Beside You

 

If there's one thing I miss about the city of my birth, Birmingham; at least of its cultural attributes, it's the Ikon Gallery. Originally started as a kind of art collective in the mid-1960's; a peripatetic travelling show for living arts and artists, it has grown and mutated over the decades from humble beginnings to Grade One gallery status, capable of showing the very best that the Arts can offer.

At the time I and my mates from school discovered Ikon, it was based in Swallow Street, just off Hill Street, and situated behind the main Post Office building in what I've recently discovered was a disused mortuary. We used to hang around the place regularly, particularly Saturdays, and I always considered it to be the coolest, most magical little haven of culture there ever was. It was here that most of us bought our copies of Penguin Modern Poets 'The Mersey Sound'.

From Swallow Street it moved into the [old-new] New Street Station Shopping Centre, near where I later worked as a salesman at Photomarkets; into a two-level, glass-fronted unit which managed to be sleek but nearly as inviting as Swallow Street. Ikon was getting glossier, but the eclecticism of it's showing praxis was still there, concentrating as they still do, on living artists. In 1978, the gallery relocated to John Bright Street, near the Alexandra Theatre; the café of which became the second home of the Birmingham Artists' Group, of which I was a member until we moved to North Wales in 1980.

It was through Ikon that I discovered the work of Andrew Logan: first through a show at the New Street gallery [I think] and then because the café at the John Bright Street gallery housed a couple of his pieces while the group used to meet there. I put together the B.A.G group show catalogue and produced several of our newsletters in the eighteen months or so leading up to our move to Wales, but sadly lost contact with the group after leaving.

Fast-forward to the mid-nineties, and we are holidaying in a cottage just outside Welshpool. Our son, James was about five years old. We decided to take a trip out to Berriew, and visit the Andrew Logan Museum: housed in a disused squash court just out of the centre of the hamlet. I think this was the second time we'd holidayed down there, but we've returned to the area time and again most years since; usually across the border in Shropshire. The visit to the museum cemented a lifelong love of the creative arts in James, and we make a return pilgrimage to the place as often as we can.

Over the years of holidaying in South Shropshire, mostly in Clun and around Bishops' Castle, we've frequented a number of notable hostelries; principally The White Horse and The Sun at Clun; The Three Tuns and The Six Bells in Bishops Castle. The Horse, The Tuns and The Bells all are breweries, too: all producing very fine beers. The place we always used to gravitate to in Bishops' Castle, though, was The Six Bells, which in those days was owned and run by its Head Brewer, Big Nev.

As his name suggests, Nev is a big lad, and was a fine host and brewer of good things. Sadly, twenty-odd years as a landlord proved enough for Nev, and he and his wife moved on to be closer to the grand-kids: ironically to just up the coast from us here in North Wales. The point of this ramble is the connection between all of these apparently unconnected things: the thing is, the first time we visited the current Ikon gallery at its location in the now chic canal side area of Brindley Place in Birmingham, there was Big Nev's photograph on the wall, alongside a snow shovel; which was apparently his contribution to a community art project, the central aim and thrust of which is now lost to my memory. Strange but true - it's so circular, it almost chimes [geddit?].