills and backgrounds in the group, there is usually someone to ask for advice or connections. (Personally I’ve learnt a lot from chatting directly with more experienced artists and been given some very useful feedback and support on my first Arts Council application.)

Members learn ambiently through contributing conversations, walk photos and links on the group chat. And there’s a big social element to the members’ walks (Handsworth stone circle walk and picnic, pictured), where people can practice leading walks in a relaxed environment.

Support can also be practical. We’ve been walk marshals, joined walk experiments and promoted member projects through our social channels. For Megan Henebury’s A Figure Walks, for example, we acted as a safety and support crew as she walked the length of the River Rea IN the River Rea – and also created documentation with Pete Ashton following along with a camera. You can read all the Walkspace posts on this project here.

I also think we’ve supported people to join who might not see themselves in a traditional ‘arts context’ to play a part in the collective. It’s been interesting to read the blog posts of Robson, one of the long-distance walkers in the group, for example. And one day I’ll get up early enough to join the Walkspace member who is secret pavement chalker.

4 A place for artistic development

As a personal example of Walkspace’s value, my experience as part of a collective has been pretty transformational. Before Walkspace I was a walker for health and fitness reasons only, doing my daily 10,000k steps to a soundtrack.

Through Walkspace, I started to develop into a more creative walker: working individually, collaboratively and collectively, personally and publicly, and being mentored through an emerging walking art practice by generous fellow members.

It’s been quite the journey from 2020 to here – from initial walk experiments, to local walk ‘n’ talks, to leading walks, to getting walk commissions, to creating live art walks, to an international walk exchange, to presenting at 4WCoP on how women walk, to being part of the group exhibition. Sometimes I look back in wonder at the projects I’ve been involved in, such as:

Extreme Noticing under Lockdown – a collaborative Walkspace video essay about starting a walking collective during a pandemic.
Night walks – group walks by new moon, full moon and in the snow, tapping into the power of invisibility.
Birmingham Dazzle Walk (pictured) – testing city surveillance with fellow Walkspace member …kruse using the cloak of female invisibility in middle age (counterbalanced by a follow-up collaborative Crone Walk of high visibility).
Stirchley High Street Highlights – a counter-touristic, anti-gentrification walk tour leaflet compiled with Walkspace alumni Pete Ashton (that the local newspaper took a bit too seriously).
Parallel Walking – in which three Walkspace artists and three Indonesian artists explored their motor cities in parallel, resulting in an exhibition and digital zine.

All of these were made possible in no small part due to Walkspace.

5 An opportunity to go on a collective journey

At our our last big online salon we asked what the group has meant to members:

“It’s been amazing – I’ve met someone that is now going into a new collaboration”

“It’s a chance to meet other walking artists and understand the range of practices.

“I value the social walks – a rich experience of walking and talking”

“It’s made me write about not being able to walk, to seize the opportunity to explore that because I’ve been missing something”

“Creating a great community is like tending a garden”

“I like that is has a loose structure but is also fertile ground for collaboration”

“Being part of a cohort is huge, to get to know each other and collaborate – it’s a precious resource”

At our next meet-up, so that we can continue on our collective journey together, we’ll be asking the following question:

Where do we go from here?

The next steps are about to be decided – with our first ‘AGM’ happening this weekend.

We’ve been approached to run walks, to collaborate on projects and to work with more formal organisations on occasion – and yet we are still informal and loose, and that is part of the charm for many of us. As one member put it, Walkspace is “sliding into being an entity, an organisation – and that’s where things get tricky”.

Whatever path we end up taking, it needs to be one that is viable, sustainable and creative for the membership. And one that we decide to walk together.

Find out more

“This is Water” extract – Stourport to Worcester along the Severn Way

Post author By walkspace
Post date 6th Sep 2023

In late-August 2022, I took a walk with my good friend James Glover from Worcester to Stourport-on-Severn. The twelve-mile walk replicated the Saturday bus journey I would take each week as a kid with my mom and my brother to visit my grandparents. A year to the date, I decided I would close the loop by walking in the opposite direction, taking the pathway from the amusement park in Stourport and along the Severn Way in the direction of the city. The following is an extract of a new piece inspired in some part by that walk.

Taking another photo, now, of a sign pointing confidently in the opposite direction to the orange horizon image still on my phone from last year, and to the Bewdley walk I took only two weeks ago. I drop the image into the Walkspace WhatsApp group.

