Rea Valley (3): King's Norton to Northfield

Yesterday's moot took the form of a wander round the green men of Birmingham. I could feel the city spirit drawing us in, culminating in us seeing a man in the trunk of a tree in the cathedral churchyard. I was going to post today on the subject of psychic vampirism, revisiting the subject of several recent posts really, & our trip into the hedge inspired me to travel further into the hedge today & make this a What I Did On My Day Off post.
I'm shocked to discover that I haven't done any of the Rea Valley walk since February. Since I lost the route in Cannon Hill Park, today I started off in King's Norton & followed the Rea Valley out of the city through King's Norton Park. That area of the city is one that I don't really know at all, although I like the feel of it. When I came out of the other end of the park I had a drink at a pub called The Camp: clearly a blokey, unpretentious pub for locals that has darts tournaments & things like that. I sat outside & drew a tarot card for the spirit of that place. I got the High Priestess - no surprise really for the way many of the older routes into the city intersect there. The Hebrew letter for the High Priestess means camel & the camel's hump of moisture in reserve for a long journey reflects the kind of knowledge that the High Priestess has. That end of the city is one of the older settlements in Birmingham, & thus has absorbed the vibrations of centuries of human life: it is secure in its in-depth knowledge of all that human living & can reveal its spirit to us in dribs & drabs.
I then went on into the King's Norton nature reserve, where I'd never been before. What struck me there was the grass, & I do mean proper grass left to grown to a reasonable height with all the biodiversity that will also grow when you don't mow the lawn. It is easy for us city-dwellers to forget what grass looks like when it isn't continually trimmed & manicured.
At the other end of the nature reserve you can leave the Rea Valley route in Northfield, as I did because I was getting hungry. This was interesting to me as it showed me a side of Northfield that I'd only heard about before, but never seen. I've repeatedly cattily commented that it's never a good sign when a part of Britain's second city calls itself a village, but when you walk up Church Hill in Northfield towards Northfield centre you pass the old village pound, & St Laurence's, the old village church. Northfield doesn't call itself a village but it was interesting to see the relics of when it was genuinely a village.
Northfield has a strange spirit of place in my humble opinion. What more hits you is how the village thing is counterbalanced by how thoroughly chavvy it is, as seen in this quote from the chav towns website:

If you've ever wanted to see the arse drippings of society, come to crack soaked northfield. Marvel at the site of toothless tattoed chav mums, dressed in black f**kin leggings, hooped earings the size of the london eye, pushing baby Ronaldo in his stroller, the one with the blue and white striped seat that looks like a cheap plastic bag from pound stretcher. Cry into your lap, as you watch her beat him black and blue for throwing an 'eppy. Drop your Jaw in awe, of the thousands of chavs, pouring into the grosvenor shopping centre. Having just collected their dole, they are now off to get a £5 bag of smack to take up to the top level of the car park and get f**ked, before catching the 18 bus to weoley castle, where upon alighting they will enter 'Booze Buster' , rob the place blind, then do a rape on the way home.
Source

I have been forced to attach two different pictures of Northfield to this post to illustrate this dichotomy: the first is of Northfield Manor, another house which formerly belonged to the Cadbury family & until recently was owned & used as accommodation by the University of Birmingham. The other picture is a view of the Grosvenor Shopping Centre in Northfield.
Oh, alright, if you insist I'll try to be more constructive about why this disjointed spirit might be. Northfield is, as it were, somewhere & nowhere. It is a major suburb of Birmingham with its own shopping centre & amenities. On the other hand the main Bristol Road runs straight through it, making it one of those places people go through on their way to somewhere else, in this case Birmingham, which centuries ago surpassed Northfield in size & importance. This contributes to a certain transitoriness in the spirit of place. I feel this would both attract transitory-spirited people & exacerbate any tendency to the short-term in people there. The caricature above of chaotic living will reproduce itself in the populace of a place, just in the nature of the chaotic lifestyle.
There are other examples of transitoriness in the spirit of place: in recent years a bypass has been built to relieve Northfield's chronic traffic congestion, resulting in an even greater feeling of being bypassed by everyone else. A major industry collapsed, in the shape of the Rover factory further out of the city at Longbridge. A long-established industrial centre like that would attract workers who already lived nearby so its collapse would have a major impact on the locals. A less well-known industry associated with Northfield was the mental health industry. In the 19th century the overflow from the City Asylum (at All Saints round the back of the prison in Winson Green) was accommodated at Rubery, about as far out of the city southwards as you can get, & then other hospitals were built in Northfield: the John Connoly Hospital (the last gasp in the 1960s), & Hollymoor Hospital. Hollymoor was actually used for various purposes including a military hospital, & was the centre for the 'Northfield Experiment': a trial of the doomed mental health treatment of insulin coma therapy. The same situation arose as for the Rover employees, & the closure of all three of those hospitals resulted in the same disjointment.
I may seem to be over-egging the cake, by over-emphasising the importance of having a main road running through Northfield & the impact of closures of local industry, both of which are things which have happened & will continue to happen in all sorts of places, but don't forget I'm talking about the spirit of place. My thesis is that places where life goes on in settled patterns for centuries will have a much calmer spirit of place, whereas disjointment & chaos lead to the proliferation of those qualities. The presence of drugs, which may or may not be related to other disjointment, will encourage this chaotic spirit. The example that springs to mind, & which I was reading about this morning (there is literally no subject which can't be dragged into witchcraft, however tenuously) was the influx of heroin from Afghanistan into post-Soviet Russia, culminating in the proliferation of the deadly krokodil amongst those who can't afford heroin. No doubt this is a subject to which I shall return in future posts...
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