Tame Walking: Finding a River
I was unaware that Birmingham had a river called Tame. It was not within my map of the city, a city which raised me and several generations before me. Then, I found myself walking along it. I was involved in an arts project along the river, in Witton, which was to work with the local community as the Environment Agency planned and built flood defences. The first thing I did was to go looking for it, and it wasn’t easy to find. The Tame has been left, disregarded, behind walls and buildings, it is a shadow under the motorways, and is pressed conveniently against the railroad. It is easy to conceal. Although being Birmingham’s largest river, it cannot carry any boat bigger than a canoe, so it is easily inserted behind the suburban cityscape. This is what has been done with it for over a hundred years, and usually it is obliging and flows quietly on, except when it bursts through its banks to swallow its old floodplains. It remembers the taste of its old lands, and pushes forcefully back into them. And it was because of this that I found it.
It is not merely a matter of coming across a river which denotes it being found. To really find a river, you need to follow it, to find out where it’s been and where it’s going to. So, I went looking for it. I trailed its route upstream and downstream, until high fences and roads halted progress. I could peer at it through weathered railings, but go no further. So, I looked at maps and went to where it might emerge from the unfollowable places. I traversed embankments, sludged through the undergrowth, and negotiated the all-embracing industrial expanses, both the old shadows of industry, gritty and grey, and the new manicured boxlands which replace them. I found not only the Tame, but a Birmingham I had never seen before, and I found a Black Country, the place where the Tame flows from. Along the way, I found that others were drawn to the neglected Tame too, and I would frequently have a walking partner. Artists, poets, photographers, friends, strangers. When I say I found a river, it was all this that was found.
Before the river was tucked away, it meandered gently through the Midland landscape. Its source is in Oldbury, then it forms the border of West Bromwich and Wednesbury before leaving the Black Country through Sandwell Valley. If finds confused borderlands as it enters modern Birmingham, as parts used to be Staffordshire, others Warwickshire, now the West Midlands. The river has lost its status in drawing its border-line between them. It emerges into Birmingham through Hamstead and Perry Barr, it goes through Witton and takes its place as Aston’s river. Birmingham grew out to engulf the Tame. Before that town’s industrial growth its primary river was Rea, and the Tame, broader, stronger, cleaner, belonged to the village of Aston. Birmingham’s encroachment on Aston’s boundaries is ancient, as tanners and smiths huddled against the Rea in Digbeth and spread northward. But the Tame’s history is not part old Birmingham. Aston was its mother, and it wove the edges of some of her ancient hamlets and chapelries: Witton, Saltley, Erdington, Castle Bromwich and Water Orton (now its own village amputated from its ancient parish, and from modern Birmingham).
Into the far reaches of history, the river gave its name to one of the Mercian tribes, those midland-dwelling Anglo-Saxons. The tribe was the Tomsæte. For these “tame dwellers”, the river was the artery of the land, and the points at which they crossed it can probably be found today at the places called ford, the Bromford’s (two of them), Salford, Holford and the unnamed ford guarded by the castle. In the Black Country, names such as Greet, now Great Bridge, denote that the land was gritty, so likely a perfect crossing point. As the tribe dispersed and settled, the Tame water was redirected down millraces and into millponds to power corn mills, making flour. The millwheels were later adapted to hammer, slit, grind, or draw metal for nails, tools, weapons, wire. Industry diversified and the river gained a younger, bigger, sister, the Navigation. Or, the Cut as it’s called in the Black Country, and by the Peaky Blinders. These canals taunted the Tame by carrying great loads across their flat, unshifting, surfaces brought only to a stir by the narrowboats which navigated them.
The railroad was a harsher companion. Whole limbs were severed in this exchange, which remained more motionless than the canals, as oxbows, and used as pools for pleasure boating. It was at this time that a plan was devised for the Tame to be used for Birmingham’s drinking water, and reservoirs were constructed. The idea was scrapped within a couple of decades due to both the industrial and human pollution. This optimism seems baffling, now, because the Tame was soon to be thought the most polluted river in the world. It was a rainbow of industrial spices. Chemicals in Oldbury turned it yellow, copper at James Bridge came in orange, at Bescot three rivers joined in different hues, and in Witton a turquoise sheen was attributed to the ammunition works. It trudged on, languishing and wearied.