We are heading home today but before we go we have one last visit planned, a tour of the roundhouse. We went and had breakfast then packed the case before heading down to reception to checkout. We are leaving the bag at the hotel, but we have made sure that we have our purchases in the rucksack that won’t leave my side until we are back home! We walked along the canal to the roundhouse which is just past the canal roundabout we had booked a tour called an introduction to the roundhouse which started at 10:00 so by the time we had checked the bag, walked to the roundhouse and checked in for the tour it was pretty much time for it to start. Only one other couple were booked on the tour, it turns out that not only is this weekend the first weekend the roundhouse has been open since lockdown, it is the first weekend it has been open as a tourist attraction at all! The tour was really good and interesting, the place was actually built as a depot for the municipal works. In 1874 with a desire to improve conditions in Birmingham, a competition was held to design a depot for the public works department, only 4 entries were submitted, and only 2 were actually considered, the commission was won by W.H.Ward, apparently it isn’t clear why this one was selected but it was slight cheaper so that was probably what clinched it. The guide suggested that the slightly strange design is possibly why it still survives today, a regular square stable and storage building would probably have been pulled down years ago. Home to the cities 50 horses, the majority of the building was given over to stables but there were also storage rooms. A number of trades were carried out here, at canal side stone cutting took place, stone was brought in from the black country and broken up into 2 inch blocks to be laid on the roads to improve their condition. It was also where the night soil men kept their carts and horses, the main location for storage of this human waste was further up the canal by the mailbox, but it wasn’t clear if it was stored here before being moved up river of if it went straigh there before being sold to local farmers as fertiliser. The roundhouse was also home to the city vet, one vet who oversaw the care and keeping of the city horses introduced a number of innovative practices in the care of horses, subsequently adopted across the UK and the rest of the world, for example he ‘prescribed’ different feed quantities for the horses depending on their workload, canal ponies were allocated more as they worked for a few days at a time, pulling the barges quite long distances without much rest, therefore they needed more feed than say the cart horses that the night soil men used who, although they were pulling heavy carts all night, relaxed all day once their work was done. The roundhouse also served as the base for the lamplighters who illuminated the city before dark. The tour lasted about and hour and a half and as I say well worth it. We had previously been booked on the 3pm train, as we had been planning to have lunch before heading back, but as it hadn’t been long since breakfast we decided we would start to head home now so we went back to the hotel to collect the bag, took a gentle walk back through Birmingham to New Street station having one last look at the Bull before we left then picked up a bit of fruit for me to munch on the train and headed home. The Reading to Bracknell train is currently operating as a bus replacement service so we decided to walk round to the bus stop and catch the bus that actually stops nearer our house as we have already done quite a bit of walking this weekend! We finally arrived home around 4:30 when it was a case of unpacking, putting some washing on and collapsing in front of the TV to catch up with what has been going on at the Olympics after a lovely few days away.
