As much as I love variety in my walks, I think there’s also something special about the way a place reveals itself slowly to you over repeated journeys.
I’ve been travelling to the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham lately to visit my mum, who has been having an extended stay there. I catch the train to Northfield and then walk through the centre of the old village, long subsumed into the city, and across Victoria Common.
Taking a moment or two along the way to observe my surroundings and snap a few photos on my iPhone has helped slow my mind. Here are some of the results.
This extract of a poem by Casey Bailey is on a wall at University Station. Written when he was Birmingham Poet Laureate in the run-up to the 2022 Commonwealth Games, it's a love letter to his home city. The full version contains two lines that struck a chord with me: 'A place that so many can reach but few can understand / You have to really breathe it in, walk amongst these people'. I feel like these walks are helping me get to know Birmingham better.Not all of Birmingham’s stations have been lavished with investment and poetry: Northfield's wild central platform gives the place an air of abandonment. With Rosemary Terry’s railway sleeper sculptures still just about visible amidst the scrub, it feels less like a busy commuter hub and more like the ruins of an ancient civilisation. Perhaps one where people knew how to make the trains run on time.A mix of grey British weather and abundance of 1960s concrete tends to make Birmingham feel a little drab in the winter months, but it's a different story under blue skies. Even this extension to the old telephone exchange looks striking when the sun comes out.There’s something otherworldly about this corner of Northfield Shopping Centre’s car park – it looms over the edge of the common like an ancient alien structure, its original purpose long forgotten as it’s consumed by the trees.At the hospital, a modern steel-and-glass entrance blurs the boundary between interior and exterior. Patients are wheeled along the corridor, glimpsing the garden beyond – the space where I've sat, read, waited and hoped.
While I was writing this post, my mum’s health deteriorated, and she was transferred to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital to begin palliative care. My strolls through Northfield are at an end, as is her time with us.
‘You have to really breathe it in, walk amongst these people.’ I think that line from Casey Bailey’s poem is good advice for life. Breathe it in. Walk.
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