This is Pickwick Park in Balsall Heath, on the road where I live, about 100m from my house. It's unbelievable how such destruction could come so close, and all my house has is a few loose roof tiles. I am very lucky.

I realised just what a big story this was, as I took these pictures of the trees and then saw Carl Dinnen from Channel 4 News walking through the park with some locals. The evening before, he had also been in the same place as me, reporting on C4 from the arrest of the bomber in Hay Mills. He is following me around! (Not that I mind.)


Above: Pickwick Park again. There's a house under there somewhere. When I took this last night, two lads were chopping up this tree with axes and saws. The back of this house was completely exposed to the street, as their whole fence had collapsed.





Above: Ladypool Road, Balsall Heath.
The above three pictures were very kindly taken for me by a police officer, as the normally busy Ladypool Road, the heart of Birmingham's 'Balti Belt', was cordoned off last night. It wasn't possible to see these cars from any area where the public was allowed to go. The police told me there was a risk of collapsing buildings and of gas leaks. This cordon was at the end of my road, and it was only when I saw this and the fallen trees that I began to appreciate the magnitude of what had happened and how lucky I had been. It's a miracle that no lives were lost, but many livelihoods have been ruined. Some of the buildings on this road may have to be pulled down, including a pub and a block of flats, according to the police.

I had set out on my bike with a mission. One of my best friends, who lives in King's Heath, had rung me from the South coast, where he is staying with his parents, and asked me to go and check that his house was still okay. As Midlands Today had been broadcasting from the Iceland supermarket, two roads away from his house, which had lost the whoole frontage of the shop, we were seriously concerned. First I had to work out a way to get through to King's Heath, as the road closures were blocking my direct route. So I cycled up the Alcester Road/Moseley Road, which was very strange. Everything was completely normal, and there was no sign of any tornado whatsoever, not even any twigs in the road, and yet this was only one street away from Ladypool Road...



Above: Rooftops in Moseley with tiles missing.


Above: This beautiful house on the corner of Forest Road in Moseley has some decorative tiles, which are going to be really difficult to replace.


Above: Further along Forest Road, the residents of this house had to knock down the chimney stack, as it had become unsafe, as well as chop up the tree which was blocking their driveway. Notice the man coming out of the skylight in the roof. There are hardly any tiles remaining on the single-storey building on the left.


This one's for Beckster Senior, who was living the ground floor flat of this house until last year. The chimney stack has fallen here, and half the roof tiles have gone. The roof of the house on the left has collapsed inwards - see below.



From Moseley, I cycled up Billesley Lane, towards King's Heath. It became obvious that you could very easily trace the path of the tornado, because, although the damage in its path was enormous, you could go around a corner and find no sign of it at all. Billesley Lane had a few branches and twigs lying around, but nothing much more, apart from this one tree (below), which had already been chopped up, as it must have been leaning dangerously over the road. It brought down a telephone line too. In Moseley, you could hear the hum of chainsaws everywhere in the tornado's path. I never knew Brum had so many tree surgeons, but they were all over the place. The irony here is that I have a tree in my front garden which needs to come down, because its roots are undermining my house. Oh well.



My friend Gregster's house was perfectly okay. In fact, there were rubbish bags out for collection and boxes of paper for recycling which had clearly not felt the slightest breeze, or they would have been all over the road. No leaves on the ground either, and yet, only two streets away in Institute Road, the front had blown off the Iceland shop - now boarded up, cordoned off and out of view, so I rang Gregster and cycled up to King's Heath High Steet. From the church downwards, a major section of the street was inaccessible - see the roadblock photo I posted last night (below). Several shops, particularly Greg's bakery, had no roofs and the church had been damaged by trees falling in the graveyard:



Workers were putting up fences to protect the church...


...and this prophetic sign in the churchyard was being eagerly snapped by several photographers:



The tornado has indeed made history. It's been evaluated as a T4 tornado, and although we get an average of 33 tornadoes in this country every year, we've already had 28 this year, and this is possibly the strongest since 1931.


· link