Maybe twenty years of living in a city without a river has made me treat real ones (rivers not cities) with near mythological reverence – I deliberately seek out the courses of ‘lost’ rivers when visiting London.

In all the guided tours I’ve been on, no-one has really explained how to look at buildings the way the architect intended.

Matt Westbrook has been spotting owls around the city over the last few weeks – as have many Birmingham residents. But Matt’s owls are different to those appearing in the Big Hoot, His are camouflaged against the fabric of buildings, nestling in the background, waiting for someone to notice them.

Alhambra, Essoldo, Tivoli, Rialto, these are names for the mouth to conjure with, as a child these words were the closest I came to exotica, these were words that ended in vowels that weren’t ‘e’ ferchristsake!

Channeling the spirit of Holmes, I set out to determine the exact location that the fairy cut-outs were made…

Something else became apparent this year too, a clearer understanding of the purpose of the walks and how they sit within the wider practice of guided tours. I’d recognised that by dropping sight-seeing as an intention for looking at our surroundings, it allowed the group to focus on the ‘invisible’ aspects of our world.

Lost and Found: Sport and the City on Monday was Alan Bain’s walk of the lost sports fields of Bearwood – a curious cluster of these appearing along City Road. Alan played on many of these fields just 15 years ago but it must have felt more like 50 to see so many of them grown over and sealed off.

What’s fascinating here is that it’s possible to go back to the Regency period in city centre Birmingham—but no-one knows it’s here. It’s invisible. Even the uber-rigorous Pevsner Architectural Guide to Birmingham misses it.

The feeling of walking in the tunnels is very much that you shouldn’t be there. Not from a permission perspective but rather that walking in the spaces I’ve previously watched thousands of cars zipping through just plain feels dangerous.

Even Christopher Columbus landing on and ‘discovering’ the Americas, which he mistook for Japan and China, was not completely lost. He knew he was five weeks sail west of Europe.

Finally we see our river named in the Neckinger Estate where an archway into a tenements complex seems to deliberately straddle the underground river, according to Tom Bolton’s map. We’d have missed all of these delightful moments in our usual movements through this city,

It’s hard to pin a definition to loitering, but it’s often seen as spending at least fifteen minutes in the same place without commercial intention, according to officials.