No, not a news article about gun crime in my old neighbourhood. This is a post about my recent wander around my old stomping grounds, Crowmoor in Shrewsbury, where I went to school and played in the streets with my mates. I lived in this area between the ages of 4 and 11 so I have many a good memory of the place. Even events that might have been bad at the time are good memories today, som eof the infrastructure built around my childhood is now gone but as if I’m wearing VR augmented reality goggles I still see the buildings in my view.
Shoot 1 – Ground Based
For the first shoot I chose a Friday afternoon, this being a few days after the tutorial on Tuesday with Euripides in which we discussed ideas for my final project. I loaded up the car with my messenger bag containing my Leica Q3 with the 28mm f/1.7 Summilux lens fixed to it, and my Leica M6 with the Elmarit 28mm f/2.8 lens on the front. The latter I can change for a 35mm lens if I want to but I choose to retain the same focal length. Euripides and I had discussed this as part of my tutorial, and whilst I normally always shoot on these cameras with 28mm lenses I sometimes pick up my Canon R5 Mkii with it’s various lenses and experiment. But for today and possibly the rest of the project it will be 28mm all the way.
Caradoc Steel Houses
I drove around the area before deciding where I wanted to park and I left the car in Flagwall, a little side street that I would have walked through on my way to friends houses or school in the late 70s and early 80s. From here I would walk across the road and up the alleyway between the School and the Church up into Ragleth Gardens where I could see the steel houses that I wrote about in this post from three years ago. Wow, three years has gone by so fast. These are B.I.S.F. houses that were post-war pre-fabricated houses and feature in a few places across the country. We have a couple of estates in Shrewsbury where these houses still exist, and some of them were being covered in cladding the last time I shot there. Many of them look like something other than the steel houses they are, whilst others, probably in private ownership are left as original. Some of the reasons for cladding these homes in housing associations will be related to energy loss and retention of heat etc. Some of the houses that have not been touched , have seen little love on the exterior for many years.
Along the way up the alley, past the huge tree that was there when I was at Primary School I smell a particularly familiar odour. The leaves falling from the trees have a smell that reminds me of sticky autumn leaves, that we used to pile up and jump into, someitmes off our bikes. There were always some leaves in there that were covered in a sticky sap which had come from the tree itself. This smell always takes me back. Nearby was a cat sitting on a fence, that moved to the roof of a shed as I neared it. It was a lovely cat so I stopped for a couple of shots here before popping out into the steel houses.
As well as some wide shots of the things in front of me, I wanted to capture a bit of detail that I could “zoom in” on in a metaphorical sense, as if to get nearer to my history. There are walls here with peeling off render, fence posts with cracked paint hiding the rust trying to escape, and paint peeling from garage doors.
I walked on into Caradoc Crescent, where my father and his siblings once lived as a young man, there are some steel houses here showing that little has been done for them in the past and I notice that the railway line goes behind a row, there is a fence with rubbish strewn around it. On the fence, is a child’s pushchair/buggy, hanging on the persuasively sharp spikes atop the galvanised steel structure. On the other side of the fence is the yellow hard top off a Cosy Coupe child’s car and a full size wheel and tyre, and some old discarded fake grass carpet. These sit atop the embankment leading down to the railway track so i wait for a locomotive to pass through.
Belvidere Tree
From here I move towards the back entrance of my secondary school, or where it used to be until two years ago it was razed to make way for a car park. The replacement school now opened fully sits on the other side of the lane that I’m now walking down. My aim is to visit the huge cedar tree that is the emblem of the school and the same tree we used to clown about on, or in back in the day. Rope swings used to hang from the branches and people used to climb as high as possible for a giggle. I could find no way into the field down this alleyway so will need to investigate further.
