Preparations Part Two
Day 4 – Oxford to Birmingham
Since our bus to Birmingham was leaving at 11:30, I decided to go and see the bust of Tolkien at English Faculty Library right after breakfast, so as to be there as soon as it opened at 9am. This time there was a different receptionist who was unsure whether he could let me have a look at it. He had to ask the library stuff who kindly let me in. The bronze bust was located on the first floor in a glass walled corner so it could be seen also from the outside. This one was bigger than the bust in Exeter College Chapel which is only a head, while this one captures also his shoulders and upper part of chest. It was made by Tolkien’s daughter-in-law, Christopher’s ex-wife, Faith Tolkien neé Faulconbridge in 1959, and given to the faculty in 1966. The library lady allowed me to take my time with it. I took some pictures and returned to the hostel to check-out. The whole 3,5 km walk there and back again (I know you see what I did there) took me little over an hour.
At the bus station, we met a lovely elderly lady who helped us find our bus. It was a few minutes late and extremely cold. After 30 minutes, I regretted that I’d left my jumper in my backpack which I put into the bus luggag compartment. I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, and in order to protect myself from the cold air blown from the AC, I covered my tights with my handbag and put my arms behind my back. Nonetheless, we were totally frozen when we got off the bus in Birmingham. So much so that, after arriving to the Birmingham Central Backpacker hostel and finding out that we had to wait a half an hour longer to be able to check in, I seated myself on a sun-lit spot on a couch. This place looked much better than the Backpackers in Oxford: there were all kinds of colourful decorations around, TV, DVD player and a screen projector. But most importantly, they had a more professional organization and reservation system. They sure value their guests. There was a problem that I mistakenly made my booking for 6th July instead of August which, despite checking all my bookings several times, I overlooked (I focused on the day number, not the month) and realized only when I had been charged £36 for the first night for a no-show. Immediately, I contacted them on Facebook and they offered me an £18 discount on my arrival in August. Big thumbs up for that attitude. Also, the rooms and beds as well as showers were much nicer than in Oxford. The only downside was the complicated water heating in the showers, the proper setting of which I could not figure out. The water was either too cold or, turning the setting button a little, too hot and when I finally set it to a likeable temperature and then turned it off and on again after a while, it wasn’t the same temperature anymore. Another issue was that somebody stole our sausage and likely even used our ketchup that we put, properly signed, into a fridge in a small shared kitchen area opposite our room. We should have known better than to put it in there, when we saw a note asking an anonymous thief to return somebody a bottle, stuck on the fridge upon our arrival. Since that incident we did not put any more food in there. But overall the place was fine and comfortable.
This day we did not want to make any long tour, so we just went to see some sights in the centre: we passed from the Bullring to Victora Square, along Chamberlain Square, library and theatre to the International Convention Centre. The whole square is dug up since they are building a new office centre there. Which I find sad because the glass monster does not fit in among the historical buildings around there. With its architectural (non-)conception, Birmingham reminded me of our capital, Bratislava. There, like in Birmingham, you can find old buildings next to new ones, with some skeletons and abandoned decaying barracks scattered in between. There is no system in it.
A Map of the places we visited in Birmingham with photos can be viewed here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1N2kL5r9b45FQLxj8zTUu1iU70gUxM_MT&usp=sharing
We tried to find our way to Edgbaston, passing through Central Square and Sheepcote Street to Broad Street which we followed until we came to Hagley Road and the Plough and Harrow hotel where Tolkien stayed in June 1916 as the blue plaque next to its door announces. Google Maps told us that the restaurant inside is named Tolkien, but there was no sign telling so at the place. Across the road named after the hotel, in the “gore” there is Birmingham Oratory of St Philip Neri where Fr Francis Morgan, the Tolkien boys’ curator served and the boys often visited. The community still supports young boys and helps them to better education. We had a look in the inner yard with the fountain, a big crucified Jesus on one wall, St Mary’s statue on another and marble memory boards with the names of some deceased priests on the third. In the fourth wall is the entrance to the chapel. We had nearly two more hours until the start of the mass, so we went to see some Tolkien-related spots in this area.
