Outside the Hippodrome

Elle Says Walkers on it now, but it used to be the Derby Hippodrome, funny name isn’t it. It must have something to do with real hippos. Hippo fights, or eating competitions to see which hippo could gobble the most food, with wranglers pumping on their tails for encouragement. Got to be careful with hippos though, loads of people still die every year from hippo related incidents. More than any other animal, unless you count like mosquitos and tapeworms and dogs and stuff. I guess that’s why they stopped doing it all and decided to turn it into a theatre instead.

Stop when you get to the corner. Stay on this side of the road by the sandy building with the arches and pillars that’s the best place to look at it. Cool isn’t. Walkers. I like the idea of theatres. A place where people can gather together to hear stories. To feel something. To learn truths about themselves they didn’t know before and discover what it is like to live in other people’s shoes. Turns out they should have stuck to the hippos, because no one goes the theatre either. But now it has been given over to nature. A monument to the earth, and the natural world. Insects, rodents, plants… have taken control. They’ve crawled into the smallest spaces, clinging to bits of brick and crumbling mortar, winding themselves around smooth wooden beams made from long forgotten trees, long lost members of the same family. Squeezing and pushing, buffeted and broken, but always rebuilding. Fresh greens emerging from brown sludge, climbing to poke out of different shaped windows, searching for the light. Taking a place that no one else wanted and making it their home.

Let’s keep moving, leave nature to it, turn right and walk down the hill. We’re going to go left at the end.