–Stourport to Worcester along the Severn Way.
Dodgy knee has decided to make an appearance but hoping it holds up.

Strike out, buoyed by the returning messages, best wishes and good lucks, from the members of the collective. I have only recently joined and it’s the first time I’ve thrown one of my walks into the chat. I am also flying solo. No James to rely on with his astute way of nudging a narrative out of a landscape, a necklace of interconnected stories and historic points of interest. No Ben either to lean ideas against, emotional ballast against the spectres of the past. I’ll have to do it myself.

Beyond the lock at Stourport, and the first small indication of the crude potential of this walk. A wall, where a series of bricks have been marker pen inked, a kind-of mind map of contemporary conspiracy theory, with accompanying links to YouTube. I take the customary photo and send it on to Ben.

–Good start to the walk, eh?

The Severn rolls its way along to my right, a thick brown soup boiling a watery pathway between two muddy verges. I dip under a canopy of trees, leaving in my wake an old factory which would once have been the operational headquarters of one ‘T. P. Activity Toys’, manufacturers of plastic slides and playhouses and other colourful pre-school play equipment. Now though, the name of this former fun provider is in a state of manic disarray, its erratic pattern of letters arranged along the river facing flank, giving the overall impression of someone having shaken up a bag of Scrabble squares and thrown an indeterminate handful at the wall. ‘Countdown’ for the Late-Capitalist.

Half hour in and I hit the first in a series of caravan parks, but where one might expect to discover flashy, gleaming static units, I find a graveyard of grubby, green and brown cuboids, their axles propped up by a tower of slate grey breeze blocks. The atmosphere of the place is rural-American. Ranch-like. It’s curiously unpeopled, too, like the abnormal pastoral landscape of the walking simulator ‘Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture’. I imagine a golden orb of light drawing me through this awkwardly arranged pop-up village to a site of past memory. Light striking into form. Human. Voices revealing themselves like ghosts in the air. I imagine being treated to some crucial crux point in the narrative, brief, charged, voices becoming light, fading away back into orbic form as Jessica Curry’s soundscape, all cello and oboe and choral verse and soaring, textured emotion transforms the landscape into something other, something peopled in an entirely new sense. I imagine peeling off back to the river’s edge in search of the next trace of the narrative jigsaw, piecing together the ‘what happened?’, the ‘why did everyone leave?’ and the ‘where the fuck did they go?’

There are more macabre tales that could be motioned toward in this place, too. Stories entirely in line with the current, insatiable desire for true crime documentary and podcast serial. I’m not immune to this either, capitulating to the mental ‘what if?’ of this already weird encounter with place. Three or four thrillers start writing themselves in my mind. Detective stories without a detective. Think Claudia Piñeiro in the rural English Midlands. Some sad bod searching for another lost soul. The criminal, the perp, or at the very least, the fingered suspect twitches a mucky net curtain, the ripples of their watch caught for a second by the protagonist, the (non) detective, as they tip-toe through the lush expanse now commandeered by whoever it is that has decided to construct a life here. We all have to get by, somehow? Don’t we?

When it comes to caravans, I perhaps know more than your common-or-garden member of the cos-playing middle-class. The haunted visage of these, now surely decommissioned-for-commercial-use dwellings takes me back to my teenage years, twelve to seventeen, living in a ‘mobile home’ on a retirement park for the over fifty-fives.

–We don’t live in a caravan, okay love?
These are static homes.
They don’t even have wheels.

Mom’s wrong. They do have wheels.

–You can’t take one of these on holiday, can you?

It’s this kind of tangled logic that I’ll spend the best part of the next twenty years attempting to unpick. Still, Matthew and I love this place. The Village of Mobile Homes. We’ve visited a few times, riding around the park on our bikes with the only other kid to have found himself ensconced in what is quite literally a post-work environment. We’ve been running through the fields flanking the (not) caravans, ever since New Year’s Day, nineteen-ninety-eight. The day after the incident in the Stourport branch of ‘Road User’ where my brother, nine-years-old, watched on as our mother’s partner chased some robbers down a busy High Street, diving into the open door of the getaway car like some sort of Midlands-based John McClane. The car accelerated away with this brave (or insane) retail worker sticking out of its side, his now dangling legs resembling those of the guy bitten off the bog by a Tyrannosaurus Rex in Jurassic Park. It all happens in a flash. The body of mom’s beau, spat out into oncoming traffic, and rolling his way down the road like an empty crisp packet. A brave (or insane) attempt to reclaim a hastily snatched handful of Blaupunkt stereos. Matthew’s seen it all through the window of the shop. He’s still holding the plastic shop phone in his hand, responding dutifully to the last instruction he’d been given.

