Anthony Hayward’s The Green Men of Birmingham is a delightful, self-published chapbook that should interest anyone fascinated by green men. Foliate heads, as they were called before Lady Raglan gave them their present poetic name in the 1920s, are those pieces of sculpture that are composed of heads, human and otherwise, with vegetation going out of their faces. Most are male, but a few rare examples are female. Though found throughout the planet in one place or another, England is the home of most of them, and early medieval churches of the Christian faith are where most are found — an interesting reality given the apparent pagan nature of these beings! (Hayward speculates that it is because the green man represents rebirth or resurrection. Given the Christian injunction against worshipping false idols, I doubt this is the answer.)
But this chapbook by Anthony Hayward shows that there was another era in which green men were popular as architectural details: the late Victorian era. Birmingham at first blush is not where one would expect to find these, being as it is an industrial city in the English midland, some 120 miles from London. Not surprisingly, it has its roots as a market town in the medieval period, but very little of that city remains as the city center was almost completely rebuilt over a 30-year period starting in 1870. Fortunately, Birmingham escaped the bombings of WWII and the redevelopers of the 1960s, so the city center is as it was in the Victorian era.
Hayward notes that the Victorians loved using the green man for decoration, an aesthetic attitude that crossed over to the USA, as you’ll find green men on public buildings in many cities, and they were commonly used on theater buildings as well. He notes in a letter to Green Man Review which accompanied his book, that Stephen King and f-stop Fitzgerald’s superb book Nightmares in the Sky includes many fine green men in their study of New York gargoyles. Why they suddenly had a revival is simple: Victorians were fascinated by the Gothic architecture of their ancestors, and that naturally included the green men that are found in many a Gothic church. Architects used many of the same symbols and decorations as the medieval trades did, so the foliate heads were a natural for their artist endeavors! And one should note that William Morris of the Pre-Raphaelite movement was incorporating foliate patterns in his artwork, so things of a green nature as inspiration were part of the English artistic bent at that time.
What the author did is catalog and photograph the many, many green men of his home city. He had been interested in these beings for a decade or so before he started looking at them in Birmingham. At first, he was just wandering around at random, but soon he realized that he had devised a route around the city that took them all in. Thus, The Green Men of Birmingham is akin to Jack McCarthy and Danis Rose’s Joyce’s Dublin: A Walking Guide to Ulysses, which Jack B. Merry reviewed a few months ago. Both are excellent guides to seeing what one would not normally see, as architecture is often an invisible part of the walking experience of a traveller. And green men by their very nature are creatures not given to being easily seen!
Both his descriptions and the color photographs of the greenies are quite superb. There is certainly enough detail in The Green Men of Birmingham to make a walking tour of that city quite doable. One must commend Anthony Hayward for a job well done!
(self-published, 2000)
