'...the thick rotundity o' the world'

I wake around 2.44 in the morning. Oliver, our grandson, sleeping on his mattress by our bed is coughing. I gently raise him up while he. half-asleep, lets me remake his ruffled sheets.
“Can I have dog back?” he murmurs.
I slide the still warm hot water bottle in its dog-sleeve back beside him and return to sleep. Lin comes to me later and wakes me for a moment
“He’s been coughing” I whisper.
I hear her tending to him as he slumbers. It’s 4.15. I’m not tired so I slip downstairs and go through my morning routine. Turn on the electric water heating, feed the cat, let Oscar in the garden to bark at shadows, make myself a large cup of tea and clean up the cat pee where she’s missed her litter tray again. Loads of time before my train. I send a picture of the defaced Gypsy Memorial in Black Patch Park to Cllr Richard Marshall, Sandwell MBC’s Cabinet Member for Leisure – this after the council’s website with which I’m long registered blanks me third page in when I use it to report graffiti.

Tap tap tap. Stuck! The page sticks on my screen. Phil Crumpton and I are going with Andrew Simon – all members of the Friends of Black Patch Park – to see Cllr Steve Eling, Leader of Sandwell Council on Thursday. Phil and I were looking at the £16.000 clean-up carried out by Sandwell Council staff over the weekend, after yet another extensive bout of commercial scale fly-tipping on the park. It was an opportunity to vent. Cursing like King Lear writ small on 'our' small park's blasted heath. Gradually calming to muttered imprecations

“What is it with these people, they won’t grab the opportunity to bring back people in houses around this park?”
Phil’s my perfect foil, listening and nodding in time to my furious expletive laced grumbles
“Are we to have decades more of tidying and dumping, tidying and dumping, tidying and dumping? Thanking and cursing? Thanking and cursing? Why can the Council not work out a strategy for this area?”

“They’ve placed everything about the Black Patch into a limbo when no-one even looks at the issue – politicians or managers. It’s denial and avoidance. They don’t want to know”

In the centre of Black Patch Park on Monday 20th Feb - after the Council clean-up

“At this meeting I’m not going to start getting into compliments on how swiftly the dumping, once reported in the media (which went national) was cleared …That’s thanking a thief for tidying up after a robbery”

Strippings from a domestic driveway replacement - broken up slabs and tarmac

Littering along the banks of the Hockley Brook

"Will the Leader have read our report and digested its analysis? I doubt it”
“You know I detest being like this. It’s weak. I sound like every other tedious old grumbler”
“No but sitting here in the centre of the Black Patch and having a bout of cursing is good for you and me”
“You and I, Phil!”

The clean up vehicles pushed uncollected rubbish into the remains of the park tennis courts 

We climbed in the van, parked near the Soho Road, leaving Oscar to guard the cab, and had samosas, chai and mango lassi at the London Sweet Centre.
Is there a point where an accumulation of small slights turn into a syndrome, and I become … neurotic? These terms! Neurotic, Grumpy Old Man, dyspeptic dodderer, subject to the 'wiry edge of our fretfulness'.
As I cycle in the dark on Tuesday morning, at the head of our road I see a new resident has concreted his drive to include the pavement and green verge which his several vehicles have turned to tyre-scarred mud.
I enjoy cycling into the city to catch a train in the gloom of a February dawn. I collect passing and passed vehicle registration numbers; see if they'll turn into words or their initials will make phrases. It’s balmy weather. I decide to explore a route into town I’ve not used for near 18 months - through the Jewellery Quarter instead of down Constitution Hill. I get to the foot of Newhall Hill, and of course, the continuing reconstruction of the Old Library site still blocks my old route, and I’m guided into circumlocutions too tedious to detail. I should have known. My grumpiness is amplified by self-blame. To enter the new New Street station by this route I must negotiate new tram lines best crossed at right angles. In the great new Grand Central concourse I realise, looking at the busy timetable boards, that my train is one that stops at many stations on its way, via Northampton, to London. I’d vaguely hoped when playing clever with my bookings that I’d found a bargain deal on a faster train. Will I make my St Pancras connection? In theory 'yes', as there’s half an hour to cycle the few hundred yards from Euston to St Pancras.
I present my ticket to the slot at the barrier machine and it's rejected. Why? I see a Virgin Trains staffman approaching to help, as I gaze down in the manner of an affronted and puzzled old man. As I turn to him he has already turned back two gates.
I heard him mutter “You ignored me”
“I did not”
He returns and activates the gate – a large one - for me and my bicycle.
“Why did it do that?” He ignores me
“But it ignored me”
I pause, deliberately obtuse, between the doors of the opened gate, so he has to notice and shepherd the old man through the lumpish gates.
I glimpse him rolling his eyes to a colleague.
At a coffee shop I wait in a free-floating queue almost immediately jumped by a busy new arrival who’s cheerily greeted by a barista. I wander away, even as I hear another calling after me “Sir?”
At another coffee shop I order a ‘small’ latte. It is really called ‘small’ but the print was so small I squinted to see it. I get my coffee, but no receipt. I could walk away. Why fuss? It means a little bonus for staff. But I’m in grump mode.
“Receipt please!”
What next affront by man, or object, lurks to trigger my vex reflex? On platform 3A my train arrives on time. I walk with my folded bicycle to a convenient door. A red notice on the open button says ‘This door is out of order’.
On the train there’s a copy of a free newspaper. I leaf through three pages of futile print.
“Who reads this stuff?” I glower silently “The subs clocked Socrates’ guide on gossip – “Truthful? Good? Useful?” – and worked on its opposite. Thought. Did Socrates really say that or is it fake news?
Except for books, which seem to be having a slight revival, the only print I read on paper is my gift to myself, the NYRB, published 20 times a year, delivered at discount to my door, stimulating intelligence and understanding in these interesting times.