At Waterworks Road there are the two waterworks towers which are said to be the inspiration of Tolkien’s Two Towers: Perrott’s Folly and Edgbaston Waterworks Tower. They are not as tall as I imagined and spottable only from a dozen of metres away. Moreover, they are not accessible to public, both being fenced in on private grounds. The first one is a part of the Medical Centre’s carpark, the other one of some large factory-like complex. Opposite this is Stirling Road where Tolkien lived at his aunt’s place. The original house no longer exists, as well as some others he lived in in this area, such as the one at Oliver Road and 37 Duchess Road. But on the corner of Duchess and Francis Road stands a building named Gamgee House. Only one house Tolkien lived in still exists, 4 Highfield Road, a big semi-detached white house that nowadays serves as a nursery. There is also a blue plaque on it.
Having made our way around all of these addresses we could go to the Oratory to attend the 5:45 pm Latin Mass. The chapel is a typical, richly ornamented, chapel with several side altars, including one dedicated to St Mary, one to St Philip Neri, and a shrine of the oratory’s founder John Henry Newman. At first, I thought that Latin Mass simply meant a mass recited in Latin, but, in fact, it was an ordinary pre-Vatican II mass at which the priest faces the altar for most of the time and is hardly audible to the parishioners seated behind him who spend a great deal of the time kneeling. The oratory provides prayer books with the text of the mass, but many of the prayers the priest recited are not recorded there; I deem it is because they are only reserved to the priest and “not the laics’ business”. So, I was not able to follow it, not to mention that I did not understand a word, beside the sign of the cross and Amens. I only managed to follow the book for one page after the priest’s triple exclamation: “Sanctus!” (or something like that, I do not remember it exactly anymore), but then I got lost again. Then it struck me that neither they, nor the Blackfriars played any music during the masses. Another unusual thing was that we had to kneel along the altar-rail when receiving the Eucharist. After the mass we looked around the chapel, lit a candle at one of the altars and gave some money for their poor fund for which we could take some “holy” pictures of the founder and local altars. You can take 2 big ones or 3 small ones for £1. I put in £2 and took a mix to give to my grandmothers when I come home. Then we headed for the hostel. We walked nearly 13 km in 3,5 hours that afternoon.
Day 5 – Sarehole
The peak of our Birmingham trip was Sarehole and Moseley, places where Tolkien spent his happiest childhood days. It was to be a long tour so we set out early after breakfast. We went along Alcester Street (It was here that I admitted that the Portugal boy, who I chatted with the previous evening while preparing my dinner at the hostel, was true with his opinion that Birmingham is a dirty city. There is a lot of garbage along the roads, and nasty smells at some spots) and across Highgate Park and then along Stratford Road up to Evelyn Road where stands English Martyrs RC Church, where Tolkien’s son John served as a priest. Then we again followed the Stratford Road up to the entrance of The Shire Country Park, a green and wild-nature park along the river Cole, at Mugham-et-Azam Banqueting Hall. The parts we went through were Muslim and immigrant parts, but we did not feel worried at all. The streets were almost empty this early because people were already at work and the shops were not yet open. It seemed that all the information of this area being a no-go zone is just a media bubble. At least by daylight, it is safe to walk through. No one at all cared about two girls with backpacks passing through.
The Shire Country Park path leads directly to Sarehole Mill. But because I did not properly read the information on their website, we arrived there too early. It opened at 11am, so we had nearly an hour. So, we rested on a bench in front of the shops at the Wakegreen Road and Swanhurst Lane roundabout. There is a snack bar that was originally called Hungry Hobbit but due to legacy issues had to be renamed to Hungry Hobb — a compromise, since removing the last two letters was obviously the easiest solution. We ate the elevenses we brought with us and then went back to the mill.
