Fountains and Sculptures

Birmingham Town  Hall, overlooking The River in Victoria
Square, which is lovely spot to sit on a sunny day.

These are not the best photos I’ve ever taken – either the sun was in the wrong place for good shots or, more likely I suspect, I was in the wrong place. As the Duchess told Alice, everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it, and the moral of this is that you should never take pictures with the sun in your eyes. Anyway, these images are a nice memory of a few hours spent in the sunshine with my elder daughter yesterday afternoon, so I thought I’d post them for a Saturday Snapshot.  Lucy had spent a couple of days with my mother in Herefordshire, then caught the train back to Birmingham where she had time to spare before the boarding the coach for a six-hour journey home to Devon, so we met up, had a chat and a tea, and sat basking in the sunshine, in Victoria Square. 

Quality time for Mother and Daughter!

 It’s one of the nicest parts of the city, with fountains, steps and statues, and the buildings up this end are old and attractive (unlike the Bullring). There is, as you might expect from the name, a statue of Queen Victoria, which was erected in her honour on 10 January 1901 – just 12 days before she died. The original monument was made by Thomas Brock (who also sculpted the statue of Victoria which stands outside Buckingham Palace), but it was recast in bronze in 1951. 

Queen Victoria: She's probably not amused
at the quality of this photo!

Dominating the Square is The River, a water feature by Dhruva Mistry, which is made up of four separate artworks. In the upper pool is a bronze statue of a bathing woman who is, apparently, The Spirit of the River – but she is known locally as The Floozie in the Jacuzzi!  The paving around the rim of the water is engraved with lines from the ‘Burnt Norton’ section of TS Eliot’s ‘The Four Quartets’,  but it’s hopeless trying to get a photo of the quotation, because you can’t get enough letters in the picture that are readable. However, it says:

And the pool was filled with water of sunlight, and the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, the surface glittered out of heart of light, and they were behind us, reflected in a pool. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. 

Cooling off.... The Floozie in the Jacuzzi.

The water certainly glittered yesterday, cascading down a flight of steps into the smaller pool, which is where we sat - on the edge, of course, not in the pool itself!  The statue here is called Youth, and shows a boy and girl with an egg and cone (though these last two are difficult to spot as they are partly submerged).

Youth: We sat by this statue of a boy and girl, listening to
water splishing and splashing.

On each side of the fountain are The Guardians, two large stone sculptures which look a bit like sphinxes, and next to them are the two obelisks, Object (Variations). I am not sure whether there is any special significance to the sculptures, and I have to admit the symbolism (if there is any) is lost on me, but it’s a pleasant place to sit and watch the world go by. 

One of Mistry's Guardians.

The sculpture I really adore is Antony Gormley’s The Iron Man, which is another feature of the Square, and is a much better guardian for the city than any of Mistry’s pieces. He’s 20 feet high, and stands at angle, tilted slightly backwards, and slightly to one side, with his feet buried in the pavement. He looks like some kind of ancient Egyptian mummy, or alien being, who has landed on earth, feet first, and remained that way ever since watching over the city and its people and is, I feel, a powerful and beneficent presence. To start with the sculpture was called Untitled, but Brummies coined the nickname, and consequently Gormley asked for it to become Iron:Man, referencing the fact that this piece represents the traditional metal-working skills of Birmingham and the Black Country.

The Iron Man: I love this sculpture and its rusty
looking surface, which is not corrosion, but is part
of the design, caused by oxidisation of the metal.

Alongside the Iron Man is the Town Hall, which is based on the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Roman Forum, and opened in 1834. One of the architects was Joseph Hansom, who invented the Hansom cab, a kind of horse-drawn taxi, but he went bankrupt which delayed construction. Charles Dickens gave public readings at the hall to raise money for the nearby Birmingham and Midland Institute, and the first public performance of Elgar’s ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ took place here. 

Birmingham Town Hall, where Charles Dickens read his work
to packed audiences

Behind the fountain is the Council House, completed in 1879 – before that the council met at all kinds of venues, including a pub. Councillors were so awed by their new home they couldn’t decide what to call it, and held a debate to consider the merits of The Council House, The Municipal Hall, and The Guildhall. I would love to see the inside - I gather the interior is just as grand as the exterior.  

When I first moved to the Midlands, Victoria Square was a very busy, very uninspiring traffic junction, but it was pedestrianised in the early 1990s, when Dhruva Mistry’s water feature was the winning entry in a competition to design a

focal point. The revamped area was opened by Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1994, and has now become popular with tourists and residents of all ages.

Saturday Snapshots is being hosted by Melinda at West Metro Mummy. Use the link to see photos taken by other participants and for full details of the meme. 

Birmingham's Spectacular Catacombs

Looking down on the Catacombs at Warstone Lane Cemetery
in Birmingham.

For three decades or more I have lived a 20-minute train from Birmingham (England, not Alabama) and I had NO IDEA the city has its own Catacombs until Younger Daughter took me there a couple of weeks ago (before my mother was ill). Sadly, they are all bricked up, so you can't go inside, and they look very neglected, but nevertheless they are absolutely spectacular, ever so slightly spooky, and well worth a visit.

They are slap-bang in the middle of the Warstone Lane Cemetery, on the edge of the Jewellery Quarter, and I've never seen anything like them. They reminded me of some kind of Roman amphitheatre – something to do with the circular (or perhaps that should be semi-circular) shape I think, and the terraces and the arched entrances around a flat arena-like area. To start with we assumed these were family vaults, but I've done a bit of research, and as far as I can gather they were for poor folk, and coffins were just stacked inside the tunnels, which sounds a bit grisly.

