A quick glance at Google throws up variations of the same image, which tends to suggest that even in the age of the iPhone shots first circulated in the days of black and white photography are spreading increasingly widely.
The church appears in half of the search engine's first 10 Solihull images, with four others showing some other stretch of the High Street. Only a picture of a UK-wide map with a rather bold red arrow pointing at the middle of the country breaks the trend.
All of this came to mind because of the photo I chose as the wallpaper for the page you're now reading. In its own very small way this blog is only adding to a long tradition of holding up one scrap of one street with the apparent intention of saying "this here is Solihull".
Of course the sandstone blocks of the parish church or the 19th century brickwork of the adjacent Mason's Arms pub aren't Solihull - they're just a few structures in one corner of a community where 200,000 plus people live.
Ironically the image is entirely out of kilter with the vast majority of streets you might stroll down in the wider area.
Timber beams of the type seen on the right-hand side are rare survivors not common features. And the grand old lamp-posts, with a design harkening back to a pre-electric past, are a world away from the modern street lights that line the vast majority of kerbsides.
All the same, there's no doubt that local landmarks, with stories that in some cases stretch across several centuries, are a hugely important part of local identity. There's a reason they jump so easily to mind.
It is stating the obvious to say that part of the reason is that they've been there an awful long time; evolving but enduring even as old country tracks have become avenues and villages have grown into towns.
Let's take St Alphege, whose bells rang out to welcome the new King's coronation earlier this year. It was already old when another Charles (of a different number) saw his reign come to a rude end in the mid-17th century.
The church's 800th anniversary was somewhat lost in the panic and disruption of the Covid-19 crisis; an exhibition scheduled for early 2020 had to be abandoned when The Core gallery abruptly shut its doors.
It is worth reflecting of course that while almost no-one alive today was there to witness the previous global pandemic, the church had stood through not only the Spanish Flu but also the Black Death, which first ravaged the borough in 1348. Another testament to its significance
The sudden closure of sites like St Alphege, and its near neighbour The Mason's Arms, three years ago was also a useful reminder that buildings - particularly buildings of a certain age and status - are far more than just bricks and mortar. They're meeting places that are full of memories and when the lights suddenly go out in the window or the bells fall silent an area feels instantly different.
In this blog I hope to look at historic buildings around Solihull - how they came to be built, how they've changed over time and what they mean to people now. The intention is to weave in some architecture, some archaeology and some historical context.
If I chose to open with a post that focuses on a scene anyone local will be familiar with, I hope we can quickly move the attention to far more obscure sites too; places off the beaten track or which are often overlooked. All suggestions obviously welcome.
Hopefully posts will show a history of more than just the very rich landowners or public officials whose names are more likely to survive in the old archives, but the population as a whole.
A history not just of Solihull's ancient villages but the neighbourhoods that are rather more modern and are sometimes absurdly assumed to have no history - as if the houses and road signs simply dropped on some dead space on a map.
And a history which escapes the trap of only focusing on what has been lost or easy assumptions that things used to be better back then - whenever "then" was.
One slight issue I have with some of the nostalgia sites that have gained popularity in the social media era is that sometimes they become dominated by slightly aggressive opinions about what the world looks like today, which misses an opportunity to take a proper look at and learn from the past.
Above all I hope to keep the site interesting and engaging to as many people as possible. Let's see where this takes us...
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