Entrance to the mill’s yard, pool and tearoom is free of charge, but if you want to see the exhibition inside the mill you must pay £6. (Why does entrance to all paid facilities cost £6?) Right behind the shop building there are metal, already rusted, models of the Birmingham waterworks towers that inspired Tolkien. I really liked the interactivity of the whole place. In Slovak museum it is not usual that people could touch or try out some exhibited items (the notice boards at some outrightly invite visitors to do so) or were provided quests to fulfil. But here it is so. The garden around the pool is presented as an enchanted forest and there are many activities for children all over the yard: there are small tables at which they can learn about and draw local animals and insects, a musical spot with instruments made out of natural materials and garden tools (e.g. wooden sticks xylophone and pot bells), a surface walk made out of different materials to walk on barefoot, and a fairy queen’s throne around which book readings can be held. In the growth around the pool children can look for animal statues accompanied by little poems or tiny hobbit hole doors. There is also a tree trunk partially carved in such a way that it looks like a dragon lying on a log. At the gate that segregated the pool garden from the mill yard is an installation of an old watering can that seems to be floating in the air with glass beads tied to strings coming from its spout instead of real water. The pool is quite big and at the time of our visit was all covered with green algae so that it looked rather like a grass lawn. Were it not for the water birds shyly swimming and quacking along the bank, one could easily mistake it for a playground; somebody probably did since there was a board warning about it not being a solid surface at the ege of the pool. The only con is that the pool cannot be waked around in its entirety because there are paths just on one side of it; on other two sides there is not enough space between the edge of the pool and the fence encircling it to accommodate any. Only plants grow there. At the fourth side there is the mill, a wooden terrace and a lovely blooming flower bed. There is one entrance to the mill from this side, but the main one is on the other side from the yard. We decided to enter it via the main door. Passing from the back side to the front, I noticed a door accessible only for the work-staff with the famous movie sign “No admittance except on a party business” in front of it.
The exhibition inside the mill combines the history of the mill with information on Tolkien’s life. The mill’s history exhibits provide long information boards written in a mature and detailed style and also boards for kids that explain the use of the various utilities in a simpler, more child friendly way, introduced by miller’s cat. In one of the rooms there is a dress chest that invites people to try on the clothes and become a miller’s apprentice, wife or the miller himself. Apart from that, they (and not only children) can look for burnt wood portraits of characters from The Hobbit – I found Bilbo, Gandalf, Thorin, and Smaug (not sure if those are all there are). There are two exhibition rooms dedicated to Tolkien’s life: one at the topmost floor and one at the ground floor. In the top one there is, apart from information posters about Tolkien’s story writing, a sample of his books, Gandalf’s costume and a giant cloth Ring. On two walls there are painted quotes from his books and third wall depicts the front of a hobbit house. In the bottom room there are posters about his life in Birmingham and a TV, where visitors can watch a documentary about the writer at special occasions in his life.
Upon leaving the mill we went to 246 Wake Green Road, a house Tolkien lived in the first two or three years upon their arrival to Birmingham from South Africa. The house stands almost opposite the mill pool. Then we tried to find the entrance to Moseley Bog. Because I lost the map of the park that I downloaded before this trip into my tablet, we asked a by-passer from whom we received misleading information. Thus, we walked all the way along Wake Green Rd to a school until we realized there was no gate in the fence on this side. At one spot, where the fence was broken down, it seemed there once might have been one, but it was all grown over with weeds and no path was visible there. So, I had to download it again there and then we saw that the entrance is from Pensby Close. There are many entwined paths across the park, some of them just dirt paths, some made of wood that contravene my attempts to imagine child Tolkien playing there. Coming to an open-space hill with a view on Moseley houses, we met a retired man and chatted with him for almost an hour. It was a good opportunity to practice my English, as shopping does not allow for a longer conversation and the other guests at our hostels rather kept to themselves.
Afterwards, our steps led through Yardley Wood Road, Coldbath Road, Brook Lane, and Addison Road (another one?!) to High Street at which stands St Dunstan’s Church. The old building Tolkien used to go to for mass with his mom and brother no longer exists, but there is a new modern church built in its place. A further up High Street we turned to Station Road that got us to Westfield Road where, at number 86, the Tolkien’s lived in 1901. Then we followed High Street again until it turned into Alcester Road. At the turn of century the Tolkien family lived at 214 Alcester Road, but that house does not exist anymore as well. I was not even able to spot the new same-numbered house even though I carefully read numbers on all the houses by the road. The span including this particular number was skipped, being probably assigned to houses in some side street. Although, thinking about it later I thought I glimpsed a house somewhat distant from the highway with a blue plaque on it. But I did not want to go back there because my friend was already too tired. I definitely must come here again and inspect the place closer some other time. Instead, I spotted a jewellery and miscellaneous shop named Smeagol’s. However, it was closed.