–Call the police.

Pre-Millennium tension. Pre-teen dreams. Pre-the move to the (not) caravan park in Warwickshire. Alex dumps me after a four-week, whirlwind romance. Rumoured interest from Katy, the mad lass who climbed on the school roof for no other reason than why the hell not? Vague interest on my part in Carla, despite my best-mate Matt’s constant warnings that, in his experience, she’s ‘as cold as a fridge’. And definite, confirmed interest from Siobhan who, due to her kindly nature and the fact she’s a tad taller than most of us lads, we have nicknamed ‘The Friendly Giant’. What complicates things here, is that Siobhan is Terri’s cousin. Terri who, here’s a theme, ditched me in the school holidays. Terri, who I’m still raging about, not because I’m particularly damaged emotionally at the age of eleven years old by her sudden uncoupling from our tryst, after all we did only kiss the once, and it wasn’t even really a kiss, more a brief coming together of faces, and after all we did only go for one lousy walk together in the summer holidays, and I stuttered and, uh, stumbled and, uh, spent most of the time unable to unfix my gaze from her, uh, not really any of that but more the fact that, due to getting together with Terri in the last few weeks before the move to big school, it meant that there could be no repeat of last summer’s end-of-school-year-barbeque-cum-disco where I danced all night with Lizzie, the true source of all the light in my life since that memorable day she arrived at the school, in Year One, and was forced to sit next to me and was weirdly confident and canny with a put down and didn’t really seem to like me at all. With Terri now on the scene, an ill-advised ‘yes’ in response to a question I’d never solicited, there was now little chance of finally revealing to Lizzie what, in hindsight, was clear all along. That despite her nascent relationship with Luke, the best footballer in our class, the lad who Keith, the manager of Worcester Juniors, had tried in vain to lure into the squad after he gave up playing for perennial champions Nunnery Wood, using me, a child, as a sort of go-between, to pass messages on to and to woo, and also despite that weird four year period in the mid-nineties where she, Lizzie, and every single girl in the entire fucking world was obsessed with that knobhead Robbie Williams, despite all of this I was still truly, madly, and very much deeply in love with her. And, come to think of it now, I would really like more opportunities to dance with Lizzie at the summer disco to UB40 and go fishing in Laugherne Brook like that time when Luke and the rest of the crew I hang out with (mainly in trees) had gone home, leaving us, Lizzie and I, in worryingly close proximity, crouched on the bank and peering into the crystal clear water, spotting minnows and on the look-out for trout, that time we fished together for around two hours (in memory, let’s be honest it was probably ten minutes) and then walked back to the estate, me to two-forty, her onwards up to the new-builds by Grove Farm.

Night of the disco, and Lizzie runs up to me on the school field as the sun sets in the summer sky. She gives me a big hug and whispers, softly in my ear.

–Me and Luke have just got off.
Four times.

Extract from a story currently titled “This is Water” © Clive Judd 2023. One of four narrative drift works Clive is currently working into book form. All photos © Clive Judd. Follow Clive on Instagram or visit him in his excellent independent bookshop, Voce Books.

Posts Walk Reports Walkspace Erratics

Walk Report: Wandering Rocks 2

Post author By Andy Howlett
Post date 25th Aug 2023

For the second walk in our Wandering Rocks series we visited Birmingham city centre for more glacial boulders, geological curiosities and further examples of “beached heritage”.

The “wandering rocks” of the title refers to the erratic boulders which travelled to Birmingham from Wales on an ice sheet 450,000 years ago. The catalyst for this walk came when I discovered one of these peripatetic stones hiding out in my front garden beside the footpath.

After receiving confirmation of its erraticness from the experts at the Erratics Project, I met up with Robson in the pub and we started plotting the next walk. Taking after the artist Alyson Hallett who travels the world with large stones, we decided to take the garden erratic for a tour of its adopted home city.

Appropriately enough the walk started in the Jewellery Quarter, a place full of precious stones that have travelled from all over the world. Eleven people came to share this tiny chapter of our stone’s journey by taking a turn pulling the cart.

