Birmingham gardens 2 - a slightly way-out one

The Akamba Garden Centre, with the Tribe bar and eatery, is a one-of-a-kind phenomenon in Shirley, just outside Birmingham.

You can indeed buy plants there, or you can buy weird metallic African animals. Or you can have afternoon tea there, or just explore the place with your mouth wide open in amazement.


There weren't many people there at all when I was there. Only this nice old lady who was trying to avoid being eaten by a croc.







The food is variously described as Afro-Carribean and Kenyan, though we played safe and stuck to tea and cream scones.




























I've a feeling it might all come to life in the evenings.

Birmingham gardens 1 - the Botanical one

I particularly enjoyed watching thepeacock doing his thing for his lady friend. He was a very fine peacockindeed, but she wasn't the slightest bit interested.

And the butterfly house was rather nice.

The Tardebigge Locks

Tardebigge, on the Birmingham & Worcester Canal, is a Very Important Place for English canal afficionados. It's where you go up the biggest number of locks along a small length of canal. You navigate through 30 locks in fact, and descend (or ascend) a total of 67m in 3.6km. The people doing it told me it was quite hard work!

I was just taking a walk along the towpath though. Some of the best (and I imagine the easiest) English bushwalks are along canal towpaths, and there are lots of them. Soon after I left England canal boat holidays became immensely popular. Canals were renovated, boat hire became big business, and prices went up. I still haven't done my canal boat holiday, but who knows.......?

During my short walk I chatted with people aboard the two boats that came by. And one couple turned out to live in Turramurra in Sydney - not far from me! They seemed a bit startled by this coincidence, but I'm sort of used to it.

A walk in the park

Another outing well worth undertaking in the Birmingham area is a trip to Sutton Park in Sutton Coldfield.



It was surprisingly easy to get to, via the much improved West Midlands passenger rail system of recent times.

The park is quite a size -  at about 970ha, it's ten times the area of  Parramatta Park, for example. 

You could easily do a walk of 10km or more within its boundaries, and there's lots to see.



But one visitor preferred a more leisurely visit.

The West Midlands are my oyster - Part 2

The West Midlands tram also took me to West Bromwich, another place I'd never thought to visit. Again, they've got the cars largely out of the town centre, and it's become a perfectly nice place to wander round.

The enormous edifice below turns out to be Sandwell College, a College of Further Education.

The West Midlands are my oyster- Part 1

For a mere £33 I got  myself a one week 'go anywhere in the West Midlands' transport card. I could use it on any bus, train, or tram in the English West Midlands, and it had already got me to Coventry. It worked just as well in the other direction too. I spent a day heading out to the north-west of Birmingham, through the once 'Black Country' to Wolverhampton and Dudley, using the new tram service.

Wolverhampton never seemed to have all that much going for it, apart from a high profile football team. At least it's now got a very pedestrian-friendly town centre to explore, as does just about every English city these days. They got rid of the cars, and it all still works, works much better in fact. Who'd have thought that Wolverhampton might ever be a pleasant place to wander around in?

Likewise Dudley. I returned to Birmingham via a series of buses, with a lunch break in Dudley. There was a statue of a famous footballer here. Duncan Edwards. Never heard of him. Turns out he was a Manchester United player in the 1950s, and he was one of the ones killed in the Munich plane crash in 1958.

This funny old building serves as the Dudley Central Mosque.

And here's what I'd been looking for: the Dudley Zoo. I have childhood memories of a  visit to Dudley Zoo. It's up the side of a hill, leading up to Dudley Castle. There was a substantial fee to enter, and I was a bit tired, and somehow it didn't seem quite worth the effort to go in and climb the hill. Maybe another time?

Then it's back to Birmingham on the top deck of the X8 bus.

Coventry's transport museum

I was very impressed by Coventry's transport museum. And as luck would have it, the day I turned up last month was the last day on which entry was free for non-Coventrarians.

It has a very extensive collection of bicycles, cars, and other stuff, illustrating a century and a half of the city's manufacturing output.

Initially Coventry was very big on bicycles, and when motor vehicles came along, all the bicycle companies switched over rapidly to car manufacture.

The day I was there saw a big gathering of Jaguar cars and their owners on the museum forecourt. They're particularly proud of their Jags in Coventry. It's one of the few of the big brands that's still manufactured there - mind you, it's owned by Tata Motors of India now.

It was Coventry's vehicle manufacturing industry that made it an obvious air raid target in World War 2. At that time it had switched to manufacturing mainly military vehicles.

I was delighted to encounter there examples of two of the cars that I've owned. And they were side by side!



There was a Hillman Imp. The last car I owned in England was one of these.



And here's a Hillman Hunter, my first Australian car. I see by the number plate that this one spent time in Tehran. When I passed through Iran in 1974 every other car was a white Hillman Hunter. I think it was something to do with one of them having won the much publicised 1968 London to Sydney endurance car rally.

Below: one of their many E-Type Jags

Coventry's cathedrals

There's a German term, 'Coventrieren', that was coined by Joseph Goebbels in 1940. It describes what was done to Coventry, ie the levelling of a city by air raids.

The city was pretty well rebuilt after the war, but the remains of the 14th century St Michael's Cathedral was left as a memorial. The new St Michael's Cathedral was built right next to it in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

I grew up a mere 30km or so from Coventry, but I've hardly ever been there, and never explored the place at all. I made a point of getting there last month, on an easy day trip from Birmingham. It's well worth the visit.







The new cathedral was designed by Sir Basil Spence, and is a Grade 1 listed building.