*** *** ***
In Centenary Square, Birmingham, under major reconstruction 25 years after it was created, a plane tree over a century old, was cut down this morning, as a precaution against a terrorist driving a vehicle into the square.

Black Patch Park - striving to renew a place

The Friends of Black Patch Park meet in the Soho Foundry Pub. Ron Collins, our Chair, on the left.

Stacey takes us through a CAD-CAM plan for Black Patch Park

A few days before Christmas I met up with my friends Andrew Simons and Phil Crumpton to design a tour of Black Patch Park. They, I and others have campaigned to save and restore this park for over ten years. A mix of protest, with lobbying by letter and meetings - plus the economic crisis - saved the place from ill-judged plans to designate this small green space for industrial building. Vital to the campaign has been the historical research and involvement of the Birmingham and Black Country historian, Ted Rudge. As well as collecting many messages and images from people in different parts of the world who recall childhood on the Black Patch, Ted has documented the enduring link between the Black Patch and the Gypsies...

The Loveridges, descendants of those evicted in 1910, campaigning in 2004, to save Black Patch Park.

...forcibly evicted from the area in the early 20th century to create a park, Gypsies whose descendants a century later joined with the Friends to campaign against building on the Black Patch.

This was from the first Wikipedia piece I wrote about the park in 2006. Black Patch Park and the adjoining Merry Hill allotments are 2.5 miles north-west of the centre of Birmingham on the Sandwell side of the city boundary, surrounded north, east and south by railway embankments. One of these carries the West Coast main line that with the A41 and Birmingham Mainline canal are the arteries, old and new, of what is now known as the city’s 'North West Corridor of Regeneration'. In the centre of Black Patch Park, Boundary Brook, which for centuries marked the boundary between Staffordshire and Warwickshire, meets Hockley Brook, which once separated the country towns of Handsworth and Smethwick.
Black Patch is a green pentagonal edged by Foundry Lane to the west and south, Woodburn Road to the north, and Perrott Street and Kitchener Street to the east beyond which, as far as Handsworth New Road, stretches the fertile triangle of Merry Hill Allotments.
Lying amid intersections, boundaries and important routes, Black Patch Park’s twenty plus acres have a special aura. Sometimes this place can be sunny and convivial, at others times, shaded, misty – especially at first light – and a little eerie; one moment a serene and peaceful place full of birdsong and the sound of breeze in the trees, another moment full of human activity and passing trains seemingly on every side.

Of course revisions removed all those unreferenced  'opinions' - quite rightly.  I have not mentioned Kitchener Street which marches along the south west border of the Black Patch. It was once lined by terraced houses. These were demolished in 1980. Kitchener Street was gated in January 2009 under Section 129A of the Highways Act 1980 - a measure intended by Sandwell MBC to prevent fly-tipping along its length.

Kitchener Street in 2008

Phil and Andrew met me near the bridge in the centre of the park. I followed them with pencil and notebook as we discussed suitable places to stop and talk about an aspect of the park...

Philip and Andrew by the bridge at the junction of Boundary and Hockley Brooks - 22 Dec 2013

A WALK AROUND THE BLACK PATCH (first draft)

Notes prepared by Simon Baddeley, Phil Crumpton and Andrew Simon - for the Friends of Black Patch Park on a meeting in the park on Sunday 22 December 2013  to plan a visitors’ tour of the park

1. “Where we stand”, 52° 29.899', -1° 56.650'   The bridge. Our tour starts at the ancient boundaries of Anglo-Saxon lands, where two streams meet...