Our first stop was the War Stone which has given its name to the cemetery in which it now resides. An inscription reveals that it once marked the meeting point of the parish boundaries of Birmingham, Aston and Handsworth and that its name is a corruption of “Hoar Stone” meaning boundary stone.

It was an emotional reunion for the War Stone and its smaller cousin who for several millions of years would have been neighbours in the Arenig Mountains.

Next up we visited a flagstone in St Paul’s Square which appears to be a petrified slab of riverbed.

As is often the case on our Erratic walks, many of the best revelations came from our guests. On our visit to the Badger/Heap memorial in Cathedral Square (or “Pigeon Park”), Phil revealed that in funerary architecture a truncated column symbolises a life cut short. The monument commemorates John Heap and William Badger, two stone carvers who were killed by a falling truss during the construction of the Town Hall in 1833. It has since become a focus for International Workers Day to commemorate all workers killed in the workplace.

Curiously this monument isn’t the only “spare part” of the Town Hall to have strayed from its mother building and taken on a new function. In our first Wandering Rocks walk we visited Cannon Hill Park where two of the building’s capitals (the topmost part of a column) enjoy new lives as flowerbed ornaments. How many more architectural “erratics” are out there living incognito? Could you construct an entire building out of them?

In Counter-Tourism: The Handbook Crab Man introduces the concept of “beached heritage” to describe any sort of artefact that has travelled (geographically and/or temporally) and washed up on alien shores.

Birmingham’s most striking example of this is surely the Grazebrook Beam Engine of 1817. Built to the design of local inventor and Steam Age pioneer James Watt, the beam engine was used for blowing blast furnaces at the Grazebrook foundry in Dudley. It’s the largest steam engine ever built in the Birmingham/Black Country area and it remained in operation for close to a century. It now sits on a busy traffic island overlooking the Aston Expressway.

The engine is accessible via pedestrian subways but there is no information board to explain its historical significance. Its mute grandeur speaks volumes enough. Just over the way though is a shiny black plaque commemorating the Matalan development of 2001.

The traffic island itself, Dartmouth Circus, is something of a monument to Birmingham’s motorcity age when the planners reimagined roundabouts as sites for green space and relaxation. In fulfilment of this vision we stopped here for a picnic.

We visited several examples of public art: some for their nomadic history (William Pye’s Peace Sculpture), others for their geological intrigue (Vincent Woropay’s Wattilisk), but perhaps the most pleasing stop of this sort was the one we didn’t plan.

As we passed through Aston University campus one of our party (Phil again) spotted one of John Maine’s Aston Stones which he remembered from his time as a student there. Phil told us how originally there were five of these stones (we only saw one) positioned along two axes in the shape of a cross. They weren’t fastened to the ground though and if several drunk students put their backs into it, the stones could be manoeuvred around the campus in the middle of the night. This earned them the nickname “The Rolling Stones”.

Those other four stones must be out there somewhere. Photo © Brianboru100

Thank you for joining us on this journey, whether that was in person or by screen. If you’d like to join us on future walks and hear about other Walkspace activity please sign up to our mailing list.

For now I shall leave you with an on-theme poem from one of my favourite writers, Joel Lane:

Don't Go

You said, stone dies like us.
They knocked down that pub 
off Deritend, close to the viaduct
that'll be the next thing to go.
I said, but stone doesn't live:

just sweats it day after day,
holding on, but not feeling,
slowly growing a coat of ash
while the lime drips from its pores.
You said, that's not living?

Inspiration Posts

Polaroids, Podcasts and Perambulation: a walking podcast

Post author By walkspace
Post date 17th Aug 2023

Sat in a coffee shop in May, Julia O’Connell, artist and co-artistic director of independent, Coventry-based cross-discipline performance company Theatre Absolute, propositioned me with a brand new commission for their new work Project:Public.

I don’t know about other artists, but when I’m offered a new commission my entire being floods almost instantly with nerves and self-doubt. I tried not to show that. I think you learn to trust that, actually, those feelings are natural, and are your body’s way of protecting itself from something challenging. You hide it and push through so you can grow.

Julia asked me to consider what it is right now that I’m obsessed with, what I can’t stop thinking about, what’s at my core.

Project:Public is their first work post-venue. Coventry City Centre South is a redevelopment plan that has pushed long-term independent businesses out of an entire swathe of the city centre. Julia, with co-artistic director and photographer Chris O’Connell, have been seeking new ways of making work.

