Now we had a car, we could get out of Cambridge; we decided we'd pick the next interesting looking town in a Northwards direction, and booked a hostel in Birmingham.
Birmingham (B'ham or Burrr-mingum to the locals) is described as the "second city" of England: it's mostly a working-class industrial town, but it's grown and picked up a little bit of culture on the way. (The surrounding area is called the Black Country, possibly due to the coal dust, and nothing to do with Jamaican residents). I sent a message to my old workmate Peter, who is from around these parts, asking what he suggested we do: he said "avoid Spaghetti Junction", and gave a list of interesting things to do.
Finding it wasn't too hard: the motorway system is really good here. We didn't actually see any spaghetti, but we did manage to find our hostel without too much trouble.
We drove into town the next morning. Without maps or any real idea of what to do, it's a bit hard to plan your itinerary. We ended up finding signs pointing us to the Jewellery Quarter, an area which probably has the highest concentration of jewellers in the world.1 As exciting as it might sound, the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter, an old factory immaculately preserved by way of them just running out of money and shutting down in 1981, was a really interesting place.
We then headed down to Brindleyplace, a canal-side shopping district, and checked out the canals around the Gas Street Basin.
Driving back to the hostel at this point, we saw a sign for the botanic gardens, and thought we'd fill some time by checking it out. What a mistake that was! There are nice brown signs pointing to all the tourist attractions, but as you get closer and closer, they get smaller and smaller, and the sign at the actual entrance is about the size of a postage stamp. This led to me driving right past the gardens, and going in a big circle around Edgbaston until finding new signs that pointed back to the gardens. 30 mins later, we were back where we started, and found out that it was going to cost us £6 each to get into the gardens. Poor Kiwi men can neither afford or justify £6 to look at some poncy flowers, so away we went again.
It was this experience that first taught us an important truth about England. Ignore what the Romans tell you; all roads lead to Edgbaston. This suburb of Birmingham is the centre of the universe. No matter where you go, you end up there. If you are there, you'll drive out, and find yourself back again within 15 minutes. Especially if you're not from round 'ere, and trying not to get killed when turning right and not giving way to left-turning traffic, it's all a bit too much, and sometimes you end up driving the wrong way down one way roads...
The next day we headed out to Cadbury World (past Edgbaston) in the suburb of Bourneville. This suburb actually started out as a farm that the Cadbury family decided to establish a factory in, and set up for all their staff. They seem very keen to point out that they were a fantastic employer 150 years ago! The tour was good, if not a little too geared at the children in places, and chocolate was in plentiful supply.
Next stop was the Air Force museum in Cosford. To continue on from here, we had to drive back in the direction of Edgbaston.
See the whole Birmingham gallery here.
- I should point out two things about advertising here. Every claim you make needs to be substantiated: any time a TV ad says "Surveys show that", a footnote on the screen will tell you how many people were sampled, and what they were paid to make such outrageous claims. Anything that isn't backed by such research introduces the word "probably", such as "Probably the best beer in the world". You are allowed to make direct comparisons (there are great big signs at Tesco claiming exactly how many products are cheaper there than Sainsbury's and Asda), but there are still ads that say "50% better than the leading brand", without acknowledging what the leading brand is. ↩
Tags: travel
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