We set out bright and early this morning, anxious to make our way out of industrial Birmingham and into the countryside. Much of Birmingham is beautiful, but the canal network makes its way through the old heartlands of an old era; now much defunct, moved to the periphery of the city or indeed, moved to another country. Some of the network has been improved (regenerated, gentrified) and this better network is what we travelled through last Autumn, mooring up at Gas Street Basin and travelling north through the Aston flight of locks.
This trip, we decided to take the speedier route, hence our journey down the Birmingham and Warwick Junction canal. This took us through much more dismal scenery with warehousing old and new, repaired and not, much of everything covered in grafitti. The rubbish piled up everywhere and part of lock working was removing planks of wood, footballs, a gas cylinder, etc. We have decided that rather than witches knickers (plastic bags in trees, for our non UK readers), plastic bags in the canal are ducks' drawers. And yet, we had a priviledged view of the old buildings. One had a foundation of old mill stones. Fascinating.
The first few pictures are of the run of bridges (you have to expand the pic to see them all), a typical grafitti clad section, an old Horsely Iron Works bridge surrounded by a few centuries of industry and then Pete working one of the locks at Bordesley Junction, where the Birmingham and Warwick Junction Canal meets the Grand Union Main Line. We finally made our way out of the 10 locks and 3 industrial miles to some trees! The next shot is of Sparkbrook cutting, theoretically beautiful, but every flat surface was covered with some kind of scribbled paint and any corner of the canal was filled with rubbish, even a pram and a garden bench.
The day became more grey as we travelled, but we were still enjoying the variety of sights in and out of the canal. Until we realised that we were slowing down. It transpired that much of the rubbish was unseen at the bottom of the canal, yet really just under our hull, and our propeller had managed to catch not only some ducks' drawers, but some human's zipped gillet. Hmm. The pictures show that Pete opens the hatch, pulls out yuk, then proudly displays his find! One of the pictures is worth expanding right out - it is the embossing on the top of the weed hatch handle, warning us that if it is not put on tightly, we'll sink...
We then stopped in Catherine de Barnes, a village just east of Solihul, for a well earned pub lunch. Pulling out again just after 3:00, we passed by a sunken cruiser and a herd of cows (we like these better than grafitti, even though they do have yellow labels in their ears). We moored up just east of Knowle, West Midlands on the Grand Union at 5pm.