I’ve been a member of Walkspace West Midlands for a good couple of years. I once led a walk around central Coventry for some amazing artists from the collective. It’s a rich collective. I took part in the group show at Artefact this year, but other than that, I just don’t seem to get the time to join for any of the fascinating wanders, erratics, adventures and exploratory research trips. I feel a bit rubbish about that but nonetheless, I admire the group and themes, and am endlessly inspired and propelled artistically by the subject matter of creative walking.

In the proposed commission, I found an opportunity to hurtle into creative walking – performative walking – conversational walking – disruptive walking. I hoped the Walkspace group would be proud. [We are! – Ed]

And so, being unable to resist an alliteration, Polaroids, Podcasts and Perambulation was born. Bringing together, as it says on the tin, instant photographs of the city with podcasts recorded whilst perambulating.

We recorded two in July – one walking on Hearsall Common with Julia:

The other walking around Ball Hill and Stoke with Chris:

We used a set of prompts for topics to discuss while talking – moving between many varied themes relating to the arts, from notions of time, pace, pressure, randomness, histories, play, funding, collaboration, getting lost, being reactive, being sensitive, and of course, public space and walking.

They are 47 and 57 minutes long, and published on Soundcloud. You can find all the content – prompts, polaroids and podcasts – at this link. You can also find lists of references of people, things, projects and histories mentioned.

Please do listen and share any thoughts if you’d like to. My email is adelemreed@yahoo.co.uk and my website is here.

Posts Upcoming Events

A walk through Selly Oak’s radical history

Post author By walkspace
Post date 1st Jun 2023

>> Book here to register your place on the walk.

Most Brummies know Selly Oak as a stopping point along the Bristol Road – or did until it was bypassed in 2011. A suburb where University of Birmingham students come to shop and eat, its terraced hinterlands rented out as student housing. And its narrow high street (still) a pinch point for traffic. But for locals and those with a longer memory, there is much, much more to this busy South Birmingham suburb.

Still from ITV news footage in October 1976 of tenants on Harborne Lane blockading the road to protest poor housing conditions and demand new council houses

As part of the walk programme for the Walkspace 23 exhibition, this walk goes below the modern surface of Selly Oak to explore its radical inclinations, and wonder if Selly Oak’s strategic location may be part of the reason.

A poster from late 1977 advertising a benefit gig at the pub (now the Goose at the OVT) to oppose council plans to evict the People’s Centre, a squatted community centre

Josh Allen will lead the walk. Josh is a writer, contemporary historian, and occasional curator, who runs his own walk-based project Walk Midlands – “A guide to day walks in the English Midlands accessible without a car, for walkers interested in all aspects of the region’s people, landscape and history.”

There are limited places on this walk. Further info and booking here.

Inspiration Posts Upcoming Events

Still Walking, book launch, and the search for a lost well

Post author By Andy Howlett
Post date 29th Apr 2023

Author Ben Waddington and photographer Janet Hart. Photo © Roxanna Collins

It’s lining up to be a good summer for walking in Birmingham with the return of Still Walking Festival and the accompanying guidebook “111 Places in Birmingham That You Shouldn’t Miss” by Ben Waddington.

Still Walking has been a big influence on many of us at Walkspace with its unusual and highly creative approach to the walking tour format so we’re very excited for its return over May and June. This edition features Sherlock Holmes, Shibboleths and Satan. Book onto the walks now.

As for the book, here are some words from the publisher:

‘111 Places…’ books are known for side-stepping a city’s best known places, instead highlighting the lesser-known— or wholly overlooked— features that more candidly reveal the city’s identity. Ben takes this approach on his guided tours with Still Walking… walks informed by posing the question ‘what would guided tours look like if they weren’t about sight-seeing?’

The aim of the book was to tell Birmingham’s story through its art, architecture, music, industrial history and cultural diversity; showcasing the city’s triumphs while embracing its gritty side. Accordingly, there’s an intriguing mix of urban oddities, micro-museums, sacred sites, epic landscapes, industrial remnants (bridges, tunnels, engines) and a handful of ‘survivors’ from the pre-Revolution Birmingham.

A few of us went along to the book launch at Ikon gallery earlier in the month and listened to Ben in conversation with Andrew Kulman. The talk was full of fascinating insights but it was especially interesting to hear about all the things that for one reason or another didn’t make it into the book.

