Tram... Stop

The naming scheme for the Midland Metro is... opaque.  In the city centre, they seem to favour the street the stop is on, which makes sense because those are some famous (to Brummies) streets.  Bull Street.  Corporation Street.  Then it goes a bit mad.  We'll get to the pure insanity of Grand Central later, but naming the stop Town Hall instead of Victoria Square is strange.  And Library?  Yes, this is where the Library is, fair enough.  But it's also where the convention centre and the Rep and a bunch of other stuff are.  It's on Centenary Square; call it Centenary Square.

Not that, if I'm honest, Centenary Square is much of a draw.  The Wikipedia page for the square details its tortuous history over the past hundred years, where plans for a great civic quarter were constantly thwarted.  Bits of it were built, then something intervened, or some redevelopment was needed, or, unbelievably, a piece of art was burnt down in an arson attack, until we've reached what is currently its final form: a big patch of concrete.

That's, perhaps, unfair.  The square is designed to be the place where the city gathers for events - New Year's, Remembrance Day, and so on.  It's there to be open so you can cram it with Birmingham's citizens.  When there's nobody there, though, like, for example, on a Monday lunchtime, it's very bland.  The interest is solely provided by the buildings around it - the pleasingly modernist Rep, the none-more-80s convention centre, a few newer office buildings, and the Library.

I'm normally a big advocate of modern, ambitious buildings, especially public buildings, especially ones that don't try to blend in or disappear.  But in the Library of Birmingham's case?  I hate it.  I'm sorry.  I think it's ugly.  I think it's basic.  It's some boxes piled up on top of one another.  Why is one of the boxes gold?  It just is.  Why are there are those circles on it?  That's your artistic flourish, mate.  It's simultaneously boring and over fussy; it's trying to be ICONIC but lazily.  It reminded me of the Bling Bling Building on Hanover Street, one of the first pieces of Liverpool 1 to be completed; a perfectly ordinary corner block that got some gold boxes whacked on it to make it "different".

Outside is a circular plaza, cut into the main square and accessed from the library, which is currently home to two ping pong tables.  I'm not entirely sure what it's for.  Is it meant to be a cafe space, or somewhere to hold meetings, or what?  A bit of landscaping might give it a purpose - imagine some trees bursting out above the level of the square - but as it is it seems like an architect's whim.  Bet you in about ten years it'll have been glassed over to form an extra room for the library. 

I went inside and that's where it truly shines, which made me think of Guy de Maupassant eating lunch at the Eiffel Tower every day because it was the only place in Paris he couldn't see it.  The interior of a library is of course the key part; this is what we're here for.  Books everywhere.

(I bet those dangling fairy lights aren't part of the original architect's plan).  It does seem slightly afraid that you might twig it's a library and get bored and run off.  The fiction was the "book browse"; the reference was the "knowledge floor" (isn't every floor of a library the knowledge floor?).  But there were plenty of spaces to sit and research and it was well lit. 

I ended up on the terrace, the sticky-out box at the front of the library, and it was a lovely place to sit.  There were curved benches and landscaping.  It certainly seemed to be a popular place for lunch, as people turned up with their sandwiches and took a seat. 

 

 

I wandered over to the balustrade to take in the view.  The square was beneath me, and then beyond that a mix of vacant lots and big, thrusting buildings.  Birmingham builds at a vast scale; everywhere in the city centre seemed to be a massive development, high or wide or long.  The concept of "infill" seemed alien to them.  Entire blocks were knocked down for new spaces.  And yet... I didn't see many buildings I actually liked.  That one at the back of shot, below, The Cube, is one of the ugliest things I've seen in my life; square, yet with cut outs, and a flared top, and covered in plus signs, and just hideous.  

 

 

I went back down to Centenary Square and through the Convention Centre.  This opened in 1991 and, pleasingly, the central aisle is open for the public to wander through and use it as a shortcut.  At least, I think it is; certainly that's how I used it.  The G8 was held here in the late 90s - that's when Bill Clinton was photographed having a pint - and it's really of its era, all exposed metal ribs and bright colours and marble.  A sign warned me that photography was not permitted but at great personal risk I took this picture anyway.  See you in the gulag.

On the other side was a canal basin, with an actual canal boat going by.  That fact about Birmingham having more miles of canals than Venice is always a technicality to me; yes, it might be literally true, but there are canals and there are canals.  Nobody's singing about Cornettos on these, and instead of 007 shooting around them on a Bondola you've got Cliff Richard and Victoria from Doctor Who on a barge yakking about beefburgers.  The glamour is very much absent.

The area around the basin had been developed into a one-stop shop for getting drunk and eating passable food, with all the favourites - Slug & Lettuce, Gourmet Burger Kitchen, Las Iguanas.  Put on a clean shirt and some decent shoes (no trainers) and enjoy.  Beyond was Brindleyplace, a development that's grown since the 90s to be Birmingham's centre for offices and finance.

