Come to (The City of) Wolverhampton: A Tourist's Guide...
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Come to Wolverhampton! Go on. It's smack in the middle of England but to the left a bit, it rains a whole hell of a lot, it's fairly windy and at some point it was almost certain to become a city. Probably. And now it is! Hooray!
Anyway, there's never been a better time to Come to Wolverhampton! On a train, preferably. You really, really don't want to come by car - not unless you're prepared to risk losing your sanity over the most bizarre road system in Western Europe (with the possible exception of Bristol - "Oh my God - where's the town?").
* On your way in from the railway station, you will doubtless see the Chubb Building. This is the home of the software company responsible for the Iron Maiden "game", Ed Hunter. If you bought that, you might - MIGHT, you understand, I'm not tellling you to or anything - want to stroll up and shout abuse at its creators through their door answerphone. Or you might not.
* Take a stroll up the high street, and see the market stall that has sold the same t-shirts ("1988/92/96/2000/06: BRING THE GAMES TO WOLVERHAMPTON" and "COSTA DEL WOLVERHAMPTON - JUST ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE") for about twenty years! Marvel at the approx. 3,000 loungerie shops! Be sick in the funky public toilets in the Mander Centre (complete with security bloke in a little Space 1999-style control cab)! Better than the Millennium Dome by far.
UPDATE: It's still better than the Millennium Dome, if only by default because the dome doesn't exist anymore. The opening of the Ann Summers' shop brings the loungerie shop total to an astonishing 3,001 and perilously close to critical mass.
* Walk though the passage by St. Peter's to reach the University of Wolverhampton, a fine institution combining high academic aceivement, world-class research capability and a nice student union complex with three bars and a Tekken 3 machine. Two years ago the university came an astonishing 97th out of a survey of 97 British academic institutes. An angry letter seen afterward insists that the reason for this low placing is that the people running the survey were a load of smug, chinless, Old Etonian gits from down south. Well, reading between the lines that's honestly what it says.
UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE!: The university weathered the storm of being declared the least distinguished academic centre in the country in fine style. They now have Silent Scope and Marvel Vs. Capcom in the Student Union - cool!
* Round the back of the University is the tallest building in the town, the Psychology block. It was recently announced that this fine 1950's building, known to literally ones of locals as the "Get Carter block", will be demolished. This is a terrible shame, as not only does the building provide fine aerial views of the town and the surrounding countryside as far as the Malverns, it also contains the funkiest lecture hall in the town (possibly the country), as well as the main student refectory and its vintage 1943 arcade cabinet, which will be sadly missed. Nothing - NOTHING - gives you such a highly charged feeling of incipent power and responsibility as dozing for three-quarters of an hour in a plastic chair in a cafeteria.
UPDATE: The mighty Get Carter block was demolished earlier this year. It's going to be replaced by some kind of unimaginative, low-slung thing with a big green glass bit. Phillesteins!
* See the now-legendary graffiti! In 1986, somebody crudely daubed the words "ZIPPY = S**T" on the side of The Eagle pub in Fordhouses. 15 years later, it's still there, and still causes profound wonderment in local residents as to who "ZIPPY" might be, or indeed, why he/she was considered "S**T"
UPDATE: It's still there! Still no news on who the hell ZIPPY is. Oh yeah, and Fordhouses is swiftly becoming Wolverhampton's latest equivalent of The Bronx, so if you must see The Wonder of ZIPPY, don't be a hero; go past it on the bus. Unless you're John Shaft, in which case, feel free.
OUT AND ABOUT IN THE ROUGH VACINITY OF W'TON (IE. ANYTHING UP TO 30-40 MILES AWAY)
* Out of town in the rough direction of Stafford lies Lucas Aerospace, the place where they make and design the guidance system for cruise missiles. Soak up the ambience of a place that probably has a Russian ICBM warhead targeted on it to this very day. Relatively close by is an ordinance factory which was the site of a radioactive fire two years ago. Next door is a detention centre for dangerous young offenders. Across the road is a huge chemical plant with an uncertain safety history. Come to Wolverhampton, and let your worries leave you!