...Hockley Brook and Boundary Brook. Bridged now; once a ford...in an area where a hundred and fifty years ago  'the earth seems to have been turned inside out.'*

The Black Country Kaulo = a Romany word referring to a common or heath, a term which is said to have originated with the large black waste lands about Birmingham and Staffordshire...in 1830 James Nasmyth, a pioneer of the machine tool industry, walking across the area, wrote...'The earth seems to have been turned inside out. Its entrails are strewn about; nearly the entire surface of the ground is covered with cinder heaps and mounds of scoriae. The coal which has been drawn from below ground is blazing on the surface. The district is crowded with iron furnaces, puddling furnaces, and coal-pit engine furnaces. By day and by night the country is glowing with fire, and the smoke of the ironworks hovers over it. There is a rumbling and clanking of iron forges and rolling mills. Workmen covered with smut, and with fierce white eyes, are seen moving about amongst the glowing iron and the dull thud of forge-hammers.
 Amidst these flaming, smoky, clanging works, I beheld the remains of what had once been happy farmhouses, now ruined and deserted.'

Boundary Brook in summer

2. Black Patch and the Gypsies - "magic hanging in the air" 52° 29.950', -1° 56.673'   On the rough path into the park just off Woodburn Road and opposite Anne Road. Here we speak of the Industrial terrain of the Black Country – high undulating banks of slag, foundry waste. Detritus and oily trickling waterways – and learn about the Gypsies with Black Patch Park and how they were violently evicted from here in order to found Black Patch Park in 1905.

We chat with Michelle and Bridget and families on the Black Patch in June 2011

The story, as told by Ted Rudge, of Queen Henty and her husband. Her curse on anyone who builds on the Black Patch. (Her ghost - scroll down this 2011 blog entry to read an account)

Queen Henty

Bryn Phillips "Queen Henty might put a curse on you"

3. From a place to a limbo, 52° 29.929', -1° 56.821'  Standing on the pavement next to the park just where the Hockley Brook passes under Woodburn Road. What was once a ‘place’ before the industrial revolution and continued as a space between factories for dumping waste and as a Gypsy settlement has, post-industrialisation, become almost a non-place, its surrounding factories mostly derelict and the surrounding population, once its users, decanted from the area. This is the challenge for the future of the Black Patch, on the boundary of two local councils, to be better recognised as a stewarded public space. recalled with nostalgia by people who once lived by, and played in the park.

A place: 1953 Coronation Day on the Black Patch (photo: Alan and Dorothy Smith)

Woodburn Road 2013 ~ limbo

4. The Old Main Entrance to the Black Patch, 52° 29.916', -1° 56.848'  From a position just inside a corner of the park where Woodburn Road meets a bend in Foundry Road. An avenue of mature London Plane trees runs south-east against a background of Grey Poplars lining the Boundary Brook on the other side of the main playing field. This is one of the finest views of a typical late Victorian Park, snowy black and white in winter; a feast of greenery in summer. and...

...if you gaze slightly right from the tree-lined avenue, you glimpse a long mound, intended over a decade ago, to be a BMX track. Just before that, covered by greenery is all that remains of the small cottage that was the home of Mrs.Hill.  Before the cottage was built, this was a camp-site - parking for a vardo in which Hannah Chaplin, née Hill, gave birth, in 1889, to a baby boy.

Charlie Chaplin by Peter Ackroyd, Chatto & Windus: London 2014, p.4

Transcript of a particular letter that Chaplin, who received millions of letters, kept on its own in a locked drawer

Charles Chaplin had his upbringing - a difficult one - in south London, but unless there's credible rebuttal, Smethwick's Black Patch, rather than London's Southwalk, has become the great comedian's strongly rumoured birthplace - 52°29'53.3"N 1°56'49.6"W

Hannah Chaplin, née Hill

The Chaplin birthplace conjecture was artfully fuelled in the TV series Peaky Blinders, series 2, episode 5 (2013) - creator and writer Steven Knight:

"...I was a bookie in Birmingham, then he went to Los Angeles.
You see, Wag is also a Romany Gypsy, as is Chaplin.
But he keeps it a secret.
Chaplin was born on the Black Patch, a Gypsy camp in Birmingham..."

Back to the future 2/8/15: I made a video recording on Sunday 26th July 2015. It shows Ted Rudge, author of Brum Roamin' and Charlie Chaplin's son, Michael Chaplin, visiting Black Patch Park. The clip records a gathering of Gypsies and friends at the bridge in the centre of Black Patch park, where a memorial has been set up, recording the association of Romany with the Black Patch. Michael Chaplin speaks of his belief that his father was born here....

5. The Coppice, 52° 29.811', -1° 56.726'   Having strolled down the SE avenue, we stop where the path divides, to meet an exit into Foundry Lane just before the Soho Triangle of the old LNW Railway or north east along the edge of Boundary Brook. This was a confluence of local population, industrial buildings and parkland; the park ill-tended; the population dispersed; the industry departed. There are views to be restored, easy to see with a selective cutback of shrubbery and windfall saplings, of the Victorian railway viaduct and embankment to the south, old industrial roof tops to the north west and, due east, the distinctive square redbrick tower of Bishop Latimer Community Church.

