What a glorious day yesterday was for A City Adventure.

Twenty eager students from Central England Teacher Training took to the streets of Birmingham to explore and undertake creative challenges. We’ve been running these days in Birmingham for fourteen years now and it feels as if they are the same as they ever were but of course this isn’t true.

When we started a tiny ‘spy camera’ was included in each pack, participants loved this, they’d never seen anything like it, now almost everyone has a camera phone that takes better photos but is more difficult to extract the photographs from.
Then the adventures were focused around our native territory in Digbeth and the ‘treasure’ awaiting you if you opened the fifteenth envelope was sealed in a plastic bag and fished out of the canal, or waiting for you on the roof of our rehearsal space on New Canal Street looking out over South Birmingham; now it is hidden amongst the graves of St. Paul’s Square as the focus has shifted to our new home ground in the Jewellery Quarter.

Yesterday Johnny was embedded in a cafe in Grand Central, a space that in 2002 was science fiction. The first task regularly involves phone boxes, now one of these has been converted into a coffee shop. The Central Library has gone and the Library of Birmingham doesn’t open early enough for us to use. The blindfold bridge walk was originated on a bridge that was demolished roughly the time Mailbox opened so that’s had to move. The Pen Museum is still around but The Coffin Works has opened as has the Wonderful World of Planes and Trains.

But there are still buskers and people in uniform and flowers and canals and good graffiti and bad graffiti and clothes shops to play around in. It’s still a fun day. Teachers still say it’s some of the best training they’ve had and when the weather is like yesterday it is glorious to be out and about in this city.