16 CONTEXT 178 : DECEMBER 2023 MICHAEL TAYLOR Fringe benefits The urban fringe is a distinct type of countryside, whose often surprising and sometimes strange sense of place deserves to be celebrated and helped to evolve. The urban fringe is an untidy place: neither completely urban nor entirely rural. The sewage treatment works stands next to the distribution park, the trading estate pushes into farmland, birdsong competes with the clatter of shunting freight wagons. Exploring the fringe means negotiating concrete and tarmac, palisade fencing with Keep Out notices and rank vegetation. But this fringe environment has long been a literary landscape. In 1973 Richard Mabey celebrated the wildlife of the outer reaches of London in The Unofficial Countryside. Psychogeographer Iain Sinclair completed a walk around the M25 in the last days of the 1990s, publishing his sometimes outspoken impressions as London Orbital. Poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts explored ‘England’s last true wilderness’ in their book Edgelands, published in 2011. In Outskirts (2017) architectural writer John Grindrod charts the history of the green belt in which he grew up. Close to the places that form the main focus of this article, Lynsey Hanley drew on the experience of her early life in the large local authority housing estate of Chelmsley Wood in Estates (2007) and Respectable (2016). Whitacre Heath is about 10 miles north-east of the centre of Birmingham. For train commuters from the east, it marks the point where the train slows a little on the journey towards the city or gathers speed for the return journey through the north Warwickshire countryside. The railway passes through the valley formed by the River Tame and its tributaries the Blythe and the Cole. The elegant hilltop spire of the church of St Peter and St Paul Coleshill is a common landmark for drivers and rail passengers through the eastern edges of Birmingham. Northward from here the valley of the Tame is a patchwork of lakes in old gravel workings. Birmingham has been extending its influence over Whitacre since the second half of the 19th century. Shustoke Reservoir, just to the east, was built in the 1880s. Nearby is Whitacre Waterworks, built in 1872 to the design of Chamberlain and Martin (favoured architects to the unrelated Joseph Chamberlain). This is Coleshill town and quarry from the north. The town was a coaching stop on the road from London to Chester. (All photos: Michael Taylor) Coleshill Manor Office Park: the Wingfield-Digbys built their new house in 1872–73.
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