The coppice

6. Warwickshire triangle 52° 29.879', -1° 56.625'. We stroll north east along the west bank of the Hockley Brook the main playing field on our left, cross the bridge, and enter the overgrown area of the Black Patch bounded by Perrott Street and Kitchener Street where there was a Primary School whose playground markings and concrete turtles still show through brambles and brush, the space so overgrown it is near impossible to see the older tree lines. There’s an entrance to the park off Perrott Street which brings you to a small undulating green sward, isolated from the rest of the Black Patch.

Warwickshire Triangle

7. The Main Playing Field, 52° 29.875', -1° 56.728'  Walk back across the bridge and head south west to the centre of the main playing field. Here is an opportunity to gaze about at the original space that was created by John Nettlefold's Birmingham Playgrounds, Open Spaces and Playing Fields Society to meet the needs of the new industrial population that surrounded the Black Patch. It is an area that is still much used by footballers of the Warley League.

8. Soho Foundry, 52°29'50.46", -1°56'50.94"  Stand beneath the imposing gateway of the Soho Foundry, opposite its eponymous pub where the tour can end with a drink and snack. This place is a prime target on the 1940s German air reconnaissance maps - some of them which we saw in the Avery Historical Museum entered below this gateway – the centre of an industrial hive.

Black Patch Park is closely NW of the 3 parallel roads - Wills, Markby and Preston - 
at the lower right hand corner of the 1940s Luftwaffe reconnaissance photo

It is also where our tour might continue - exploring the remains of the Soho Foundry and, still standing and part-used, the 19th century houses, first to be lit by gas.

Andrew and Phil

Black Patch Park was saved from building, but it remains a blighted and derelict space

*E-mail from Phil Crumpton on 15 Feb 2014 re that place in Black Patch Park: 

Hi, Simon...Mercia before William  Conqueror, Kingdom of Mercia was almost the monopoly of England outside Essex, Wessex, East Anglia and Kent with Sussex.  Western area was mostly Welsh border and still to be tribally fought over.
WHERE BLACK PATCH ( then Handsworth Plain and Pre-'Smithwick' ) ended up as a camping site for Roma was to form a later eastern boundary to pre-date the convergence of Staffordshire; Worcestershire and Warkwickshire.  That's where we (3) stood on the bridge as the brooks joined up in the park.  We have to work on County Boundaries that also differentiate the site from the Norsk Invasion period that saw so much pre-industrial fallowness.  People were more welcome to 'live' at the Patch in those times than they are accommodated, today...!
Let me know what you think.  Watching (videoes) and brushing up on my Smith Wick knowledge over this weekend.  See you on tuesday night at the AGM where I think there's likely to be many hours of lively discussion. Phil.

If I was adding to points on this tour I'd include the way in and out of the area that brings a visitor to Black Patch Park via the Birmingham Mainline Canal towpath, up Avery Road to meet Foundry Road - a hedged path almost a tunnel - 52.495691, -1.947895 - at the bottom of the Avery Road cul-de-sac. It  leads about 100 yards via a couple of kinks to and from the waters of the canal and its towpath back two miles or so eastward into Birmingham or six or seven miles westward to Wolverhampton.

The path to Black Patch Park from the canal

Cycle and walking path from Avery Road to the canal towpath - a Sustrans route

*** *** ***
My longing for Greece is palpable. In days from the cold Adriatic I shall touch the concrete at ugly Igoumenitsa Port. We'll walk a kilometre to the ferries for Corfu.

A view from Ano Korakiana - the ferry from Venice to Igoumenitsa in the centre of the Kerkyra Sea

The Philharmonic Christmas Concert on Sunday, December 29, 2013, is in the church of St. George, in our village στο χωριό μας....
Χριστουγεννιάτικη Συναυλία
Η Χριστουγεννιάτικη συναυλία της Φιλαρμονικής την Κυριακή 29 Δεκεμβρίου 2013, στην εκκλησία του Άη-Γιώργη, στο χωριό μας.

*** *** ***
These last few months have been spent working on the soil of my allotment. I've invested in manure and topsoil and paid someone younger and stronger than I to spread and dig it in.  My neighbouring plots seem neglected, even for winter, after small bursts of enthusiasm earlier in the year...

These allotments are sketches of achievement and shortcoming; aspiration and lethargy. How appropriate that the word ‘plot’ also means 'story'; in mine and my heighbours' cases. biographies - more complicated than the original purpose, which was an allotted piece of ground off which a working man, often an émigré driven from the countryside, could feed his city family. These allotments test more than our craft as gardeners. Standing on my rented ground I gaze hopefully at a mirror.
The shed came free. We got it for the cost of transport via Freecycle. I repainted it, re-roofed it and added a veranda. Inside it's neat. I keep only hand tools there, most hung neatly on hooks. My neighbour's bees, to the west of the shed, are surviving the winter so far. We continue to take out couch grass, removing the spreading white roots and their rhizomes. Some of the plot is covered in black polythene - bringing the couch roots to the surface for elimination. Just to the east of the shed, four builder's bags are composting green waste. There's a water tank beside the shed door - a gift from a neighbour. The whole plot has been deep dug over several times. The collection of middle sized stones is getting larger as these are sifted out and separated from the soil. They're flattish and round, a reminder of how millions of years ago a wide warm river ran through this part of the world, Our five fruit trees have survived another year. We are half through the fourth year of the tenure for which I signed on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments. My plot is just acceptable; just satisfactory; clearly being worked. Having campaigned ten years to prevent the whole area being used for building, this is a small island in which I rejoice.

