Another Brick...

 

Continuing on the theme of my disappearing - inevitable, I know - youth; or at least the landmarks that still fix that period in my mind, I refer you to the potential destruction of one of my favourite haunts, and a beautiful piece of 1930s architecture to boot: Thimblemill Baths in what is today Warley, West Midlands. I used to swim a heck of a lot when I was a youth, as well as cycling daily. I had a round of baths through the week: Saturday was Harborne, where my uncle Godfrey and I would just power through length after length for an hour or hour and-a-half; Sunday was the lovely Rolfe Street baths in Smethwick for a more leisurely pootle about in the warm waters of the small pool - I could do two lengths underwater there, and it was the place I learned to swim - although I did once try the big pool there which was bloody freezing! 

On Mondays, when I was still at school, at least, it was back to Harborne; but Thursday evenings were spent at Thimblemill, the biggest pool of them all; not quite Olympic-sized, but pretty darned big. As time went on there were other pools I used to visit, but the two best were the biggest and the smallest: Thimblemill and Rolfe Street. The Rolfe Street building has long since been dismantled and rebuilt at the Black Country Museum at Tipton: however, dear reader, Rolfe Street was in Smethwick and therefore emphatically not part of the Black Country, despite the softening of boundary concepts these days. Those of us that hail from those parts care about such stuff!

There is a Change.org petition out there, which aims to preserve the building from the potential ravages of some anonymous, dickhead private developer, when it hits the auctions. The Peoples' Orchestra want to save it as a concert hall. It was famous locally for decades as a music venue: even The Who played there in the early days. For years, a floor used to be put in over the drained pool for performances and dances: Jane went there in the sixties, and my parents in the fifties before that; so the renaissance of the place as a concert venue seems appropriate. Pity about the pool, but hey, you can't have everything. Please support the petition: it really is a worthy one, and would at least knock a brick out of the wall occluding my youth...