We just got back from a stay in Birmingham visiting friends and family. It meant I missed my seventh Blogoversary, which was yesterday, and it is now New Year’s Eve. I thought I’d do a bit of a post about Moseley, where we used to live. How different it is from Hastings! Of course, not forgetting HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL BATTLEAXE READERS!
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| School Road, Moseley |
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| Oxford Road, Moseley |
The urge to write about Moseley has partly come about because of my poetry book – I realised that I don’t have a proper Birmingham poem, and there needs to be one in the collection. I was talking to Philosopher in the car, about how it seems to be the case that as we get older it is easy to summon up memories of events that happened in one’s childhood, but not so easy to remember recent events. He reckoned that it is not due to some incipient decline into demetia, but that when you were a child, things made a greater impression, and you had less going on in your head to interfere with memory storage.
I thought about this on Saturday morning as I walked right across Moseley, where much of my adult life was spent. I realised that although I had travelled up and down those streets hundreds of times before, over nearly 40 years, I never actually paid much attention to my surroundings. I was always too busy and preoccupied. This time I really looked. It always feels comfortable to walk such well-known streets, it’s like your feet know where to place themselves. Nothing much has changed since we left seven years ago – but then, that’s partly why we decided to leave, and to start a new life…. we did want things to change!
Moseley has massive mature trees lining many of the roads and in the gardens, and a fantastic variety of domestic architecture – some of the finest Edwardian and Arts and Crafts homes to be found anywhere. The gardens are large, and the housing density is low. Half the time you can’t believe you are in the middle of such a large city.
I was so busy looking about me on my walk that I didn’t take any photos – some of these I had already, some I took from Google Streetview screenshots, and a few from the wider internet. This explains why the photos show a variety of seasons…
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| A snowy scene…. |
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| Oxford Road |
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| Billesley Lane |
This house was just across the road from us… it is famous as the home of record producer Bob Lamb, and for the start-up of the likes of Duran Duran and UB40... when we moved in, Moseley was a very alternative, boho area… now, it is very desirable and house prices have rocketed.
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| Cambridge Road |
Here are a couple of views of our old house in Cambridge Road, which is a typical style for the area, built in 1910.
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| Cambridge Road – our house on the right |
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| Our old house |
Although all the houses are different, you can see that have been built by the same builder – here is another with features like ours, in the next street, Blenheim Road.
A few more photos to finish…
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| Wake Green Road |
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| Cambridge Road |
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| Corner of Anderton Park and Wake Green Road |
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| Oxford Road |
I suppose the thing I miss the most about living in Birmingham are the trees. In Hastings, you have to go down to Alexandra Park to see mature giants like we had on every street corner in Moseley – but on the other hand, the trees and the flat terrain meant you couldn’t raise your eyes to a wide horizon. It is good to contemplate distance…. space…. and, of course, the sea.
Here’s Hastings Old Town from the East Hill…. our wider view….
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