Yukio Fujimoto's Tower of Time at Perrot's Folly

Just in time for those of you who have a minute spare today or tomorrow between 1pm and 5pm. Take a trip along Birmingham’s Hagley Road out of town from Five Ways, right at The Plough and Harrow, and tucked behind the carpark for a medical centre, you’ll see Perrot’s Folly.

It’s 96 feet tall, octagonal, and was built in 1758 by a local man with more money than sense, John Perrot. Enter through the tiny courtyard, where fuschias and bindweed hold the brickwork together, and climb the spiral staircase.

On the first floor, a tiny red clock ticks away the seconds on the concrete floor. A few sweeps around the staircase, in the room above, ten little clocks tick in synchopation- each one a fraction of a second out from its neighbour.

On the next floor, 100 of the little blighters tick tock away the aching seconds, their little red second hands pointing North, Northwest, North by Northwest, East, South and all the compass points in between. You can still hear each tick separated from the next, just about. If you unfocuss your eyes, the second hands look like red ants giving each other directions.

On the next floor up- not quite the top floor, which is closed off to the public with a polite notice- 1000 clocks jitter quietly- cockroaches pinned to the floors and tables with tiny red stakes. Two clocks have moved, under their own propulsion, out of line with the rest.

Such a strange sense of infuriation and delight, to be surrounded by working time pieces that tick away the seconds, but do not tell the time.

This is the work of Japanese artist Yukio Fujimoto. According to Ikon Gallery, who curated the piece: “The implication of human mortality is inescapable as Fujimoto reminds us, with an abundance of time pieces, that our time is limited.”

Downstairs, the delightful attendant tells us Perrot’s Folly is listed, no screws can be bored into its walls, no peeling paint glossed over. Its circular windows peer out over South Birmingham, I can see the Buddhist temple, the university clock tower, the housing estates, the distant hills.

No one is sure why John Perrot built this place- some say he used it as a hunting lookout, to spot deer and rabbits in the surrounding woods. A more disturbing theory states that, fearing his wife’s infidelity, he climbed the tower to spy on her as she flitted around the village.

The Ikon’s lease on the folly will soon be up for another year, and there is talk of turning it into some kind of homage to Tolkien, who reputedly took the folly as his inspiration for one of the Two Towers in Lord of the Rings.

For my part, I’d rather at least one clock were left ticking on the top floor, marking the seconds between now, and when the door on this strange place was last locked by a suspicious old aristocrat, on his way down from playing the cuckold.

Tower of Time, by Yukio Fujimoto, continues at Perrot’s Folly until July 26th.