* On the other side of town is the road to Sedgley and Dudley. This road has the largest concentration of pubs in the country - every second shop front is a pub. While this might sound like a favourable thing, caution is advised, as many of these pubs are slightly on the rough side. This is probably because, with so many pubs to choose from, people aren't too bothered about being barred from a few/many/most.
* Come to Sedgley! In the last fifteen years, Sedgley has declined from a stalwart small town/village with its own identity and a population of Transformer-obsessed six-year-old little thugs (my good self included) to a depressing amalgam of cheapo discount stores and arty-farty fancy-good outlets. Still, never mind. The local chippy's still a good one. Loads of pubs too. Damnit! I'm taking this seriously now...
Snowboarders can go up the top of Sedgley Beacon in wintry weather, and enjoy a terrifying near-vertical rided down the hillside to the broken-bottle strewn bottom. I went down it on a skateboard as a kid and I wet myself with fear. Mind you, at that point near-legendary, Scooby-Doo-alike non-horror film The Gate was the most frightening film I'd every seen, so maybe I'm overstating things a little.
Wonder if Sedgley still hosts the entertaining Police-vs-villian car chases that thrilled the local kids years ago?
* Take a trip to Dudley, and see what happens to a fine and useful town when somebody opens a massive soulless out-of-town shopping centre (complete with monorail) right on its doorstep - Merry Hill, I'm talking about you. See the awesome horror of the near brand-new town shopping arcade - with two - TWO - shops inside, one of which is a fruit-machine stand (with two fruit machines). See the old BHS store, which is now a "99p bargains" shop. See the place where Lenny Henry recorded the now legendary classic "A Day Out in Dudley - It's Out of This World, Man!" advert, produced in 1986 for Dudley Council's then-genuinely-busy tourism office. Make sure you're packing heat if you do, though. And watch out for those tumbleweeds.
UPDATE: Dudley has, if anything, become even more shabby and worn-down over the preceeding months, to the extent that you half expect to see Judge Dredd and his chums striding down the even-more "£1 bargains" shop-strewn high street. Dammed shame.
* But, hey, stuff Dudley - why not go to Walsall instead? You too can walk through Walsall Arbouretum, home to the annual Walsall Illuminations - the source of that old tired "Warsaw is the capital of Poland/I've been to Warsaw, miss/Really, Timmy?/Yes, miss, to see the illuminations!" joke that got wheeled out every year at school! See the 10-inch deep pool that the author unsuccessfully tried to use a snorkel in as a child! (I must have inhaled a lot of car exhaust to get that bad.)
And those Illuminations - wow! Actually, I feel a twinge of guilt about dissing them, because when I was little they had me spellbound. But, really - it's a load of chipboard panels with lightbulbs strewn all over. And the laser show! A laser doing the same thing for hours on end (making a misty swirly tunnel thing) while some vague wireframe shapes appear on a screen and wiggle about a bit. If that sounds like fun to you, then go with my blessing, sweet child.
Okay, so maybe I was a wee bit scathing there. You know, it hurts me to diss what I loved. And I did love, right up until the Shoe People started to make an appearance at the show, circa 1991*. The Shoe People! They ruined everything with their irritating shoe-based illuminated chipboard antics! Curse you, Trampy and Sergeant Plod-or-whatever-the-hell-you-were-called, and all the other Shoe People! Curse you all! Gaaaaaaahhhhhhh!
* Or Bilston. Why not visit Bilston? See the ever-popular market and, er, the local branch of Morrisons, and, er, the place where there used to be a really good toyshop with a large selection of model aircraft, before it went bust and was replaced by a babyware store that's permamently shut with iron fencing over the windows.
* And hey, why stop there? Why not ride the hyper-modern, pensioner-packed Midland Metro tram system to go somewhere really exciting? Like, er, Bethnell Green prison, or the piece of wasteland near the tram depot.
