Jonathan Meades loves the new Pevsner guide to Birmingham – a city full of rich oddities and pleasingly bewildering contrasts
Lucky Brummies
JAMES O. DAVIES
I
n the days when the floors of two-room pubs were glossy with freshly hawked Dudley oysters and the markets sold blewits and pies, the Black Country really was black with soot, with the issue of belching chimneys. Furnaces, foundries and forges abounded and many of the area’s buildings acquired a patina of smuts. As industry declined in the 1960s and ’70s, many of its factories were demolished while others, constructed of impervious materials, were cleaned to the point where they looked brand-new. Those faced in terracotta resemble the late Peter Bull; they take on an appearance of glaring ferocity far from the mournful mien of widow’s weeds. My revenant grandfather (b. Oldbury, 1880) would recognise very little of what actually remains – though Edwin Bayliss’s paintings of night lit by flame and of miners and chainmakers trudging beside poison canals would be instantly familiar. So, for that matter, would Constantin Meunier’s depictions of le pays noir around the sinister Walloon city of Charleroi – destitution and pneumoconiosis are international. So is sprawl. In the pre-penultimate entry in his revised and massively expanded version of parts of the Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Staffordshire Pevsners, Andy Foster notes of Shirley Golf Club that the clubhouse is the work of John Madin, the most prolific and perhaps best of the city’s architects in the latter half of the last century. The club was founded in 1956 by the Birmingham Jewish Golf Society, ‘whose members had been refused entry to clubs elsewhere’. That was in 1956. Foster writes that Shirley is ‘a modest hamlet which has become an unending c20 suburb’. That description could apply to scores of places in this unwieldy conurbation,
20 The Oldie April 2022
Wild West Midlands: Oratory of St Philip Neri, Edgbaston
whose very boundaries are a matter of dispute. This is a part of England that is characterised by ribbon development, piecemeal intrusions, weird struggles of scale and style, terrains vagues, edgelands that aren’t edgelands because they are near the countless centres and, of course, sprawl usually prefixed by ‘relentless’. Should we wish to learn anything from Brum, it is that sprawl is far from uniform and is rich in clashing oddities. Coherence is not a property of attractive urbanism; collisions are more exciting than elisions; there is pleasure to be had in bewildering juxtapositions.
There are four Iranian restaurants within a minute’s walk of the Oratory where Cardinal Newman received Gerard Manley Hopkins into the church. It is certainly at odds with most of the city’s contemporary ecclesiastical architecture. Newman wrote, ‘Gothic is now like an old dress, which fitted a man well twenty years back but must be altered to fit him now. I believe that Gothic can be adapted … Mr Pugin does not.’ Foster calls the Oratory ‘tremendously Italian … marble everywhere’. It is, however, Gothic that is everywhere in this surprisingly green agglomeration. The Sligo architect
