Birmingham - Jim Perkins's home town

Birmingham - my home town

There are worse places to live than a big city. Here are a few photographs of Birmingham - the town of my birth - designed to show you why I think so.

	The latest enterprise in Birmingham: the Bull Ring Shopping Centre. At least the third in my lifetime!
	St Philip's - the 'society' church - became a cathedral when Birmingham was created as a separate diocese early in the 20th century.
	The Crown Inn, Deritend ('Dirty' End). Birmingham's oldest pub has had a more chequered career in the last 30 years than in the previous 600!
	The 'Forward' statue was erected in Centenary Square. It didn't last ten years, let alone a century, because some enlightened souls burnt it down!
	A rather gloomy Matthew Boulton, James Watt and William Murdoch. Is this because they know they are to be moved to the site of the 'Forward' statue?
	The Town Hall looks down on a re-vamped Victoria Square.
	The flower seller brings a splash of spring colour to Victoria Square.
	Symphony Hall The city is rightly proud of its new concert hall. Like all such it incorporates the latest acoustic technology, though some of my guests don't like its conventional layout.
	Gas Street basin. There are more miles of canals in Birmingham than in Venice (35 versus 26).
	Old Turn Junction. And we have something which Venice doesn't: a traffic roundabout where three canals meet! Behind it stands the Malt House pub, where Bill Clinton (42nd US President) had a drink before a G8 meeting. The FBI refused to allow the landlord to preserve the glass - they deliberately smashed it!!

To say nothing of the Birmingham Wheel and Christmas market.

	The former Co-op furniture factory in A.B. Row now stands empty. A family story says that my paternal grandfather, John Perkins, worked here as a young man. For a long time I wondered what the 'A.B.' stood for, but Jane Jordan tells me it was the border between Aston and Birmingham!
	Hodge Hill Common - playground of my youth.
	Blakesley Hall, in Yardley, is nowadays engulfed by suburbia.
	Maglev was replaced by conventional technology at the Birmingham International Airport/station link. Yet another example, along with computers and hovercraft, of British inability to exploit our own superb inventions.
	The erstwhile 'Heath' cinema, in Washwood Heath, now serves a very different clientèle!
	Recent demolition of the Saltley 'gasometer' (as we mistakenly called them when I was a kid!) reminded me that gasholders are an endangered species - to be photographed as soon as possible! A recent, Bulgarian, guest suggested they be preserved for use as climbing frames!
	The Metro Cammell offices in Leigh Road may soon become the last reminder of this once great local employer.

Left: Bloomsbury Free Library (Nechells), recently restored to its original terracotta glory.

For many years my great-grandmother lived just down from this at 54 Saltley Road.

Right: The King's Head clock is nowhere near the pub after which it is named. The clock is in High Street; the pub in Hagley Road.