No, actually there's a good thing about the Metro - namely you walk out of the Snow Hill terminus into The Nice Side of Birmingham. Having long experience of shopping in Birmingham, I always wondered how the hell it could be considered for European City of Culture status. But now I know. The area around the Cathedral's right classy, like. Lots of green, lots of nice old buildings, lots of foreign university students talking about the drugs scene. Lots of money evident everywhere. In fact, you could drop this part of Birmingham into any classy European city and it'd fit right in. Hurrah - that's one in the eye for them barstewards who diss the Midlands and Moidlanders as being fick and backwards clots! Oh, yes, ny brothers and sisters...
But defending Birmingham means having to defend the rest of the city centre. Which is tricky, because to be honest it's too noisy and too overcrowed to really like. And why is that? I have the suspicion it's because it got bombed flat by the Luftwaffe in WWII, and when the time came for urban renewal they decided to "do a Coventry" on it, but not to quite the same manic intensity as Coventry (because Coventry really had been wiped out). In other words, embrace modern building techniques, like the use of prefabricated cast concrete sections! New civic concepts like the office block, the modern shopping precinct and the subway! Emphasise the growing importance of the car to city life! Do exciting things, city-wise!
And 30 years later it's all gone down the pan due to neglect, and the fact that walking around a city made almost exclusvely of light-grey concrete just depresses the hell out of people. You're meant to be living in a vibrant, bustling city, not serving on the Death Star. How many of these '50s shopping precincts - not just here, but nationwide - have just gone to seed? Like the Elephant and Castle in London. Or the Bull Ring in Birmingham. They're tearing that down by the way; there'll be a new Bull Ring, and what's been in the press suggests it'll be a top-drawer establishment.
COMING SOON! RadiO will eventually get round to dragging his stale, tired carcass to Coventry and checking it out in detail for an article. He particularly looks forward to investigating that funny market hall that looks like part of the Mysteron base from the Captain Scarlet episode, "Crater 714", and hopes the guy in the street who offered him ten packs of cigerettes and a lighter for £1 isn't there when he goes.
Anyway, there's never been a better time to Come to Wolverhampton! On a train, preferably. You really, really don't want to come by car - not unless you're prepared to risk losing your sanity over the most bizarre road system in Western Europe (with the possible exception of Bristol - "Oh my God - where's the town?").
* On your way in from the railway station, you will doubtless see the Chubb Building. This is the home of the software company responsible for the Iron Maiden "game", Ed Hunter. If you bought that, you might - MIGHT, you understand, I'm not tellling you to or anything - want to stroll up and shout abuse at its creators through their door answerphone. Or you might not.
* Take a stroll up the high street, and see the market stall that has sold the same t-shirts ("1988/92/96/2000/06: BRING THE GAMES TO WOLVERHAMPTON" and "COSTA DEL WOLVERHAMPTON - JUST ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE") for about twenty years! Marvel at the approx. 3,000 loungerie shops! Be sick in the funky public toilets in the Mander Centre (complete with security bloke in a little Space 1999-style control cab)! Better than the Millennium Dome by far.
UPDATE: It's still better than the Millennium Dome, if only by default because the dome doesn't exist anymore. The opening of the Ann Summers' shop brings the loungerie shop total to an astonishing 3,001 and perilously close to critical mass.
* Walk though the passage by St. Peter's to reach the University of Wolverhampton, a fine institution combining high academic aceivement, world-class research capability and a nice student union complex with three bars and a Tekken 3 machine. Two years ago the university came an astonishing 97th out of a survey of 97 British academic institutes. An angry letter seen afterward insists that the reason for this low placing is that the people running the survey were a load of smug, chinless, Old Etonian gits from down south. Well, reading between the lines that's honestly what it says.
UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE!: The university weathered the storm of being declared the least distinguished academic centre in the country in fine style. They now have Silent Scope and Marvel Vs. Capcom in the Student Union - cool!