I return back to the entrance of the new school and wander in through the gates, there are no students about , it’s 5:15pm. I wander into the playground surrounded by numbers on the fences. 8E, 9L, 7I all relate to the forms in the school and this must be the fire/emergency muster point. When I was in the secondary school for 5 years I was always in the E form, from 1E to 5E but these have now changed with the altering of the years structures, to 7E to 11E. The letters for forms come from BELVID, the start of the school name, Belvidere but there were only four forms (I,E,N, and T) of them during my time there between 1984 and 1989. Here I can see the Cedar Tree on the other side of the fence along with the top of the railway embankment that will feature in another shoot.
There is also a tall tree that I remember someone making into the top point of a zipline, but foolishly it was at far too steep an angle so the first traveller was quite badly injured upon hitting the fence post the rope was tied to at the foot of the slide. It wasn’t me, I know what you’re thinking. Seeing this didnt put me off ziplines and I have done a few of them in the years since this.
Brimful Of Asha
Now it was time to head back towards the car so I decided to walk past the church and the corner shop before passing my old house and doubling back to where it was parked. I’ve never visited this church, not even for a rummage/jumble sale but the architecture of it has been an ever-present feature of my environment. There were some biscuits in wrappers stabbed onto the prongs of the fence and a cross as a fence decoration. Across the road was the shop, known by us as “Brown’s” when we were little. A 10p mixture here was a great experience when we took back a Corona bottle for the 10p return fee. If you had some more pocket money you could buy chocolate cigarettes that were packaged exactly like real fags in cellophane, foil and even wrapped individually in paper.
My Dad refused to go this shop for ever after Mrs Brown, the owner, made an old lady put back her loaf of bread as she was 1 pence short. A man of morals was my Dad, but I don’t know why he didn’t just give up the penny of his own cash to help her out. Outside this shop today though were three girls or young women. I wanted to capture an image of the shop but they were stood outside like Jay and Silent Bob so I waited, and waited for them to clear off. They weren’t going to go anytime soon, so I said to them what I was doing and that I wanted to take a photo of the shop, they could either stay there or move if they didn’t want to be in the picture. Obviously I was polite about it and they said they would stay where they were as they weren’t bothered. Another of their friends was dropped off by her mum and as I was taking the picture she strolled into frame. Her mum was shouting out of the car window trying to figure out what I was doing so I wandered over to her and assured her that I wasn’t a weirdo and I was taking pictures of places from my youth for a university project, she remembered it when it was Brown’s too and seemed happy that I was being upfront and honest. I thanked her for checking though and then continued down towards my house.
SLAM
Back in the day we would play SLAM or WEMBLEY on the wall at the end of our terrace, where you take it turns to kick the ball at a wall. The ball cannot stop moving and you can only kick it once, you can use deflections to get it to the wall but if you miss or the ball stops before you get to it you count up one on your score. So first miss is S or W, the next failure is met by adding L or E onto the score until you reach the full word and you’re knocked out of the competition. My friends, brothers and I played here for hours, often getting shouted at by the neighbour behind the playing area for rattling his fence for a rebound shot or even losing the ball over his fence into the garden. He was miserable and grumpy but at the time I didn’t realise why that might be the case. Doh. The space in front of this wall is not that large and there is a No Ball Games sign on there too, as the noise reverberates through into the house on the other side of the bricks.
Now back through the car park at the rear of these houses I was headed to my car and there were a few more photos that I managed to find, another ball games sign, some raspberries and different views of the three storey terrace I spent some my formative years in.
Shoot 2 – Aerial and Ground
The next day I decided to revisit the primary school with my DJI Drone as the school is all fenced off these days. This is obviously for the right reasons as the kids in the school should be provided as much protection as possible. This means I cannot just pull into the car park and have a walk around the school grounds, even when the school is closed and no kids are there. Therefore I choose to park in an entrance to a car park near the Flagwall parking spot yesterday. I remove the drone, the controller and the battery from it’s little carrier bag before assembling and setting everything up. I launch the drone from the roof of the car and send it straight up and over the school.
