To your right, you see glorious Cheapside. Factories and warehouses to let with flexible terms.They say that this area will eventually be regenerated, and this street, being closer to the main drag may be ripe for the pickings. Already, the café at the post office hosts storytelling and poetry evenings, serving drinks, snacks and light refreshments; further up the road is the Edge, for arts and artists to congregate and further on, The Fountain, open to the residents and the workers within the area. A cosy pub, no nonsense. Trespassers arrive and the doors shut behind them. The regulars turn and observe, and the trespasser can cheerfully order a pint of lager and some cheese and onion crisps. You begin to walk up the hill in wonderment, but decide to stop and sit on a bollard to roll a fag. The building to your left looks like a possible bathhouse. A swimming pool in Cheapside maybe not, but a Turkish Baths? Rather like the Ford Meteor Garage in Moseley or the disused dance hall in King’s Heath, both possible venues, cinemas, gig venues, arts centers? Up Cheapside there’s already plenty of offices and warehouses, it more recently boasts a Costcutter, a chippy and a cornershop. No need for another Tescos or more flats. No. There needs to be something new, something different, something for the residents and the outsiders to get their teeth into. Maybe even they’ll get used to the diagetic sounds that come from the quiet area. As you start walking again, a skipyard belches smoke. Wooden pallets ablaze, its firestarters stand around, warming themselves against the chill February afternoon. A half demolished building cries from your right, the smoke and soot cry out, face torn in two, locked in perpetual agony. Else Francis Bacon is alive and full of distemper and living in Cheapside.

Bacon would have been proud of the free art gallery on Bradford Street. Take a look…

Artists unknown but the quality speaks for itself. A cyber-lady, face obscured, pvc legs akimbo. Super-cool. Is that meant to be Corey Feldman as Golden Boy? Resplendent in spectacles and monochrome? So good it speaks for itself twice. An alien baldhead? And a Judge Great helmet, together with a motif that has been placed there by the forthcoming robot destructors, ready to obliterate Birmingham’s human populace. All there. A few tags screaming for recognition amongst poetry and quotations make you think of the putter-therer; ‘Keep my feet on the ground and my head in the clouds’ and better still;

But one of the finest free art collections in the city obviously is. The Kid dangled himself about for a bit in his ill-fitting school uniform that looked crap anyway. He knew it, the teachers knew it, his peers knew it, and his parents knew it. Everybody knew it. He got his fags out, and stood on for a while on Bradford Street, swigging his energy drink. Observing all around him, the creator of his own destiny, for the while. Blowing smoke out. Tomorrow, another day, back to face the consequences. He got his marker pen out and created. ‘Classroom’s not for me’. He’s a bright lad, the apostrophe is in its right place, as if that matters in the Great Scheme of Things. No, The Kid knew. Looking down the road, at the White Swan and beyond, The Anchor. Up the road, The Adam and Eve. Another swig. This city’s mine, he thought. He knew it. ‘Classroom’s not for me.’ In his few years, he’d seen it all. Nothing they could teach him. Ducking round the corner, he saw the prime minister’s face staring up at him.

Weather-beaten and worn, slashed with knives, torn from side to side. The Kid wondered; ‘Is this what I’m here for? Is this all there is?’ ‘Stop the cuts’ the poster pleaded. The Kid drank, and soaked in the image for a minute. He chucked his milkshake on the floor, spat, and got the 50 back into Balsall Heath. But the journey doesn’t stop there.

The Abacus Apartments stand erect on Alcester Street. But you’d think they’d be proud of their position, facing the derelict building and the Spotted Dog pub, but they’re not. Instead, they stand ashamed. Abashed. The bricks and mortar know that the pub used to be a thriving epicenter of Irish tradition and punk rock in-the-garden, but a few of its inhabitants had better ideas. And the apartments looked on in horror, as noise-abatement orders were issued, and the street sang not no more, but a little quietly, like poor church mice. The apartments thought;

‘No, this is not what our intention was. We wanted our lot to be vibrant, sexy, hip to new ideas and existing avenues. Look at the building opposite, with its smashed in windows, and weed strewn floors. I told you we shouldn’t have mocked, as we were being loaded out of the pallets. I told you. Now look at us. Standing proud, but everybody hates us. We’re pariahs. It’s not our fault.’

If you listen carefully on a still day, you can hear the low cry of the Abacus apartments, wishing they could invert themselves like the house in Poltergeist, but they know they shouldn’t. They just stand there, doomed to mockery and snide comments, whilst the pub opposite proudly boasts the name of the landlord and the landlord’s mantra, ‘Licensed to sell all intoxicating liquors for consumption on and off the premises.’ The Abacus Apartments also look glumly over the road, at the Rainbow pub. Monday afternoon, the pub should be swarming with hipsters and haircuts, munching on fish finger ciabattas and posing about.

No such luck. A bare floor, well swept. The upmarket lights and fans dangle lifelessly, not really doing anything at all. Bare. There should be bare people in here. But there’s nothing. The games machine doesn’t even bleep. Nobody’s been in here today. The chairs cold, waiting despondantly for the snug warmth of bottoms. The room sighs. The Big Bulls Head down the road was doing a roaring trade today, the air thick with burly chatter and chip grease. Friends and family locked in garrulous chatter, the women swigging manfully from their pints of Carling Cold, and the debate of another one for the road is answered easily with money changing hands over the bar. For a moment, the front bar of the Rainbow feels irritated, and annoyed. But the feeling dissipates as it considers the love and attention that has been tattooed on the bricks of its swaggering cousin, the Rainbow Warehouse…

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By James Kennedy

James Kennedy is a multimedia artist living in Birmingham’s city centre. The below piece is adapted from his forthcoming full length project ‘The Wind’, about re-imagining the city centre as a place of utopia and beauty.
Blog – www.jameskennedycentral.wordpress.com // Links to all the photos taken for this project can be found at; www.flickr.com/photos/james1kennedy