The bland, corporate inoffensiveness continued.  You wouldn't go out of your way to go to Brindleyplace - not least because it's styled as a single word and not two - but if you worked here or you were passing by you might nip into the Costa or the Pret.  The National Sea Life Centre was wedged in one corner - because when you think "Midlands", you think "ocean life" - and beyond it was an acre of corporate space that looked public but was very much private.  A neat sign warned me for safety reasons, do not enter the water feature, so don't take your kids there for a paddle on a hot day.  Don't loiter or remain or do anything other than consume.

It was all very pleasing to walk round, in the same way that Canary Wharf is pleasing to walk round, but you wouldn't go there if you didn't have to.  It's a spot for commuters to come to and then go home to nicer, livelier, more interesting places.

There was always a bridge here over the canal, but it was blessed with the boring name of Broad Street Bridge.  An enterprising local hoping to drum up tourist trade came up with the idea of renaming it the Black Sabbath Bridge, after the city's most famous musical sons, and a bench with their heads on was installed to commemorate them.  

 

I am unfamiliar with the works of Black Sabbath, beyond Paranoid, so I've had their best of playlist on in the background while I wrote this blog.  My main question is: are those all different songs?  Are they not the same one over and over again?  I wasn't entirely sure when one ended and the next one began.  I'm not a heavy metal person, which puts me at odds with West Midlands' fine musical heritage; I'd have been more excited by a Duran Duran Bridge, or a Mike Skinner Boulevard, or a We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It Plaza.

I descended down some tight narrow steps to the Gas Street Basin, the heart of Birmingham's canal network, and still thronged with boats today.  There was a towpath that took me past some more pubs and bars, and the Mailbox up ahead.  The very first time I'd visited Birmingham had been nearly thirty years ago, when the BF had a friend who lived in the flats near here and we came to visit.  I couldn't remember which block he lived in; I'd never seen it from the canal side.  He was long gone, and the flats by the water that had seemed so glamorous and desirable in the late 90s now looked tired.  The fashionable part of the city had shifted somewhere else and these apartments were left behind.

I doubled back on myself, walking past the city register office and the rehearsal space for the symphony orchestra, and ended up at Brindleyplace tram stop.  I reached into my pocket for my Daytripper ticket and... it was gone.  I checked all my pockets.  Nope, it wasn't there; it must've fallen out when I pulled out my phone or my camera.  Considering how often I'm on trains you'd think I'd have learned to stow my ticket safely by now.  

Grumbling slightly, I went to the app to try and buy a new ticket.  It wouldn't have it.  I got an error message every time I tried to pay and the whole thing hung up.  After three tries I went to the machine on the platform, but again, it didn't want to take my money: the slot refused to let me insert my debit card, and the contactless wouldn't work.  I had to cross to the other platform, the city-bound one, and buy a ticket there.  And, of course, nobody then checked it on any of my subsequent tram trips, so I could've saved myself a few bob.

Behind the tram stop, incidentally, on the front of a closed bar, was a large photomural celebrating the achievements of UB40 (3 UK Number 1s! 17 Top Ten Singles!  100m+ Record Sales!).  Obviously someone was annoyed they'd not got a bridge named after them and decided to remind the locals of their prowess.  UB40 have had one of those acrimonious splits that means there are two versions now touring, and the one depicted here was the version without Ali Campbell and Astro - very much the Bobby Gee Bucks Fizz to the Mike, Cheryl and Jay.  They might legally have the name but we all know which is the real band (although Astro has sadly passed away now).

(Controversial yet brave statement: I think the UB40 version of (I Can't Help) Falling In Love With You is better than the Elvis version, and the fact that it's the theme from Sharon Stone softcore disaster Sliver is the cherry on top).   

The next stop was Five Ways, but I rode the tram beyond that to Edgbaston Village, the end of the line.  The tram was barely full and I didn't want to suffer the judgement of the conductor by going only one stop.  

We got to the stop and he nipped out for a cigarette.  The terminus is barely out of the city centre - you can still see the ring road from it - and there were plans for the tram to go all the way along the A456 to Quinton but, as is usual for British transport projects, those plans failed.  The history of the Midland Metro is of a series of piecemeal, bit at a time extensions; the route through the city centre seems to have been opened one stop at a time, like Transport for West Midlands could only build the next section once they'd found some spare change down the sofa. 

I'd actually been here before, when I did the first section of the tram line; in fact, this blog post about Albrighton and Shifnal was written in the Starbucks next to the stop.  (You can put up a blue plaque if you like, I don't mind).  I'd been in Birmingham for the weekend to watch a showing of Live and Let Die hosted by Madeline Smith - it was, unsurprisingly, transcendent - and the next day I'd had to kill time until my pre-booked trip back to Liverpool.  