June 2010 - Adrian Stagg welcomes new gardeners on the opening days of the VJA

Plot 14 in summer 2010 

Oliver in the park

Moment of undiluted content, sharing fallen leaves with my grandson in Handsworth Park; these from our plane trees, broad and brown; heaped up they're good for falling on, being buried amid and shuffling all over the place. By the pond, willow leaves like little blades are strewn, yellow and curved, to be picked up in a bunch and thrown above our heads, spinning as they fall, winning, from our child, shrieks of pleasure and surprise. Down by the water's stoney edge, under the intense guardianship of eye and hand, Oliver sits by the bank as, across the grey city water, we're approached by hopeful fowl - Canada geese, coot, duck, moorhen, two married swans like galleons with their cygnets - no longer ugly ducklings. Oscar dog stands on an outcrop and earns open-beak hisses from cob and pen, but Oliver and I are treated as benign, at least non-combatants; allowed to stare.

*** ***
First thing in the morning I'd cycled to Aston station, taken the train to Blake Street and cycled about three miles in car-land to Aldridge Parish Church…

Car-land on the way to Aldridge from Blake Street

Aldridge Parish Church

…to give a talk about the Founding of Handsworth Park to over fifty members of the Probus Club of Aldridge. Nearly 15 years after I wrote a history of how Handsworth Park was invented in the 1880s its story has  taken more secure form in my mind. Good. When I asked how many of this audience, men of my age and older, had visited Handsworth Park, over two third raised their hands. Yet to me Aldridge feels so different from my Handsworth I'm apprehensive at the prospect of explaining how much I love the place and how much I've learned about it these last twenty five years.
"Our park was not, like many fine city parks, a gift from a philanthropic landowner. It had to be paid for by local ratepayers in what was then the rich and salubrious village of Handsworth in rural Staffordshire, at comfortable remove from the the smoke, noise and mess of the great working city of Birmingham. But Birmingham was spreading. Relentlessly."
I quote what I and others have written:

Birmingham’s expanding population sought new living space, leaving only the poorest in the insanitary courts of the city centre and even these were soon edged away by the Corporation Street “improvement scheme” initiated in 1875 and finished in 1882 at a cost of over £1½ million. A familiar idea of “inner city” was not so much when the poor increased but when they no longer lived so close to the unpoor. In addition there were houses closer to the city centre, such as the Jewellery Quarter, whose artisan owners were converting them into workplaces and setting up home further away while still working in the city. Handsworth, many of whose residents had a special connection to Hockley and St.Pauls, was only one of the outlying parishes of Birmingham to undergo a process of transformation to “suburb”: 'While it was going on, the process gratified landowners, developers, builders and the occupants of the new suburbs, or at least continued to lure them with the prospects of profits, status, and happiness, but pleased practically no-one else. Contemporary social and architectural critics were fascinated and appalled by the mindless, creeping nature of the sprawl ... The ceaseless activity of the builders, the alarming rapidity with which they turned pleasant fields into muddy, rutted building sites, the confusion of hundreds of building operations going on simultaneously, without any discernible design, the impression that little schemes were starting up everywhere at once and were never being finished, were in themselves frightening portents of disorder and chaos…' Thompson, F.M.L. (ed.) (1982) The Rise of Suburbia (Leicester:University Press) pp.67-68.

The talk went well. Nervousness aside I enjoyed myself. Over coffee, one old man - my age - said "I wonder if some of those people you quoted, when the case was being made for a park in Handsworth, would have believed their words were being quoted all these years later?" It was a lovely thought. I'd read from some of the conscientiously reported transcripts of local leaders arguing for the park, debating with sceptics and people downright opposed to having their rates spent on a park in what was still countryside…and especially the concerns of the Vicar of St.Mary's Church, Handsworth:

Dr. Randall rose amid the uproar to make what the Handsworth News reporter, with irony, called the speech of the evening: “I will answer for myself. Allow me to say that from my heart I am the last man in the parish to stand between any object which is for the welfare of the people of the parish. It is because I don't think it is for the well-being that we should have the park that I lift up my voice against it. We have an agricultural parish, and we have some of the finest air in the kingdom, and I believe that the park will be more for the benefit of the roughs of Birmingham.” (a perfect howl of dissent, uproar for at least a minute and cries of “shame” followed by alternations of groaning and cheering)  Dr. Randall spoke of people leaving the parish because of the heavy rates. (“hear, hear” and applause) He thought the Local Board had erred through jubilee zeal or some other zeal.(laughter) The vendors had taken advantage of that zeal to raise the price. (clamour) “I will state on my honour and word that the same land including the house has been offered to me even a few months ago, first at £7000 and then at £6000. If on no other ground I will oppose the purchase because it is above the price at which it has been offered to a private individual.” (great cheering and interruption, Babel itself was not in it with the confusion of sounds that then ensued)..p.16 of my history, drawing on unnamed reporters for the Handsworth News and the Handsworth Gazette, 19 Jan 1887

