Kidderminster, Riverside Town
So, further to JHR's post, I was doing a bit of Streetview tourism around brutalist Kidderminster architecture (and there's a lot, all of which I like very much), when I suddenly zoom out to the map and realise quite how much the town is tied to the river Stour.
Walking and driving around Kidderminster you don't really think of Kidderminster as a riverside town. Mostly this is due to my beloved brutalist concrete buildings hiding the river quite well; until the recent Weaver's Wharf / Tesco redevelopment at the back of Owen Owens and the old library, it was almost impossible to actually see the river at all; the river was almost entirely built over (as the River Chelt is in Cheltenham).
Of course, another reason that I don't associate Kidderminster with being a riverside town, is that it is only a few miles from Bewdley and Stourport-on-Severn, where the mighty River Severn thunders past, in all of its two-hundred-metre-wide massiveness. Kidderminster's tiddly little River Stour, at all of six metres wide, seems hardly worth mentioning.
One of the things that has often perplexed me, driving in to Kiddy as I do, from the Worcester side, is how on earth the town's major employer is no longer a carpet factory, but a major luxury cruise boat firm. I find it difficult to think of a town more landlocked than Kidderminster. Zooming out to the map, though, I today realised that behind the factory, they have their own slipway and private canal leading directly to the Stour and on to the Severn. D'oh.
Meanwhile, my Streetview tourism notes that the camera car picked a nice early Sunday morning to do Kidderminster centre, the result being that they've got coverage of the whole of the town's otherwise pedestrian shopping precinct in full-on Summer Of 2009 recession glory. A large Woolworths and a 4-storey Littlewoods right next door to each other, now that's unfortunate.
Walking and driving around Kidderminster you don't really think of Kidderminster as a riverside town. Mostly this is due to my beloved brutalist concrete buildings hiding the river quite well; until the recent Weaver's Wharf / Tesco redevelopment at the back of Owen Owens and the old library, it was almost impossible to actually see the river at all; the river was almost entirely built over (as the River Chelt is in Cheltenham).
Of course, another reason that I don't associate Kidderminster with being a riverside town, is that it is only a few miles from Bewdley and Stourport-on-Severn, where the mighty River Severn thunders past, in all of its two-hundred-metre-wide massiveness. Kidderminster's tiddly little River Stour, at all of six metres wide, seems hardly worth mentioning.
One of the things that has often perplexed me, driving in to Kiddy as I do, from the Worcester side, is how on earth the town's major employer is no longer a carpet factory, but a major luxury cruise boat firm. I find it difficult to think of a town more landlocked than Kidderminster. Zooming out to the map, though, I today realised that behind the factory, they have their own slipway and private canal leading directly to the Stour and on to the Severn. D'oh.
Meanwhile, my Streetview tourism notes that the camera car picked a nice early Sunday morning to do Kidderminster centre, the result being that they've got coverage of the whole of the town's otherwise pedestrian shopping precinct in full-on Summer Of 2009 recession glory. A large Woolworths and a 4-storey Littlewoods right next door to each other, now that's unfortunate.