Annie Murray, author

Scrapbook

A Walk through Brum

Imagining Birmingham in the past takes quite a bit of effort if you weren’t there to see it. In the old inner city wards you can catch glimpses of the city’s past, but there are also streets and whole neighbourhoods which have been wiped off the map. Walking round some areas with a map from 1918 or the 1930s is to feel surrounded by ghosts.

Recently I took a long walk round Nechells, Duddesdon and Saltley and back to the city centre, looking for a sense of the past and for the heart of my next book. Nechells feels, at least in appearance, to be an almost completely different place from the one I see in old pictures or on maps. Where is the power station? And all those tightly knit streets?

But here are a few pictures I took that day, looking for the past of the old streets, between the ring ways and high-rise blocks of flats.

Click on each photo to enlarge the image.