The book was several years in the making and in typical Birmingham fashion a number of the places originally due for inclusion were demolished before it went to print. Perhaps we can expect a follow-up volume: “111 Places in Birmingham You Shouldn’t Have Missed”.

Another reason for some places not being included were the difficulties in obtaining permission to photograph private property. Ben told us of the case of the Lady well, “Birmingham’s answer to Leicester’s Richard III car park discovery“.

Buried underneath the car park of the Ibis hotel in Chinatown is a holy well, probably once dedicated to the Virgin Mary, that provided water for domestic and industrial purposes until the mid 19th Century. The site of the well is marked only by a concrete square built into the ceiling above.

Ben enquired to Ibis for permission to photograph the sacred site but found himself entering a Kafka-esque, bureaucratic nightmare, being passed from department to department with no one being able to give him a clear answer. Alas, the Lady well doesn’t feature in the book. This story was just too tantalising though so immediately after the book launch three of us decided to schlep over to the other side of town in the pouring rain to investigate.

The first clue is in the name of the road that the hotel is on: Ladywell Walk. The car park can only be accessed through the hotel reception so we stepped inside, approached the receptionist and said that we had come to see the site of the holy well. Somewhat perplexed by this request, she told us to take a seat while she went to consult a with colleague.

A few minutes later the colleague came and acknowledged the existence of the well but warned us that there wasn’t much to see. She offered us a keycard to get down there and told us about reported ghost sightings associated with the well. Unperturbed we thanked her and made our way down.

This is a taster of the sort of unexpected discoveries and urban adventures that Still Walking and “111 Things…” offer up to the curious city dweller. For the tenth edition of the festival, Still Walking has crafted a special programme of eleven walks inspired by the new guidebook. Head over to the website where you can order a signed copy of the book to collect when you attend any of the walks for the discount price of £12.

Posts Walk Reports Walkspace Erratics

Photos from Winter Solstice sunrise walk

Post author By Andy Howlett
Post date 3rd Jan 2023

For the final Walkspace Erratic of 2022 we visited Bordesley Henge in Birmingham to mark the Winter Solstice. Bordesley Henge is a municipal stone circle situated in Kingston Hill Park and is believed to date back to the 1990s. Six standing stones form a ring on top of a mound, up which a spiral footpath winds its way from the park’s entrance just off the A4540 Middleway. The park is the very definition of a hidden gem and from above it looks like a giant ammonite.

Andy first piloted this walk three years ago in the days before Walkspace but this time around he was joined by Charlie who helped flesh-out the idea with a lamp-lit procession and Yule Altar. Being a sunrise walk we weren’t at all sure how many people to expect but we were delighted to be joined by some friendly faces including the Deer Mother and Holly King.

After making our offerings at the altar and enjoying an impromptu singalong, some of us made our way onto the Grand Union Canal and followed the towpath north to Spaghetti Junction for a cup of tea in Salford Circus – a very different type of stone circle.

We hope you enjoy these pictures from the day and here’s to many more Erratics in 2023. It gets lighter from here!

Photos by Andy Howlett unless otherwise stated

Posts Upcoming Events Walkspace Erratics

Winter Solstice Sunrise Walk

Post author By walkspace
Post date 30th Nov 2022

The Winter Solstice is the midnight of the year: the point at which the sun is furthest away and daylight hours are at their lowest. It’s the shortest day, the longest night but it also marks the beginning of lighter days to come. In the cycle of the year, it’s a time between death and rebirth and so is a time for rest, reflection and dreaming.

The clamour and strain of city living can make it difficult to feel connected to these cosmic cycles but fortunately Birmingham does provide some unorthodox sacred sites that suit the purpose. One of these is the council-commissioned stone circle at Kingston Hill Park in Bordesley Village, believed to date back to the 1990s. This is where we will welcome the sunrise with a silent, lantern-lit procession up the spiral footpath to the stones. Here we will create a Yule altar* and watch the first of the sun’s rays hit the city skyline.

From there we will make our way onto the Grand Union Canal towpath and head north through Saltley towards Gravelly Hill. We’ve already spoken about the significance of Spaghetti Junction as a confluence of confluences and it is here that we shall end our walk with a visit to some very different standing stones: the concrete columns of Salford Circus. If we’re lucky with the weather then the sun will provide us with a natural light show across this mighty colonnade and the surrounding scenery.

Meet Andy and Charlie outside The Rainbow pub on Bordesley High Street at 7:45am, Wednesday 21st December.