* Round the back of the University is the tallest building in the town, the Psychology block. It was recently announced that this fine 1950's building, known to literally ones of locals as the "Get Carter block", will be demolished. This is a terrible shame, as not only does the building provide fine aerial views of the town and the surrounding countryside as far as the Malverns, it also contains the funkiest lecture hall in the town (possibly the country), as well as the main student refectory and its vintage 1943 arcade cabinet, which will be sadly missed. Nothing - NOTHING - gives you such a highly charged feeling of incipent power and responsibility as dozing for three-quarters of an hour in a plastic chair in a cafeteria.
UPDATE: The mighty Get Carter block was demolished earlier this year. It's going to be replaced by some kind of unimaginative, low-slung thing with a big green glass bit. Phillesteins!
* See the now-legendary graffiti! In 1986, somebody crudely daubed the words "ZIPPY = S**T" on the side of The Eagle pub in Fordhouses. 15 years later, it's still there, and still causes profound wonderment in local residents as to who "ZIPPY" might be, or indeed, why he/she was considered "S**T"
UPDATE: It's still there! Still no news on who the hell ZIPPY is. Oh yeah, and Fordhouses is swiftly becoming Wolverhampton's latest equivalent of The Bronx, so if you must see The Wonder of ZIPPY, don't be a hero; go past it on the bus. Unless you're John Shaft, in which case, feel free.
OUT AND ABOUT IN THE ROUGH VACINITY OF W'TON (IE. ANYTHING UP TO 30-40 MILES AWAY)
* Out of town in the rough direction of Stafford lies Lucas Aerospace, the place where they make and design the guidance system for cruise missiles. Soak up the ambience of a place that probably has a Russian ICBM warhead targeted on it to this very day. Relatively close by is an ordinance factory which was the site of a radioactive fire two years ago. Next door is a detention centre for dangerous young offenders. Across the road is a huge chemical plant with an uncertain safety history. Come to Wolverhampton, and let your worries leave you!
* On the other side of town is the road to Sedgley and Dudley. This road has the largest concentration of pubs in the country - every second shop front is a pub. While this might sound like a favourable thing, caution is advised, as many of these pubs are slightly on the rough side. This is probably because, with so many pubs to choose from, people aren't too bothered about being barred from a few/many/most.
* Come to Sedgley! In the last fifteen years, Sedgley has declined from a stalwart small town/village with its own identity and a population of Transformer-obsessed six-year-old little thugs (my good self included) to a depressing amalgam of cheapo discount stores and arty-farty fancy-good outlets. Still, never mind. The local chippy's still a good one. Loads of pubs too. Damnit! I'm taking this seriously now...
Snowboarders can go up the top of Sedgley Beacon in wintry weather, and enjoy a terrifying near-vertical rided down the hillside to the broken-bottle strewn bottom. I went down it on a skateboard as a kid and I wet myself with fear. Mind you, at that point near-legendary, Scooby-Doo-alike non-horror film The Gate was the most frightening film I'd every seen, so maybe I'm overstating things a little.
Wonder if Sedgley still hosts the entertaining Police-vs-villian car chases that thrilled the local kids years ago?
* Take a trip to Dudley, and see what happens to a fine and useful town when somebody opens a massive soulless out-of-town shopping centre (complete with monorail) right on its doorstep - Merry Hill, I'm talking about you. See the awesome horror of the near brand-new town shopping arcade - with two - TWO - shops inside, one of which is a fruit-machine stand (with two fruit machines). See the old BHS store, which is now a "99p bargains" shop. See the place where Lenny Henry recorded the now legendary classic "A Day Out in Dudley - It's Out of This World, Man!" advert, produced in 1986 for Dudley Council's then-genuinely-busy tourism office. Make sure you're packing heat if you do, though. And watch out for those tumbleweeds.
UPDATE: Dudley has, if anything, become even more shabby and worn-down over the preceeding months, to the extent that you half expect to see Judge Dredd and his chums striding down the even-more "£1 bargains" shop-strewn high street. Dammed shame.
