River Rea Welly Walk

Update: Due to snow and a lack of Spring I’ve decided to postpone this until falling in the river is a less frightening prospect. It will happen though. I promise.

I’ve had this idea for a walk and it’s not really to do with photography so I’m going to do it as an Art-Pete thing, in preparation for some ideas I’ve been having about walks as performance and stuff. None of them are coherent yet - that’s kinda the point - but the end goal is hovering in the haze ahead of me.

The walk will be along the River Rea, Birmingham’s main river which, for our purposes, runs from Longbridge to Spaghetti Junction before merging with the Tame.

What makes this different is I intend to walk along the middle of the river in wellingtons. In dry periods this should be eminently possible, though the levels do often rise after a downpour.

The point is to travel the city on foot from a completely unique perspective and see what it looks like from there.

When I mooted this a while back a few people expressed an interest, so this is a slight formalisation of that. If you’d like to join me on an exploratory walk, from Kings Norton park to the Mac, please leave your name, email and mobile number along with the dates you’re free on and I’ll be in touch.

Needless to say you do this completely at your own risk. I have no idea what it’s like down there and there’s a very good chance you’ll slip and fall (Yaktrax or similar are recommended). This is an exploratory walk to see if it can be done en masse in the summer. If it’s a success I’ll test out the Mac through Digbeth.