Spirit of place: Digbeth again

To town today. First to the Zen shop in Digbeth, which prompted me to a further splore of Digbeth, although admittedly this post will stretch the boundaries as far as they can go & further, wandering into Bordesley at one end & almost into Highgate the the other. The reason I went to the Zen shop was I'm having a spot of bother at work, so Stay Away From Me oil to anoint a candle duly purchased, I had a wander. I've been through the bit I explored on the 50 bus loads of times & never got off to have a look.

I essentially went up & down Bradford Street & the roads off it. At one end of it is the former Holy Trinity church, one of the landmarks of Birmingham since you see it from the train as you come in from that side of the city. The first picture is a picture of the doors I took today, & the second picture is of the interior when it was still up & running. It has had a downturn in its fortunes of recent years: after many years as a homeless hostel a bid to convert it to business use was scuppered by the recession, but I was delighted to see that it is secured, the timber painted, CCTV in operation & looking basically sound. This is what wikipedia has to say about it:

The church was built between 1820 and 1822 by the architect Francis Goodwin in the decorated perpendicular gothic style. The church was consecrated on 23 January 1823 by James Cornwallis, 4th Earl Cornwallis the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, and a separate parish was formed in 1864.

The church became the centre of a battle over high church practices introduced by the vicar Richard William Enraght. The vicar was prosecuted in 1880 in a trial which was known nationally as the Bordesley Wafer Case.

The church was closed in 1970 and spent some time as a homeless shelter.

Source: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Trinity_Church,_Bordesley

It is also a Commissioners' or Waterloo church (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissioners'_church).

This slice of the city is known as the Irish quarter, as opposed to the other side of Digbeth I posted about before which would have been purely industrial. Fittingly the next church you come to is St Anne's, a Catholic church. My real motivation for this explore was to continue looking for a possible place to buy a flat in the city centre. I have ruled out that area for two reasons, first I can't think where the natives buy food & second it is a little too Irish for me. What I mean is this: both St Anne's & the sheltered housing over the road had big signs up saying 'Irish in Birmingham'. The housing is even named after a priest. Admittedly Mass was ending as I went past & the people coming out were certainly not the mainly or only Irish population they would have been in the 19th century, admittedly I have some Irish in me on my father's side, but here's the thing. Being Catholic & being Irish are not the same thing. This really annoys me, this identification of a religion with a particular ethnicity, & it makes no sense if you are a missionary religion. Now you may reply that if I was Catholic & went to St Michael's I would find the same identification with being Polish, but here's the difference: I wouldn't understand what was being said because the people would be speaking Polish. Any way, this put me off the idea of living there, it's too much redolent of the Catholic culture of my youth.

The next picture is one I took over a wall of the river Rea just to prove it does flow through Digbeth, then the next two are of my favourite wrecked building at the moment. I love that the building has so much missing & is still standing! The graffiti merely adds to the effect. An Asian lad came up to me while I was photographing it & told me it won't be there much longer as it is, as his uncle's bought it & is going to do it up as a sheesha lounge. This I have to see.

Two pubs next: The White Swan seems to be the posher of the two, at least judging by the sumptuousness of its Victorian interior. I love that one of its walls is covered in roofing felt to keep the damp out after the building next door was demolished, & I know for a fact there was a building there because the plot is now a mass of buddleia, which thrives on the acid lime mortar of old buildings. Not the sort of knowledge I normally aspire to... I went into The Anchor for a drink, which gets high praise from me because when I said I'd take my drink outside because I didn't have a top on the woman said it was OK & I could stay inside. Full marks for not being getrified. A man I've seen around in Bearwood was there. He's known as the lawnmower man & he parked his lawnmower outside.

While in Digbeth I got a closer look at the restored John F Kennedy mosaic, but I think that deserves a separate post on its own.

So what is the spirit of Digbeth I contacted today? If I had to think of one word it would be 'transitory'. So many business & cultural endeavours have begun & ended there. Of course the reason people outside their native land cling to their culture so much is precisely that they don't want to lose their identity, which only happens in a situation where you think you might. I kept thinking that it felt like some of Margery Allingham's later crime novels such as The Tiger in the Smoke, where she successfully creates the threatening feeling of a city. Digbeth is like that, I know the unknown is there I just don't know what it is! And psychically it is strangely quiet: for all the people that have lived there, it feels like they've just moved on without a trace. I walked back into town, & as soon as I left Digbeth, in that car park on rough ground behind Moor Street Station, I could feel the hum of multiple entities again. I am completely at a loss as to why this should be, since where I went today is far from being an abandoned area. All suggestions gratefully received.

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