Birmingham

Susan and I spent August this year going to cultural institutions around London. Then in September, we decided that we’d make a pilgrimage or two. Our first adventure involved going to Shropshire to see the home town of one of our favourite English poets, A.E. Housman. Unfortunately, this effort also gave us a good taste of British rail travel, which consisted in this case of taking three and a half hours for a 45-minute trip to Birmingham, so we decided to stop the night and spend part of the next day exploring the town.

The Bull Ring
I had first visited Birmingham with Susan in 2004, when David Sless had a bunch of us to Coventry to talk about health information design. We had a few hours to spare when all the dust had settled, so we tootled over to Birmingham to take a look. She snapped a photo of me in front of a giant bronze bull that gives its name to the central shopping complex. I did my best to look as though I had no idea I was standing in front of this giant, charging animal, but I’m afraid the photo itself doesn’t quite manage to convey my fecklessness, since it is, after all, a statue of a rampaging bull, and not the real thing.

Pre-Raphaelites Galore
If there is one thing you can say about Birmingham, it is that they have an art gallery that is worth the trip. It is quite large and impressive, with a very good bronze statue of Satan in the lobby, and enough work by the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood to make your head spin. If you’ve seen it in a book about the pre-Raphaelites, odds are good that the original is in the museum at Birmingham. Or rather, since many of the pre-Raphaelites had no compunction about painting the same picture more than once, it might be more accurate to say that one of the versions will be there. Perhaps, for instance, the Rossetti Prosperine where Jane Morris has red hair.