The route is three miles long and will likely take upwards of two hours including the procession. For those who just want to come for the sunrise but not the towpath walk you are welcome to do so – we’ll be finished at the Bordesley stones by 8:30. For those carrying on to Spaghetti Junction there are regular trains back from Aston Station and buses into town from Lichfield Road.

The route will mostly be pavement and towpath with some steep and uneven sections. Steps will be avoided. Wear sturdy footwear and wrap up warm. We recommend bringing bottled water and something to snack on. No need to book, just turn up. The walk will go ahead whatever the weather.

*You are welcome to bring a contribution for the Yule altar eg. holly, mistletoe, pinecones, candles etc.

Posts Walk Reports

The Contraption – A tribute to Nicholas Monro 1936 – 2022

Post author By Andy Howlett
Post date 11th Nov 2022

This piece by Andy Howlett was originally written in April 2021 and appeared in Back to the Future, “a forward looking journal about past-futures, modernism, architecture, and town-planning in Birmingham.” Upon learning of the death of the pop-artist sculptor Nicholas Monro it seemed fitting to repost it here in tribute. Every word of it is true and like all great stories it started with a walk…

Anyone who’s seen the film King Rocker will know that for a brief time in the early ‘70s, a giant fibreglass gorilla lorded it over the grounds of the Bull Ring shopping centre in central Birmingham. The previous two decades had seen the city rebuilt from the rubble of World War Two in the image of what was then considered the future: soaring flyovers, concrete monoliths, traffic island beauty spots, heroic multi-storey car parks.

“What Birmingham does today, the world does tomorrow”

King Kong watched over this futurescape from the shadow of the Rotunda, encircled by the rumbling flow of the gyratory new road system.

Guardian Spirit

City (dis)oriented

Eighth Wonder of the World

The mighty Kong’s reign however was short-lived. After six months Birmingham City Council sold him off to a second-hand car dealer down the road at Camp Hill. The “City of the Future” swiftly degenerated into a concrete wilderness: the once radiant surfaces became sullied by petrol fumes, pedestrians came to resent their second-class status, and the much vaunted inner ring-road earned itself the nickname “The Concrete Collar”.

After his stint in second-hand car dealership, King Kong found his way to Scotland, was painted bright pink and displayed in a market, only to be later left abandoned and vandalised in a car park in Penrith.

Fast-forward half a century. It’s a sunny May afternoon in suburban Birmingham, the country is in the grips of a deadly pandemic, and I receive a text from my mum:

“You’ll never believe this but I think I met the sculptor of King Kong on a walk in the Dorset countryside this afternoon!!! Tony and I were out walking and we came across this remote cottage and we couldn’t tell if it was inhabited or derelict. Then we walked round and saw this elderly man working on a strange object in a half covered shed. He said his name was Nicholas and talked a while with Tony about his invention. Then we came across the local farm shop and they said he had been a sculptor. We looked him up when we got back and are pretty sure he is Nicholas Monro and that one of his creations was King Kong!! How amazing is that.”

I look up from my phone and regard the King Rocker poster on my wardrobe door. The great ape returns my gaze through a pair of fiery red orbs.

Fast-forward four months. We are walking along a dusty track through the lush Dorset countryside, the site of a lost medieval village. We don’t know if he’ll be home but I have a printed picture of the Kong statue and a sharpie pen, just in case. Anticipation grows as we descend the gentle valley and proceed through a corridor of foliage. Various farm buildings loom up either side of the path, the immense steel and wooden structures swallowed by ivy.

Then we reach the shed; a sturdy structure of stone and wood with a wavy red-tiled roof. One side is open to the world and the contents spill out onto the weed-ridden yard. The vibe is somewhere between a junkyard and a workshop: upturned wheelbarrows, assemblages of rusted machinery, tripod-mounted sculptures including a spindly figure of wire and bone. Other than a lolling tabby, there’s no one here.

“Hello?”

“Is anyone there?”

“Nicholas?”

We wait with bated breath, the cottage just visible beyond a sprawling garden. We consider knocking but then he emerges from a track beside the shed in a striking purple jumper and matching long sleeve shirt. We’ve interrupted his afternoon glass of wine but we’re a welcome interruption. He remembers Tony and my mum and is delighted to see that this time they’ve brought company: a ragtag audience. He’s even more delighted and not a little astonished to learn that we know who he is. He sees my King Rocker T-shirt and his eyes light up in recognition of his famous simian creation.