The long campaign for the recovery of contemporary Handsworth Park required the construction of a political narrative (helped in our case by access to far wider reference*) as robust as that which persuaded our ancestors. Reading the words of contemporary reporters of the 1880s I'm even more aware of how astutely argued was the case for the financial value of the park, its utility for a fast-growing urban incursion - effectively an expanding 'Birmingham suburb', a 'lung' for the city assuring the 'vigour and health' of the new population in their tiny-gardened workers' terraces with hardly room to 'swing a bat'. I said to the Probis members "I love this park, my family love it. I see it dew filled on spring mornings, its tranquillity to be enjoyed alone as much as its bustling crowds on summer afternoons. And as for the fun of visiting it in the snow!"

Amy and Guy and the dogs in Handsworth Park

Christmas day 

Summer evening

Simmer Down Festival 2012

I would have argued for its aesthetics and in consequence would have had none of the impact of those shrewd local politicians who'd made their case for popular support with demographic statistics and the language of efficient accountancy; such calculation raising for the new park the largest single loan then known to the district…I quote from one of the crowded public meetings held in the Council House off Soho Road seeking popular permission for a park in Handsworth... 

"...If the park is established I feel sure that in a very few years houses will be built in the locality which will render no extra rate necessary to support the park” (laugher and cries of “no, no”). Mr. Lines sits down and Mr. Wainwright rises to reply:
He was commendably brief, but exceedingly earnest, and his short fiery speech was admirably adapted to secure his purpose. Every word told, and the promise that the Board would, if the resolution were carried, do all their promised work without raising the rate, and throw in the park as well, seemed to produce the desired effect. Having concluded his speech, Mr. Wainwright put the resolution, and hands having been held up on either side, he declared that..
IT WAS CARRIED,
..much to the disgust of many on the platform. Mr.Jacobs loudly protested that the proposition was lost and demanded a poll. Mr.Cooper offered to place in the hands of the clerk or the chairman a cheque sufficiently large to cover the expenses of a poll. Mr. Ellis fumed and Dr. Randall looked disconsolate. But the clerk explained that the Board had no power to arrange for a poll of the ratepayers and the malcontents had to satisfy themselves with empty protest and not too polite observations as to the chairman and his manner of conducting the proceedings. Meantime, Mr. Wainwright, with radiant face and beaming eyes, left the platform, being heartily congratulated by his friends and supporters, and as we elbowed our way out of the still crowded room, we felicitated ourselves on the fact that the vexed question of a public park for Handsworth had been set at rest, with every appearance of the settlement arrived at, being a final and permanent one. Handsworth News, Jan. 22 1887 (pp.16-17 my account)

Even so in the final paragraph of my account (and in all my talks about the creation of Handsworth Park) I conclude 

They did not pursue such an idea simply out of expediency or to raise the value of their properties. Such self-interest was present - used unashamedly to strengthen their case among the practically minded citizens of Handsworth and more covertly to mitigate social conditions that might spur political unrest - but opposition to the Park from some of those who would be paying for it was at times so intense that calculative motives alone would not have carried the project through.

'...its tranquility to  be enjoyed alone…' A 19th century postcard

*for instance The Economic Value of Protected Open Space or a much circulated Japanese study on the link between longevity and walkable green space.
*** *** ***
After a visit to town - coffee with Phil Crumpton to discuss Black Patch Park at Yorks Bakery on Newhall Street - I take my usual journey home, Oscar running in front, beside and behind, on the canal towpath - Gas Street, from the top of Farmer's Locks where narrow boats are moored, some with their generators running, dim lights showing through curtained windows, the whiff of coal and wood smoke from their stove pipes; onto the Birmingham Mainline, then sharp right onto Soho Loop, my eyes unable to make out the way I wheel the Brompton under the flat rail bridge, Oscar a lighter smudge in the gloom….

