All Together Now? by Mike Carter

Author:Mike Carter [Mike Carter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783351589
Publisher: Guardian Faber Publishing
Published: 2018-02-08T16:00:00+00:00

14

LITTLE LOCAL DIFFICULTIES

(BACK TO WALSALL)

The People’s March for Jobs had taken a rest day in West Bromwich on 17 May 1981. But instead of spending my day off there, I went back to Walsall to have a better look around. I’d been shocked the day before at the way the town had changed in the thirty years since I’d lived there, how shabby and poor and desolate it now seemed.

I’d arranged to meet the leader of the Labour group on the council, Sean Coughlan, in the afternoon, and spent the morning wandering around.

I started off at St Matthew’s Hall, originally Walsall’s first library when it was built in 1830, an amazing building with columns built in Greek Doric style. Now it was a giant Wetherspoons pub.

From here, I walked along Bridge Street, a thriving shopping street three decades ago, but now full of boarded-up units. In the window of a temp agency, I scanned the board advertising for cleaners and care assistants and forklift truck drivers. Most cards carried the figure £7.20, the minimum wage for those aged 25 and over.

I walked into The Crossing at St Paul’s, a church whose ground floor was now converted into a shopping centre, filled with independent little outlets selling jewellery and gift cards, ladies’ clothes and Christian books. From a florist in the corner wafted the sweet scent of gardenias.

The church’s columns and vaulted ceiling had been preserved and incorporated into the new design, split by the three new floors built around the edge of the church, so that looking up I could see the full height of the building, to the glass roof lantern, which flooded the space with light and from which was suspended a giant cross made of green glass.

Upstairs, I knocked on a door with a sign saying ‘church office’. A young woman opened it. I told her that I used to live in the town and that I was retracing a 1981 march.

‘That was the year I was born,’ she said.

The church, she told me, had been facing closure and demolition in the 1990s. A plan had been hatched to save it, which involved converting some of the space to retail and conference rooms. It had reopened in its current form in 1995, with the chapel on the top floor. ‘We can now keep the church open seven days a week,’ she said. ‘Our rental income helps keep our friendship groups for people with mental health issues going. We issue food vouchers for people whose money has been stopped.’

She told me about the relationship the church had with the Glebe Centre, a homeless shelter up the road. ‘There’s been a massive increase in homelessness in the past few years. More women these days as well,’ she said. ‘There are twenty-one food banks in Walsall now. That’s doubled in the last ten years.’

She said that if I wanted to know anything more, I should talk to Andrew, a volunteer, who was working in the next room.

Andrew, now in his mid-fifties, had been born in Walsall.

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