A closer view of the bricked-up tunnels.

In the 19^th century Birmingham was a manufacturing power house where wealthy financiers and businessmen made their fortunes. But the people who worked in the factories lived in squalid conditions, with overcrowding, no proper sanitation, and inadequate water supplies. Illness was rife and mortality rates were high. Graveyards, apparently, were as overcrowded as the streets of terraces and back-to-backs – so much so that in some places 'boring rods' were used to check if there was room for another burial! And at some of the city's churches there were so many interments that the ground was raised several feet above street level.

Facilities were obviously inadequate, so a group of non-conformists established their own cemetery at Key Hill in 1836, and 12 years later Birmingham Church of England Cemetery Company established another graveyard close by, at Warstone Lane. It was created in an old sandpit, and the Catacombs were tunnelled into the sides on two levels, to create more space, while normal burials in proper graves took place on the rest of site.

Memorial stones have been inserted at the
entrance to one or two tunnels.

Bizarrely, when Christ Church, in the centre of Birmingham, was demolished in 1899 the remains of 600 bodies were moved to the Warstone Lane Catacombs. They were taken in funeral coaches, which travelled in a dignified, slow procession, as was right and proper – but it was all a bit 'cloak and dagger' because the journeys took place at night (under cover of darkness) so residents wouldn't be disturbed, and it all sounds quite macabre.

Among those who were transferred to the Catacombs was the renowned printer and typographer John Baskerville, and the story of how he came to be there is very odd indeed. As an atheist he had no wish to be buried in consecrated ground, so when he died in 1775 he was buried in a mausoleum in his garden. , where he lay forgotten some 50 years, until gravel was excavated from the land. He was moved to a warehouse – where visitors paid sixpence (which was probably a lot of money at the time) to see his embalmed body! Then he was moved again, to the shop of a plumber and glazier. By this time, of course, the body was less well preserved than it had been, and people were no longer keen to see (or smell) it! In desperation, the poor old plumber/glazier had the body buried secretly at Christ Church, and from there poor old Baskerville's mortal remains were shifted once again, to the tunnels at Warstone Lane.

The view from the ground.

Baskerville (one of the fonts he created) is still a classic typeface and, since I was once a journalist, I would have liked to pay a tribute to this great typographer and printer by using it for this post but it's not listed on Blogger or Open Office. 

The cemetery also also provides the final resting place for Major Harry Gem who, with the help of a friend, invented lawn tennis in 1860 or thereabouts, and Pte James Cooper, who was awarded the Victoria Cross in 1867 for bravery at sea rescuing colleagues from cannibals in the Andaman Islands.

Part of the main graveyard at Warstone Lane.

I'm not sure when the last burial in the Catacombs took place, but apparently people lived in the tunnels during WW2. However, I'm not sure if they were used as shelters (like the London Tube stations), or whether bombed-out families set up home in them. Either way, it must have been pretty unpleasant. Today the entrances are bricked in and plastered over (to prevent vandalism and accidents I suppose) although a couple do have memorial stones set into them. A section of the wall is in danger of collapse and has been shored up, and the whole area looks in need of some tender loving care.

The entire cemetery, along with the one at Keys Hill (which also has Catacombs, but I haven't been there yet), is 'listed', and volunteers help maintain both areas, which are not only architecturally unique, but have also become havens for wildlife and plants. I think plans for improvements are included in an ongoing scheme which takes in the whole of the Jewellery Quarter, so hopefully something will done.

The blue brick Victorian lodge at Warstone Lane Cemetery
still stands, although it has been sold for offices. But the Gothic
chapel, dedicated to St Michael, was demolished in 1958.

For more Saturday Snapshots see  Alice's blog at http://athomewithbooks.net/ 

Edited, Saturday: I forgot to attribute my sources! Information in this blog was taken mainly from  the website for the Jewellery Quarter at http://www.jquarter.org.uk/webdisk/walk14.htm and the book 'A History of Birmingham', by local historian Chris Upton.

Sore Feet and Saturday Snapshots

I was going to write a book review, but we went to Birmingham to meet my younger daughter and her boyfriend for lunch, and spent the day wandering around the Rag Market, walking along the canal, and mooching around the city’s Museum and Gallery, where we visited the Staffordshire Hoard, which we have seen before, but was well worth another look - the intricate work on these tiny pieces of gold is just incredible. 

By the time we got home I was so tired, and my feet hurt because I wore new shoes (there is a moral in everything, as the Duchess told Alice, and the moral of this is that one should never wear new shoes when walking around a city). Anyway, I never got round to writing anything properly, so here are some Saturday Snapshots, some of which were taken today, and some on my last visit, when the weather was still sunny, and there were lovely reflections in the water.    

 Birmingham is supposed to have more canals than Venice, but I am not sure if this is actually true, or merely some kind of urban myth. At any rate,  the  Worcester and Birmingham Canal at Brindley Place and the Gas Street Basin (where it meets the Birmingham Canal Navigations Main Line) is one of the nicest spots in the city, and one of the few places which seems to have kept its character and from development.

 There are boats, and bridges, and tunnels, and some of the old buildings (including the WBC Company's headquarters) are still there. They may have been revamped, and turned into eating places, but at least they have been preserved and are being used. And there's a surprising amount of wildlife on the water and alongside it, including this Canada goose and two tiny goslings, which we spotted on the opposite bank, and you can just make them out in the photo, if you squint a bit - I need a much better camera I think.

This was printed on a  wall - I'm not sure I agree with the sentiment,
 but it made me laugh.

For more Saturday Snapshots see  Alice's blog http://athomewithbooks.net/