* But, hey, stuff Dudley - why not go to Walsall instead? You too can walk through Walsall Arbouretum, home to the annual Walsall Illuminations - the source of that old tired "Warsaw is the capital of Poland/I've been to Warsaw, miss/Really, Timmy?/Yes, miss, to see the illuminations!" joke that got wheeled out every year at school! See the 10-inch deep pool that the author unsuccessfully tried to use a snorkel in as a child! (I must have inhaled a lot of car exhaust to get that bad.)
And those Illuminations - wow! Actually, I feel a twinge of guilt about dissing them, because when I was little they had me spellbound. But, really - it's a load of chipboard panels with lightbulbs strewn all over. And the laser show! A laser doing the same thing for hours on end (making a misty swirly tunnel thing) while some vague wireframe shapes appear on a screen and wiggle about a bit. If that sounds like fun to you, then go with my blessing, sweet child.
Okay, so maybe I was a wee bit scathing there. You know, it hurts me to diss what I loved. And I did love, right up until the Shoe People started to make an appearance at the show, circa 1991*. The Shoe People! They ruined everything with their irritating shoe-based illuminated chipboard antics! Curse you, Trampy and Sergeant Plod-or-whatever-the-hell-you-were-called, and all the other Shoe People! Curse you all! Gaaaaaaahhhhhhh!
* Or Bilston. Why not visit Bilston? See the ever-popular market and, er, the local branch of Morrisons, and, er, the place where there used to be a really good toyshop with a large selection of model aircraft, before it went bust and was replaced by a babyware store that's permamently shut with iron fencing over the windows.
* And hey, why stop there? Why not ride the hyper-modern, pensioner-packed Midland Metro tram system to go somewhere really exciting? Like, er, Bethnell Green prison, or the piece of wasteland near the tram depot.
No, actually there's a good thing about the Metro - namely you walk out of the Snow Hill terminus into The Nice Side of Birmingham. Having long experience of shopping in Birmingham, I always wondered how the hell it could be considered for European City of Culture status. But now I know. The area around the Cathedral's right classy, like. Lots of green, lots of nice old buildings, lots of foreign university students talking about the drugs scene. Lots of money evident everywhere. In fact, you could drop this part of Birmingham into any classy European city and it'd fit right in. Hurrah - that's one in the eye for them barstewards who diss the Midlands and Moidlanders as being fick and backwards clots! Oh, yes, ny brothers and sisters...
But defending Birmingham means having to defend the rest of the city centre. Which is tricky, because to be honest it's too noisy and too overcrowed to really like. And why is that? I have the suspicion it's because it got bombed flat by the Luftwaffe in WWII, and when the time came for urban renewal they decided to "do a Coventry" on it, but not to quite the same manic intensity as Coventry (because Coventry really had been wiped out). In other words, embrace modern building techniques, like the use of prefabricated cast concrete sections! New civic concepts like the office block, the modern shopping precinct and the subway! Emphasise the growing importance of the car to city life! Do exciting things, city-wise!
And 30 years later it's all gone down the pan due to neglect, and the fact that walking around a city made almost exclusvely of light-grey concrete just depresses the hell out of people. You're meant to be living in a vibrant, bustling city, not serving on the Death Star. How many of these '50s shopping precincts - not just here, but nationwide - have just gone to seed? Like the Elephant and Castle in London. Or the Bull Ring in Birmingham. They're tearing that down by the way; there'll be a new Bull Ring, and what's been in the press suggests it'll be a top-drawer establishment.
COMING SOON! RadiO will eventually get round to dragging his stale, tired carcass to Coventry and checking it out in detail for an article. He particularly looks forward to investigating that funny market hall that looks like part of the Mysteron base from the Captain Scarlet episode, "Crater 714", and hopes the guy in the street who offered him ten packs of cigerettes and a lighter for £1 isn't there when he goes.
