Our Day Out In Brum, 2016

Digbeth Coach Station, Birmingham, June 2016

As part of my School-based day job, I accompanied our Art Dept. on a day trip to Birmingham, the other day.  This kind of thing is definitely one of the perks of my support role.  Inevitably, with these deals, you're always very much on duty, - and usually even more conscious of possible hazards than one would be back at base.  However, it's still nice to get out of a context where everything is constrained in boxes - both physical and mental, and to watch students starting to make creative connections with the wider world around them.

Digbeth, Birmingham, June 2016

Still Open For Business: Digbeth, Birmingham, June 2016

As it is, the vast majority of our kids handle themselves pretty well in such situations.  We had no real problems ushering 80-odd Year Nines around the slightly edgy Street Art hotspots of Digbeth, then on up through the City Centre to view the more official displays at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and Birmingham School Of Art.  As a result, I had plenty time to collect various images of my own, a few of which you see here.

There It Is again - That Paradoxical, Anarchist Tradition Of Formal Design Qualities:
Digbeth, Birmingham, June 2016

Those shown here are all from Digbeth, an area I've returned to repeatedly with my camera in recent years, and one which always provides a rich, and ever changing, source of urban texts and textures.  It’s one of those fascinating regions where one can see economic and societal transformation at work even as one watches.  Once a hotbed of industrial activity, and dominated by a towering railway viaduct, in more recent times it sank into economic decline, and consequently picturesque physical dilapidation.  What traditionally industrial enterprises hang on there, do so in a slightly parless state, wringing out any available business in neglected or shored-up buildings, despite the less savoury evidence of social deprivation accreting in certain alleyways and gutters.

Digbeth, Birmingham, June 2016

Thus, in several respects, Digbeth echoes some of the characteristics of Leicester's St Augustine’s back yard - albeit on a larger and rather more vivid scale.  But what really links them is the sense of their both being zones of transformation.  If St Augustine’s is rapidly being absorbed by De Montfort University's ever-exploding property boom, Digbeth is gradually succumbing to the creeping gentrification implied by the expansion of the 'Creative Industries'.  Admittedly, Creative or Media types are often originally attracted to an area exactly because of its earthier, more affordable aspects.  But experience shows that Property Developers and purveyors of overpriced lifestyle accouterments are rarely far behind.  Either way, I noticed several such newly opened ventures - even since we did the same educational walk last year; and that many once-neglected buildings were currently undergoing refurbishment or remodelling.

Indeed, none of this is really any surprise.  We started our day at The Custard Factory, - once the origin of a million school puddings, but for several decades now - a complex devoted to performance, media, niche retailing and various creative activities.   As such, it acts as a big, white flagship for much of the change currently overtaking Digbeth  Exactly how this will all be impacted by the recent decision to leave the E.U., and the accompanying economic impact and loss of income streams, remains to be seen [1.].

Digbeth, Birmingham, June 2016

As ever, the properly constructive way forward for any artist, is to interact with actual events, and to explore and react to the distinguishing subtleties of each situation on its own merits.  The restless processes of upheaval at work within cities are one of their defining characteristics and recording and responding to those currents is ultimately a more positive act than bemoaning what may have been left behind.  In reality, for me, it is those moments when a district seems caught in an interim state between past and future, which seem to quiver with the most delicious resonances.

Digbeth, Birmingham, June 2016

Thus it was that, as our students snapped away at some of the more spectacular outcomes from Digbeth's officially sanctioned 'City Of Colours' Street Art Festival, I found myself predictably drawn to many of the less formal and more easily overlooked visual clues that punctuated our walk.  Defiantly undisciplined, often easily overlooked, and frequently full of humour and subversion, they represent the powerful, organic and uncommodified currents of outsider creativity still flowing through the streets of Digbeth [2.].  What delights me most is the tension between so many of these and more official legends; or the way that hastily written, commercially driven injunctions, themselves come to resemble little more than territorial tagging.  The ceaseless transformation of all those grimy and decaying industrial substrates into a polychromatic, ever-mutating canvas - reflecting both the best and worst human impulses, still fills me with deep joy.

"Tru-Dat":  Digbeth, Birmingham, June 2016


[1.]:  My last but one post bemoaned the misguided result of Britain's recent referendum. To many of us, it feels like a depressing turn towards blinkered Nationalism and the kind of unenlightened Philistinism that always runs scared of the 'other'.  And yet, for many, the transformation of Digbeth from a local manufacturing hotspot to a cultural playground may symbolise how ‘ordinary’ working people have been dicarded by a rapidly changing society society.  Is there really so much distance between my slight queasiness at the perceived march of smug gentrification, and a baulking at the insecurities of a globalised economy on the part of many Brexit enthusiasts?  Am I a hypocrite who just wants to have my cake and eat it?  Is it really tenable to always enjoy things most when they’re decaying beautifully?

[2.]:  And, of course, it's all too easy for artists to glibly celebrate all that’s raw and authentically 'From The Street'.  But, for all I know, entertaining yourself with amusing Situationist street interventions, or lurking around to document them, could just look like so much decadent self-indulgence to many trying to grind out a living at actual street level.