Dudley Road bridge over the Soho Loop canal

Soho Loop towpath by Clissold Street

…then with him back in his pannier, I exit the tow path through a gap in the railings to join Clissold Street with its speed bumps, All Saints Street, free-wheeling down Goode Avenue wary of turning cars, into narrower Crescent Avenue, across South Road and up the slope of Claremont Road that turns into Richmond Road - a cul-de-sac - at the end of which I cross at the traffic lights on busy Soho Hill onto Hamstead Road, cross the Villa Road, turn right on Radnor Road, then left down Wycliffe Road which continues into Beaudesert Road and home.
**** **** ****
We have our passage booked for Greece - a flight to Venice, then by sea along the chill Adriatic to the ugly port of Igoumenitsa, then, in late afternoon, a ferry crossing to Corfu. In our dear village, in Ano Korakiana - 'The first seeds of Winter' - the liturgy for St.Barbara in the church of Our Lady in Mougades, at the west end of the village. The festive cycle of winter begins:

Τα πρώτα σπερνά του Χειμώνα

«Βαρβαρίτσι, Νικολίτσι κι Άη-Σάββας μες τη μέση…» και κατά πως ορίζει το γνωμικό αυτό, ξεκινάει και ο φετινός χειμωνιάτικος εορταστικός κύκλος, με τη Λειτουργία της Αγίας Βαρβάρας στην εκκλησία της Παναγίας στην κορυφή της Μουργάδας.Σε αντίθεση με άλλες περιοχές της χώρας,το πρωινό είναι ηλιόλουστο και η μικρή εκκλησία δεν θα αργήσει να γεμίσει από κόσμο και μάλιστα κάθε ηλικίας: από τις δεσποσύνες Αγγελική και Μαριέτα, έως την κυρά Χρυσάνθη, από την ανηφόρα της Πλαγιάς.Κάθε είσοδος στο ναό συνοδεύεται από προσκύνημα στη μεγάλη εικόνα της Παναγίας, που δεσπόζει σε κεντρικό σημείο και στη μικρότερη της Αγίας Βαρβάρας, ενώ κατά την έξοδο, ένα σακουλάκι με σπερνά αναμένει τους πιστούς, φτιαγμένα «δια χειρός» Δημήτρη και Ελένης Απέργη, που έχουν εφέτος τη σχετική επιμέλεια.

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…and on the 24th November the website of the village describes a meeting there with William Gladstone.

Ο Γλάδστων 1859

I find the piece beyond my ability to translate, and I want badly to read this - a village record, probably unknown to history, of a local discussion with one of our greatest statesman, dispatched down the wintry Adriatic by his rival Disraeli, in part to get him from England, in part to see if the great man could resolve an intractable problem among the seven islands of  Britain's troublesome Ionian Protectorate. Gladstone, in his diaries, wrote later of being utterly absorbed 'in the affairs of these little islands...'The complexity of the case is inversely (so to speak) as the extent of the sphere.' (31 Dec 1858). And complex it is; even embarrassing; certainly politically sensitive to this day, not least because Gladstone a strong friend of Hellenic independence found, on touring Corfu, that union with mother Greece was not to the liking of many of the islanders he met. This, I hasten to insist, was not through love towards, or even friendship with the English - tho' that did exist for a variety of motives - but through apprehension among the more politically sophisticated, not about Enosis-Ένωσις - as such, but at too close a union with the political corruption associated with government from Athens, and indeed reciprocal anxiety in Athens at the prospect of being united with the radical intelligentsia of Corfu, Zakinthos, Levkas and Cephalonia. The British - ever 'perfidious Albion' - 'handed us over to Athens" I've heard said by neighbours in Ano Korakiana ' because through those corrupt corridors they could have more influence over the affairs of Greece than by struggling to preserve their unwelcome foothold on the Ionian Islands":

