Spirit of place: Jewellery Quarter

I've previously touched on Birmingham's jewellery quarter - in reality a posh way of saying 'the south end of Hockley'. This is a part of the city for which I have an affection: I must be getting old because this is an affection for what it used to be. In my misspent youth, the entry onto the canal bank here was a notorious picking up point - a friend once expressed her incredulity that there should be so many men hanging around there on a Saturday night, & her disbelief that they were looking for sex. Also the canal bank there used to be dark & unfrequented - almost designed as a gay hang out - but all that changed when people once again started living there & the area was cleared up.

You see this gentrification has partly displaced the spirit of place *as I knew it*. The spirit was most apparent at the weekend, when the factories & other businesses were closed. The jewellery quarter is relatively cut off from the rest of the city centre, so it genuinely felt like everyone had just upped & abandoned it. If I had to put my finger on that spirit, it would feel almost like the atmosphere deliberately created in the 1990s Avengers film - a London where there was nobody about ever, & the 60s had never ended. The spirit of the jewellery quarter is more focussed than that, though, on industry, making a living, the work of beautification, it is constantly shifting & changing.

I feel the spirit is best exemplified by the so-called warstone, a lump of felsite stone deposited near where it is now in the last ice age, between 10 & 100000 years ago. Felsite is apparently fine-grained volcanic rock that may or may not incorporate other crystals. I was talking with a witch friend the other day about how crystals do absolutely nothing for me - I get nothing from them, although I do from fossils. Strange then that I get this sense of busyness from the warstone. I had a chat with it while I ate lunch today - it's not restful because there's loads of stuff going on inside it.

The rock is on the edge of Warstone Lane Cemetery, famous for Birmingham's catacombs, that you can't get in nowadays. They felt different today - what struck me when I first went there was the smug bourgeois feel of the graves, a sense of stifling respectability. Today an anguished entity latched on to me straight away. You would not believe the sheer angst of this dead person, already dead over a century. She latched on to me because I could sense her, but she frankly had got stuck in being anguished & wanted & needed to be moved on. I simply told her to move on - it took quite some insistence actually - & she was gone, onto whatever's next.

My lack of fear of, or rather obsession with, graveyards & death was one of the things that should have alerted me to being a witch years ago. In retrospect I was - how I hate this word - 'destined' to be a priest of Hecate, on account of being inexorably drawn into endings & beginnings. Imagine my delight as a very young - but still unaware - witch to find this hymn in the old standard edition of Hymns A & M. Living closer to death, with more fear of it suddenly happening & less ability to prevent it, made the Victorians more matter of fact about death. Now it would probably be considered 'morbid' - at least that's what I got called when I went round happily singing this to myself as a teenager. Death is the ultimate reality that the witch mediates - it's also the one there is least point in trying to avoid. Oh, perhaps I should just comment that this is a *children's* hymn:

Within the churchyard, side by side,

Are many long low graves;

And some have stones set over them,

On some the green grass waves.

Full many a little Christian child,

Woman, and man, lies there;

And we pass near them every time

When we go in to prayer.

They cannot hear our footsteps come,

They do not see us pass;

They cannot feel the warm bright sun

That shines upon the grass.

They do not hear when the great bell

Is ringing overhead;

They cannot rise and come to church

With us, for they are dead.

But we believe a day shall come

When all the dead will rise,

When they who sleep down in the grass,

Will ope again their eyes.

For Christ our Lord was buried once,

He died and rose again,

He conquered death, He left the grave;

And so will Christian men.

So when the friends we love the best

Lie in their churchyard bed,

We must not cry too bitterly

Over the happy dead;

Because, for our dear Savior's sake,

Our sins are all forgiv'n;

And Christians only fall asleep

To wake again in Heav'n.

(http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/w/c/s/wcsbside.htm)

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