Because we were both tired, we rested at St Anne’s Church, another one the Tolkien’s used to go to while living in the neighbourhood, in Park Hill street. That was our last sight that day. We walked all the way back to the centre along the Alcester Road and Belgrave Middleway where there was a lot of work going on on the road. And we were to witness some more the next day on Bristol Road. It seemed that half of Birmingham is dug up. We walked 23 km in 7,5 hours that day.
Day 6 – King Edward’s School
There was only one Tolkien-related sight left for our last day of this Tolkien pilgrimage, the remains of his old school. This day it got perceptibly colder, especially while the sun was hidden behind clouds, so we wore long trousers and jumpers. We walked down the dug up Bristol Road and then turned to Wellington Road because I wanted to pass Edgbaston Park from the West (and well, its name connects to New Zealand and the Tolkien-inspired films). This part of the town seems to be inhabited by richer people because there were big houses, so unlike the copy-paste rows of typical British houses (It was only later that day at the Birmingham Museum that I learnt that the uniformity of the houses was accounted for by the deliberate expansion of the town in the first half of 20th century when town grew twice as big in the span of 30 years). And it was significantly cleaner. We stopped for while at the Vale Pool and then went straight to King Edward’s School at Edgbaston Park Road. The old building Tolkien used to go to stood actually in New Street in the town centre, but it became a fire risk and had to be demolished in 1936, after 100 years of existence. Only the chapel survived and was moved to the new place here in Edgbaston. As school grounds are not usually publicly accessible, I expected there to be some reception where we would ask for permission to see it. But nothing such existed. The gate was wide open, maybe because there was some reconstruction going on in the main building, so we just walked in and, not knowing whether to inform anyone of our presence there, we went to the chapel. From 2014 to 2018 it holds an exhibition in anniversary of World War I, but it was closed at that time. Later I read on their website that it was due to it being prepared for the last stage of the exhibition, as its contents were changed every two years to present different stages of the war. What a pity! I would like to have seen it.
From there we went to Old Joe, the world’s tallest free-standing clock tower that is situated in the middle of the University of Birmingham square. The university claims that this too might have been an inspiration to Tolkien’s Two Towers. We visited the Lapworth Museum of Geology where we spent about an hour, then waked all the way back along Bristol Road to the town centre and spent another 2 hours at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery at Victoria’s Square. It is very good that the entrance to British museums funded by the ministry of culture (I don’t remember the exact name of the institution in charge, but in the simplest way it can be termed thus) is free. In Slovakia we only practice this on the first Sunday in a month yet. I hope our politicians get inspired by the UK in this, because then more people, who do not do so now for financial reasons, would be able to visit the museums.
In the afternoon the sun shone bright and it got hot again, but in the evening, soon after we left the museum, it started raining heavily, so we had to hide ourselves at the Waterstone’s 5-story bookshop. Both of us being bookaholics, we spent over an hour there, during what time the storm was over. Then we went to our hostel to pack and prepare for the next day travelling home. Including our strolling through the museum exhibitions and bookshop, we walked 20km in 10 hours, making it about 116km in 6 days altogether.
We were lucky to have exceptionally good weather for the major part of our stay in England. It only got slightly cooler on Wednesday when the temperatures dropped significantly lower and it started to be windy and rainy on the day of our departure. But we did not mind that because we spent the day travelling in a bus and waiting at the airport. The weather also prevented our take-off on time. We were already seated in the plane and it seemed as if we would take off as scheduled, but when the time came the captain announced we cannot fly because of a storm in Germany. So, we had to stay in the plane on land for another hour. But what can one do about that. Better be late than crash in a storm. This time I sat at the window so I watch the clouds and land below us and that made it for me. This was the best holiday of my life and I can’t wait to get back some day.