Ο Γλάδστων στην Κορακιάνα του 1859

27 Ιανουαρίου (1859): Υπήγεν η Α.Ε. Γλάδστων μετά των υπασπιστών του εφ’ ίππων εις το χωρίον Κορακιάνα, διότι προ ημερών οι χωρικοί τον επροσκάλεσαν και αυτός δια να τους ευχαριστήση υπήγε. Και άμα έφθασεν, κατέβησαν όλοι οι χωρικοί, προεστός και λοιποί, δια να τους υποδεχθούν. Τους συνόδευσαν εις το χωρίον και άρχισαν να τους περιγράφουν όλα. Όταν ήτο έτοιμο το γεύμα (εν γεύμα μεγαλοπρεπές και πλουσιοπάροχον), επροσκάλεσαν την Α.Ε. με τους οπαδούς του, οίτινες ήλθον και εκάθησαν εις το μέσον του τραπεζίου. Διαρκούντος του γεύματος οι πρόκριτοι του χωριού τους έκαμαν διαφόρους ομιλίας, λέγοντες ότι « είμασθεν καλλίτερα υπό την Τουρκίαν παρά υπό την Αγγλίαν, διότι τότε εχαιρόμασθεν πολλά δικαιώματα, τώρα δε όχι». «Διατί (τους απάντησεν ο Γλάδστων) δεν είσθαι ευχαριστημένοι με την τωρινήν Κυβέρνησιν;». Και ότι: «Προ καιρού επεριφέρετο μία γραφή (ανακοίνωση-δήλωση) περί αποικίας, όντες υπογεγραμμένοι κάμποσοι από εσάς». «Μάλιστα (είπον αυτοί), το εκάμαμεν αυτό δια να εκβάλωμεν άλλο έξω, το περί Ενώσεως.Δηλαδή εσπείραμεν και θέλει έλθη καιρός να θερίσωμεν», «Και πώς (τους είπεν ο Γλάδστων) δεν σας αρέσουν οι μεταρρυθμίσεις τας οποίας επρότεινα εις τηνΒουλήν; Τέτε θέλει είσθε καλύτερα και θέλει χαίρεσθε πολλά δικαιώματα», «Όχι» του απάντησαν αυτοί «ότι κάμνουν οι Αντιπρόσωποί μας, καλά καμωμένα» Σ.Σ. στο έντονο αίτημα της πλειονότητας των Επτανησσίων για «Ένωση με την Ελλάδα» τη δεκαετία του 1850, η αγγλική προστασία απάντησε με ένα σχέδιο μεταρρυθμίσεων, προσπαθώντας να κερδίσει χρόνο.Στα τέλη δε, του 1858 ο Γλάδστων έφτασε στα νησιά προκειμένου να διαπιστώσει το κλίμα που επικρατεί εκεί. Το Γενάρη λοιπόν του 1859 οι Κορακιανίτες προεστοί τον κάλεσαν στο χωριό, όπως φανερώνει η παραπάνω αναφορά των «Καθημερούσιων Ειδήσεων» του Σαμαρτζή. Εκεί αυτός, μάλλον έκπληκτος, αντίκρυσε όπως φαίνεται αρνητικό κλίμα και υποχρεώθηκε να υπενθυμίσει ότι αρκετοί από τους παρόντες στη συνάντηση είχαν προ μηνών υπογράψει ανακοίνωση «περί αποικίας». Πιθανότατα η αναφορά αυτή αφορά το περιβόητο χαρτί που υπέγραψε μερίδα Κορακιαντιτών και άλλων, ενάντια στην ένωση και υπερ της παραμονής υπό την αγγλική προστασία. Υπάρχουν δε μαρτυρίες ότι στην ίδια (;) επίσκεψη ο Γλάδστων ομίλησε στους χωριανούς στις Μουργάδες, έξω από την οικία Μαρτζούκου (Άη Νικολόπουλος), αλλά αυτοί δεν έπαυαν να επαναλαμβάνουν το αίτημα «Ένωση αν’ όρος» (δηλαδή, «Ένωση άνευ όρων»)….

I wrote asking Aleko for help and within hours he replied.

Dear Simon and Linda. Here is the translation, done quite quickly, so please excuse mistakes!! My Greek lessons this year at Sally's are going very well. I now have two groups, beginners and an advanced group, all done on the same day, Tuesday 11 to 12  and 12.30-1.30.  Have many new people, a total of 18 now! Please get in touch when you come back to Corfu and we will arrange some meeting. In the meantime a VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO YOU BOTH and a VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR! with love,  Aleko

GLADSTONE IN KORAKIANA IN 1859 

On the 27th January 1859 His Excellency Lord Gladstone, with his aides on horseback, went to the village of Korakiana because some days before, the villagers had invited him. In order to please them he accepted their invitation and went. When he arrived all the villagers and dignitaries from the village came to welcome him. They accompanied him and his entourage to the centre of the village and started to relate to them everything about their village. When the dinner was ready (a memorably rich and grand feast) they invited His Excellency, with his followers, to sit at the centre of the table. While the dinner was under progress the village dignitaries delivered some speeches with their focal point being:

“We were better off under the Turkish rule than under the English, because then we enjoyed many privileges which we don’t now”

“Why” answered Gladstone "are you not happy with the present government…A while ago there was a declaration concerning colonies and indeed many of you have signed to join them”

“Yes indeed” they replied. “We did this in order to bring up another point - the point concerning the Union of our island with Greece…In other words we have sowed the seeds and are now waiting for the harvest…”

“And why” said Gladstone "do you like these reforms which I suggested to the Parliament? You would all be much better off and would enjoy many privileges”

“No” they answered “Whatever our representatives do are WELL DONE and WELL RECEIVED”

P.S. This request by the majority of the Ionians to join Greece during the 1850s was answered by the English Protectorate with many reformation plans in order to gain time. Towards the end of 1850 Gladstone arrived at the islands in order to find out what the general feeling was all about. In January 1859 Dignitaries from Korakiana invited him to the village, as written in the report of the Daily News by Samartzis. When Gladstone arrived at the village he noticed a very negative attitude so he was compelled to remind them that many present in this meeting had signed many months before a statement concerning ‘Colonies’. It is very possible that this signed document is the well known document signed by a certain section of Korakiana villagers OPPOSING the union of the Ionian Islands with Greece and who were pro the English Protectorate. There are testimonies that Gladstone spoke to some villagers at Mourgades, outside the house of Martzoukos (Saint Nikolopoulos). They never ceased to repeat the request : “Union under NO conditions”.