Rea Valley Walkway (1) & On Avoiding the Village Thing

This morning I started my other long-felt ambition for this holiday & started walking the Rea Valley Walkway. If you live in Birmingham & don't know where it it, don't waste your time looking on the website. There is a walking Birmingham map which shows the route rather unclearly. But the easiest was to get on it is to find one of its sign posts: it is very well signposted when you find it.
I got onto it from the 11 route between Cotteridge & Hazelwell (you can see signs for it from the bus on both sides of the road). Doing the small bit I did today, you could also get on it at Kings Norton: it goes through both the park & the playing fields.
I was pleased to find that I'd actually already 'done' part of this morning's route, which goes along the canal bank. The picture is of a gorgeous house actually on the canal: nightmare to live in, & that stretch of the canal is prodigiously graffitied so it must be vulnerable to all sorts of naughtiness going on.
The walkway leaves the canal bank here & goes up towards Kings Norton Green, famous for its ancient buildings. I have never been to King's Norton before, & frankly wasn't impressed. Here's the thing: it seems to me that publicly-funded amenities differ greatly in different parts of the city. Strange that. The classic example would be the gorgeous listed Moseley Road baths, which have been out of commission for some years, because they're in such a bad state. Who let them get in such a state: that'll be Birmingham City Council. There are now rumours that the council is not planning on re-opening them at all. That would be fair enough in a cash-strapped environment *if* they hadn't meanwhile demolished an operational baths in Harborne, & built a completely new one. Similarly I went into the library at King's Norton, which while not lavish, was certainly well appointed in contrast to some of the libraries in poorer parts of the city.
One thing Kings Norton & Harborne have in common (don't even get me started on Moseley) in addition to a wealthy populace, is that they call themselves villages. Now you may say, & you would be right, that all cities have grown up from the merging of villages. London is a comparable example, where the different villages have their own atmosphere. However in big brash Birmingham, calling a suburb of the city a 'village' reeks of affectation. The supporters of the village appellation would probably come up with some guff about community. The fact is that in, say, Balsall Heath, people form genuine coherent community/ies. This is how people survive against the shit that life throws at them. That is real community, which is not made by the privileged making artificial community based on road signs, shopping at Waitrose, & farmer's markets. In a bin in Kings Norton I saw an empty Mars drink bottle & the parish magazine: obviously a wild night out in Kings Norton. I got the bus to Cotteridge & thence home, but the next leg of the walk will start in Kings Norton, now I know how to get there on the bus, & go outwards.
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