A View

One of those impulse pictures - a vista catches your eye; point, click, walk on. Only now have I discovered I was looking at something with more substance than I thought

We are grandparenting. Trying to be useful, but really just wanting to be present, to wonder at the sight of those early days of trying to understand the world. Mother and baby crave fresh air, sunlight and exercise, so we follow one of the city's green lungs - the riverside paths into the centre. This is one of over 570 parks that the city administers

I now know that this amenity exists because of the Victorian ideal of philanthropy that existed along side the unfettered capitalist model that allowed a few individuals to make vast wealth while the majority lived in squalor. A man called John Ryland and his son Samuel made a fortune in Birmingham from 'wire drawing' in the 18th century. The family moved to a country estate south of Warwick but retained their links to Birmingham town (as it then was)

Samuel's daughter Louisa inherited the wealth but she had no family and took it upon herself to give a lot of it away - £13 million, in contemporary value. This included the 30 hectares of land we were exercising through, for the establishment of a public park as "a source of healthful recreation to the people of Birmingham". She would have been delighted by our use of it, I assume. The town wanted to name it after her, but she refused, so it is simply named after the land it was founded on: Cannon Hill - so-called because it was used by the Royalist army en route to their catastrophic annihilation at the Battle of Naseby over 200 years earlier. The strange ways that history lingers 

The bridge was built soon after the donation, in 1875, spanning a neck in the municipal pond. You can hire a swan-shaped pedalo to voyage up to it if you wish - don't disturb the cormorants in the middle of the lake. Take care; in 2021 the bridge was assessed to be in poor repair and in need of renovation. Post-Covid, post city bankruptcy, I expect it is a low priority behind social services, youth support, libraries, museums, arts funding and all the other things that the city can no longer support. If, like me, you think public ownership of social amenities is preferable to a reliance on private beneficence, you might need to stand on a bridge in a park and think through your position, in the face of this lunacy