I take a few wide shots first to have a look around and see what might be possible. I see the quadrangles where we used to play at break times and the old assembly hall, where the parquet wooden block floor stilll seems to be the same as it was when I sat on it in my short trousers.
The entrances to the areas where the toilets used to be are still there but they are dressed up with some murals and posher roofing than would have been when we were there. The female toilets were opposite the male and I remember my brother Mike having the tip of his finger amputated after he’d got it caught in the door of the girls toilets. I remember this as I got the time off school as a result to go with him. Here is a photo of him still healing up.Ha ha.
As I was flying around the sky above the school, I noticed that there were a few items not immediately obvious to me from the ground. There was a basketball court, a tennis net and a couple of paintings on the playground that caught my eye so I was moving the drone around at different heights trying to capture viewpoints of these installations.
Back To Ground
Bringing the drone back to the Home Point and landing it near the car I packed it up and prepared to have a wander around somewhere else with my cameras. As I was sat in the vehicle packaging everything else up I noticed some movement in the wing mirror and a young man crept out from underneath a broken garage door with a backpack before disappearing off into the distance. I wondered what might be behind the hanging off door, would it be a drugs distribution den, or a squat where a young homeless man spends his nights trying to keep warm. I decided then that it was time to revisit the scene of a significant event from my younger years.
When I was learning to drive my Great Aunt Milborough (great name huh?) donated her old car to me, it was a brown Morris Marina that had more than a couple of issues. I used it to learn how to drive and then it lasted a while before I changed up to a Ford Escort Mk iii. On one occasion my friends and I were driving around the town, as we used to, and I was travelling a bit too fast for a humpback bridge caught some air and landed a bit heavily tearing a hole in my petrol tank on a half brick that was in the road. This was right next to the driving test centre where I’d recently passed my driving test and when a friend in the car behind let me know via CB radio that there was a fluid dripping out I went and parked it on my Great Aunt’s drive as it was close. CB Radio? Yes, we didn’t have mobile phones back then so we made use of some FM CB radios between a few of us.
The result of this was the fire brigade being called out to an escaping petrol leak going into the drains at the bottom of my “Aunty’s drive” I was in trouble with her and with the fire brigade. Oops.
I wanted to go and take a look at the bridge and have a walk around the area again as it was also on the walking route into town from my home and I would l have spent a lot of time hanging around on my bike too with my mates. I parked at the old driving test centre, which is now a nursery, closed at the time, and then went for a stroll. I saw the bridge and the area around it before making some photos and sound recordings of this and the nearby underpass which was not in existence when I was growing up. There weren’t many photographs around here, and I captured some of the shadow in the underpass which I quite liked as well as some of a small group of kids chilling in the dark with their pushbikes.
Reflection
I’m happy with about four or five of these shots, that is not a bad hit rate for me. The drone shots of the playground tennis court net and numbers are a winner, as well as the close in shots of the degradation of paint and rust on a few different surfaces as I walked around. There are many more photos than you see here and with a bit of hindsight I may look back and think more of some others too.
It was good using a 35mm colour film (Kodak Gold 200) to capture images also and I metered them correctly and then backed off the aperture a stop to intentionally overexpose by a stop. This was done due to the photos I made on holiday in the US Road Trip all seemingly being a little underexposed. I was aiming at the shadows and metering for them this time a little more religiously but then adding a stop of light to it. I’ll see if I can process this film in Uni the next time I am there, or get it done at Jessop’s in the town.
The digital shots are nice too, a couple that I liked were the green fence with the blue sky and green playing field behind it, the brown garage doors too. On the whole I think this is a good start to a collection of images revisiting my youth and the places that shaped me. Some will go nicely into the review in Week 4 an d be a proving ground for the idea to see if it something that my tutor and the other tutors are into. For me though it is about capturing these sights, as well as the memories that it stirs up in my brain. The smells and sounds are also important to the project too.
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