Another walk home from work (Digbeth) starting on Garrison Street, passing the Birmingham City Mission building on Langdon Street with it's really useful four-sided clock tower, each of which displays a different, wrong, time !
Taking a side street off Landor Street (Clarel Avenue) brought me to this huge pile of junk !
Proceeding along Adderley Road, I passed Norton Baths - or what remains of it. Opened in 1924, the swimming pool was built to the unusual length of 100 feet which made it a bit inconvenient for competitive swimming.
During the winter months the pool was covered over and used as a dance hall - luckily before the punk era and all that pogo-ing !!!
The baths have been closed for a number of years.
From Saltley Gate, I took the Washwood Heath Road as far as Ward End Park, where I turned left onto Drews Lane, passing the derelict site of LDV.
Formely, part of the British Leyland empire, Leyland Daf Vehicles was formed in 1993. The huge factory complex on Drews Lane made vans until 2009 when the company folded.
The last model of van produced in Birmingham, the Maxus, is still being built - in China.
The site is due to be re-developed as a business park providing around 3,000 jobs. There is some disagreement with the site owner, Alsom, who want the site as a maintenance depot for the HS2 (if it is ever built!)
From a former site of horsepower to another; although one with a lot fewer horses.
Where the Bromford estate sits today, was the site of the Bromford Bridge Racecourse. Opened in 1894, the course was 11 furlongs long.
The land was acquired by the Birmingham Corporation which built a housing estate there. There are a few reminders of past racing links with roads named Newmarket, Haydock and Thirsk. The abandoned Racecourse Pub still stands (just) on Bromford Drive.
At the end of Bromford Drive are the abandoned streets of, probably, an area of the Firs estate. The streets are still there, overgrown in places, but the houses which once stood have long gone.
