So ordinary they named it twice
One of the highlights of my year is the annual Flatpack film festival, now in its eighth year. It’s run by Ian Francis, a friend, who like me works from an office in the Custard Factory in Digbeth. Flatpack delights in the place-based nature of its events, with an eclectic range of films appearing in pop-up venues such as pubs, shopping arcades, railway arches, and churches, as well as in more conventional cinemas. The industrial/bohemian district of Digbeth, in and around the Custard Factory, always has a concentration of Flatpack venues. But for the last three years there has been a second cluster in the very different Colmore Business District, home to banks and accountancy firms. Someone should do an anthropological study of how the diverse programmes are received in these two contrasting urban cultures, a mile apart.
In fact my favourite event this year was in neither of these places, but at the Midlands Arts Centre (the mac), in the sylvan setting of Cannon Hill Park, three miles up the river Rea from the Custard Factory. It was the 1991 film about the poet and jazz pianist Roy Fisher, directed by Tom Pickard, called Birmingham’s What I Think With.
Fisher was born in Handsworth, although he left the city several years ago, and his poetry has famously documented Birmingham’s gritty fabric, including its canals and hidden rivers, and has lamented its cyclical self-destruction. In the film he explains its title by saying, typically laconically: ‘It’s not made for that sort of job, but it’s what they gave me’, using the analogue of a Brummagem screwdriver (a hammer, in case you don’t know).
Fisher is someone to be treasured: someone not an urban designer, but who understands some important truths about urban design, learnt from the point of view of a person in the street, like Jane Jacobs. As a child he became interested in street maps: ‘…the feeling that you could, in fact, get up above the thing, and know the story of it’. The film is loosely constructed around a narrative in which Fisher returns to his childhood’s terraced house in Handsworth, where he finds that its original panelled front door has been replaced by its latest occupants. He asks if he can have the old door, left out in the back garden, and is then filmed carrying the door on his back through inner city streets, along canal towpaths, past Spaghetti Junction, through shopping malls, and across industrial wastelands. It’s a Via Dolorosa, with a nod towards Eric Sykes’s film The Plank, but really it’s an excuse to record an eccentric urban travelogue. Intercut with the Stations of the Door, we see Fisher playing piano excellently, reminiscent sometimes of Thelonious Monk, and reading his poems, including Birmingham river, about the Tame, the Dark River of the Anglo-Saxons.
…caught on the right shoulder by the wash that runs under Birmingham, a slow, petty river with no memory of an ancient name, a river named Rea, meaning river, and misspelt at that. Before they merge, they’re both steered straight, in channels that force them clear of the gasworks. And the Tame gets marched out of town in the police calm that hangs under the long legs of the M6.
The resigned voice of a university teacher of English can also be heard there, I think: ‘… Rea, meaning river, and misspelt at that’. Flatpack also showed at the mac a video installation commissioned from the artist David Rowan called (misleadingly, as it’s the Rea) The Dark River, partly inspired by Fisher’s poem. Rowan, wearing industrial-strength waders, set up his static camera in the centre of the Rea at several locations, pointing up the river, and let the camera run. The result is a series of silent screens, each with a magical combination of the compositional stillness of the unfrequented river with the gentle rippling of the sunlit water, and the occasional driver crossing a road bridge, probably unaware of the presence beneath of ‘a slow, petty river with no memory of an ancient name’.
As featured in URBAN DESIGN 131 Summer 2014
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The river Rea at the mac in Cannon Hill Park, looking upstream
The river Rea three miles downstream near the Custard Factory in Digbeth
Joe Holyoak is an architect and urban designer, working in masterplanning, site planning, area regeneration, historic conservation, and community participation.
He is also on the Editorial Board of the URBAN DESIGN journal.