The makers of the film had looked into contacting Monro for an interview but couldn’t get an address and were told he lived off-grid, reachable only by payphone. He tells us about the Kong statue’s critical reappraisal in recent years, how it was rescued from the car park, restored to its original condition and displayed in the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, star attraction of the City Sculpture Projects 1972 exhibition. He says he wishes he’d known that we were interested because then he could’ve told us about the show.

I take the printout from my pocket and ask if he could sign it for me. This clearly isn’t a situation he’s familiar with – how should he address it? “Dear” sounds too personal.

“To Andy,

Nicholas Monro”

He takes us into the studio-shed and shows us some of his latest ink drawings: a series of comic-book style scenes based on puns of his own invention: “Here’s looking at Euclid”, “Vermeer to Eternity”. He’s considered approaching the art shop in the nearby market town but hasn’t mustered the courage yet.

He leads us away from the work-desk towards the grand centrepiece: a work-in-progress he refers to as “The Contraption”. A curious apparatus of scaffolding, breezeblocks and bicycle parts, assembled in a radial configuration with a motor at the centre. It’s immediately clear that this is his true passion project, as he excitedly offers to give us a demonstration.

The generator is located in a small outhouse adjacent to the workshop. He disappears behind the door, starts it up and re-emerges with a makeshift control pad. He turns a dial and The Contraption jumps into life, the bicycle wheels rotating around a central axle in a centrifugal motion, gradually picking up speed. We all take a step back.

He’s at pains to stress that this isn’t the finished thing but more like a prototype. He points to a pile of physics textbooks and explains how when he’s got it just right, the component parts will rotate in such a way and at such a velocity that the known laws of physics will break down and The Contraption will defy gravity. Yes, Nicholas Monro is building a flying machine. Once the basic principle has been demonstrated he’s confident that it will revolutionise the aviation industry, put an end to our fossil fuel dependence, and make flying cars a reality.

He says that while he’s done his best with the skills he has, what he really needs is an engineer and some decent kit. He’s contacted the physics departments of different universities to tell of his innovation but none have been willing to take him seriously. “They think I’m a charlatan,” he tells me, “I don’t mind really but given the choice I’d rather be thought of as a fool than a charlatan.”

By now The Contraption has picked up quite a bit of speed and the youngest member of our group asks excitedly, “is it going to fly?” to which Nicholas replies with a chuckle, “no it won’t now but it will someday… because I say it will.” Following the demonstration he bids us farewell and tells us we can come and visit any time we like. We promise we will and continue our walk in the scorching late summer sun.

It’s 2021 now; King Rocker has premiered on Sky Arts to great acclaim and Birmingham tentatively looks ahead to a post-pandemic reality. In a time of such uncertainty, when so much has been lost and so much may never return, it’s comforting to know that somewhere in deepest rural Dorset, a kindly elder is keeping the future alive.

Many thanks to Joseph Lilley at The Holodeck for permission to republish

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Skull Walk 3: Return of the Wandering Dead

Post author By walkspace
Post date 10th Oct 2022

It’s that time of year again. The nights are drawing in, the leaves are falling and the earth quietens as we prepare to enter the dark half of the year. It’s now become a Walkspace tradition to mark this point in the calendar with a Halloween walk around the Stirchley Skull and we hope you can join us.

We created the Stirchley Skull two years ago in the midst of the plague by overlaying an image of a skull onto a map of Stirchley and then walking it into existence under the light of a full moon. We carried jar lanterns to ward off evil spirits and ate soul cakes for sustenance.

A year later our second skull walk was nearly thwarted by an early winter tempest but fortunately the howling gales and horizontal rain were short-lived and the walk was able to go ahead, albeit without the lanterns. Minus the protection of the lanterns we were subjected to many incursions from the Otherworld, this being the time of year when the veil between the physical world and world beyond is at its thinnest. Fortunately we still managed to complete the circuit without losing anyone along the way. Will we be as fortunate this time?

Join us on Monday, October 31st at 7:30pm, outside Stirchley Library on Bournville Lane. This is a gentle circular route lasting no more than 90 minutes with the option of going to the pub after to de-spook. The terrain will mostly be pavement and roads, with a bit of grass and a gravelly track. Prepare for muddy conditions and the first gales of winter. No need to book, just turn up. A number of jar lanterns will be provided, weather permitting, but if you’d like to bring your own please do so.