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| I hadn't been back to my home town, motherland, call it what you will, for a while, so now seems the right time to devote a megabyte or so to Stourbridge. I am going to try to be objective- I don't think I shall succeed, but try, I will. If you want more information about the town, then go to the exhaustive www.stourbridge.com, but otherwise, try to bear with me and my slghtly frazzled attempt at loyalty. In any event, I promise to be not as rude about Stourbridge as I was about Walthamstow. |
| In order to do justice to this task, I spent a few hours of my Christmas break wandering around the town, armed only with my digital camera, and a slightly dodgy sense of irony. My first port of call was a traffic sign very close to my parents' house, where for many years I had been intrigued by a red graffito question mark that lingered interrogatively and menacingly over the words "Stourbridge Town Centre". The question mark has now almost completely faded away, but I've reanimated it, using only a little artistic licence. It did always make me wonder what had motivated someone to mount a step ladder, and paint that single mark of puncutuation, rather than the usual obscenity, a chad, or even "There be demons". Or perhaps the guy who did it was just a complete aerosol. |
| After a slight detour to take the dreaming-spires-and-car-parks postcard view of the centre of town that can be seen at the top of this page, I walked into the centre of town to answer the plaintive question asked on the road sign. In the slightly wonky photograph above, may be seen the preserved facade of the old Market Hall and the town clock, which was the source of great controvosery a few years ago when the local council, now based in far off and unloved Dudley, proposed that it should be moved, after restoration, about ten metres to the centre of the road. This may seem, in retrospect like Lilliputian arguments over how an egg should be opened, but I can remember this debate assuming the importance of choosing King or parliament. To be honest, I am still annoyed that the bracket which linked the clock to the Market Hall was not put back- I suspect Council did move the clock just enough to make that impossible. You see? The issue still rankles,even with me. |
| I am, however, deeply fond of the Victorian folly of civic grandeur that is the Town Hall- I'm not sure why, but maybe it's because it does add a little individuality to the town centre. I can forgive it almost anything, except for those local pantomimes that I went to there, which seemed to last longer than advent. Less of a joy is the Ryemarket, the town's main shopping centre, which bustles a great deal less since the arrival of the local consmeropolis of the Merry Hill Centre. The civic fathers of the 70s foisted us with the rather unimaginative fountain pictured on the right, which like many of the products of that decade, has aged without adding any grace to what it orginally had, which was nil. |
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