Cruising from Warstock to Hockley Heath. Another short day, as they are wont to be on Sundays as I rush to find a mooring for the week. I was due to catch a bus just after 2pm from the Wharf pub at Hockley Heath, to get back to Birmingham to catch a train to Norfolk to get back to work.
So I swore I'd set off before 9.30am, and true to form I started at 10.30am. But it was a predictable cruise, with no locks, and I made it in 2 1/2 hours.
It's two years since I came this way, but I remember it as if it were - well, a couple of years back. The towpath on this stretch is still difficult in places - indeed, impassable at times.
But it had its share of walkers, and there was a glorious, memorable moment when a tiny shi-tzu roared past, outpacing the bicycles of its owners. I've never seen such a tiny dog run so fast!
Two years ago, this site was a morass of mud in open fields, and I could sense that changes were afoot. Busy workmen were driving a huge amount of piling into a morass of mud by the canal. "What the dickens is that?", I thought. "A new marina?" I was half-right. It was Dickens Heath, in the early stages of construction...
Well, since then it looks close to completion, a fretwork of construction cranes towering over a nearly-built canalside development. It looks like a waterways palace, neo-classical and imposing, but far too crammed-in to be elegant. A staircase (looking less palatial than it might, in that crammed setting) sweeps down to the water, where the 'wharf' looks discouragingly inhospitable to boats. Fair enough - it's a long way from completion.
I'd not noticed Dickens Heath the last time I came here, but no missing it now. It's a modern suburb, halfway to being a new town of 2,000 people. Solihull Online here describes Dickens Heath, and it's a fascinating development, underway for over ten years:
The Council finally approved the principle of the Dickens Heath project in December 1992. At the outset, the Council decided that Dickens Heath should be given special treatment. Rather than it become simply a large housing estate in the country, the view was taken that the new settlement should possess the features and attributes of a traditional village.
Only in the last couple of years has the masterplan finally embraced the canal, with perhaps the first all-new 'wharf' to be built on the Stratford canal in a century or more. But what sort of wharf will it be? A wharf, as I've pointed out before, is a place where boats stop to spend money; once in the form of loading fees, now in a more leisured sense.
I can't help but fear this 'wharf' will end up as more of a water feature, and the Solihull Online story doesn't say much about the canal at all. And yet, the plans for the whole development make it look pretty idyllic; well, as much as a brand new suburb can be 'idyllic'. It's intended to be a community, not a dormitory. Whether the community will embrace the canal remains to be seen. But what of 'Dickens Wharf'? Will the boats be welcome to tie up?
I hope the planners don't have their heady minds set on creating (sigh) a nearby Dickens Marina in a field instead. The planners here are John Simpson and Partners, responsible for some intriguing and much-sought-after 21st Century country villages (such as Poundbury in Dorset, the brainchild of the Prince of Wales), and also the prized (and somewhat Venetian) redevelopment of Diglis Basin in Worcester. I feel reassured.
Further on, the towpath around here - apart from exactly at the point of the Hockley Heath Wharf mooring - is as muddy as a hippo's bathtub and as bad as it comes on the Stratford canal.
I tied up at Hockley Heath Wharf at 1pm, and caught the bus to Birmingham an hour later. There's only one other boat there now, and it seems to be deserted and lonely. What a shame it's not a community of boaters, as it was when I was last here in 2004 (see pic, right/above).
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