(I've stopped listening to Black Sabbath and I've put the Live and Let Die soundtrack on instead.  This is infinitely preferable).

I'd also had a wander round Edgbaston Village and it confirmed my long-held prejudice that anywhere in a city that puts "village" after its name is right up its own rear end.  If you can get a pizza delivered to your door in ten minutes, you do not live in a village, and no amount of preservation orders and conservation areas will change that.  (Exception that proves the rule is on Merseyside, where every settlement is a village, no matter how big or small, except for the city of Liverpool, which is "town".  Don't ask why, just go with it).   

I was back in familiar territory in another way, as I'd previously been to the Hagley Road when I collected Five Ways railway station.  There's a bit of a walk between the station and the tram stop so I again found myself descending into the open space at the centre of the gyratory, traffic swirling around above me, trees and grass around me.  Such a lovely idea.  Such a shame humans ruin it.

The gyros stall was open this time, but the owner was sat on a stool outside, smoking a cigarette.  He smiled at me as I passed and I felt bad for not wanting a slab of greasy lamb at this time of day.  Under the low bridge and onto a patch of land that didn't know what it was - pedestrian plaza, hard shoulder for the busy road, entrance space for the buildings alongside.  There was a statue, but the name was hard to read and I had to look it up when I got home.  It was Sir Claude Auchinleck, who was in charge of the forces in India and Pakistan at the time of partition, so perhaps his name being obscured was deliberate.  That's what we call a "complex legacy".  He had no connection with Birmingham at all, and was simply the chairman of the property company that built an adjoining shopping centre - a shopping centre that was demolished over a decade ago, so I'm not entirely sure why they brought him back.

 

Five Ways was now marked by a large brick box of an entertainment complex: cinema, gym, bars.  Like a retail park dropped into the city.  Its windows advertised lots of exciting times as people drank beers and ate chips and laughed.  Across the road an abandoned language centre had a sign in the window: Jesus = Heaven, No Jesus = Hell.  

I can assure you that my bright red face is purely down to the lighting.  I wasn't about to explode or anything.

Our tram clattered back through the city streets to take me to my final stop, the last uncollected halt on the Midland Metro: Grand Central.  Or, as it should be called, "New Street Station".  Yeah, yeah, corporate interests, private finance, etc etc.  It's not Grand Central.  It's the tram stop for bloody New Street, and nobody will convince the public otherwise.  I'd be very interested to see a survey of how many people call it by that name.  I'll bet the numbers are single figures.

When I rode the Metro back in 2013, I hated it.  It was the worst possible version of a city tram.  I'm pleased to say it's vastly improved since then.  Proper trams, proper stops, a proper route through the city centre that goes places you actually want to go.  The upcoming extensions can only make it better.  I'm quite looking forward to coming back for them.

Tramping

I have no memory for people or names.  I struggle to remember what I did yesterday.  Places, though?  Places come to me easily.  Places are wrapped in memories and emotions, sometimes for years.  I can recall stuff and directions and walks going back forever.  Last year the BF and I were in Yorkshire, and we drove around a random corner and I said "I've been here before."  I didn't remember the name of the village or of the station I'd been to, but I remembered the bend in the road, the twist on the hill, the scenic spot behind that wood.  I remembered feeling tired, taking my socks off on the platform, a footpath I'd been too afraid to go down because it went through someone's garden.  Those all came rushing back.

It was a much smaller interim of time of course but as I rode the Midland Metro from Wolverhampton into Birmingham I got flashbacks to my trip down it last October.  (A trip that I published on here under the title of Wolves, Lower and not one person got the REM reference.  You people disgust me). That was the stop where I discovered my lunch had been crushed.  That's where those rowdy blokes were hanging out.  Here's where I saw a load of Metro trainees learning signalling by the side of the track.  Small details that none the less lodged in my head.  Psychogeography.

I picked up where I'd left off in October, at Jewellery Quarter station/stop,  and wandered into the district beyond.  It continues to have the greatest name vs reality contrast in Britain, a district where nothing glistens except the broken glass on the pavement.  

I negotiated the twisted streets, lined with tiny shops offering jewels and gold.  Seeing them all packed together I wondered how much worth was packed into them.  I pictured the owners having to take the displays out of the window every night for stowing in the safe, then returning them to the front every morning.  I wondered how many ram raids they got round here.  There's safety in numbers of course, and I would imagine the police are pretty hot on protecting an area full of gold and diamonds, but you'd still think there'd be loads of criminals willing to chance their arm.  Mind you, I read recently that there are hardly any armed robberies any more: everyone's moved online to identity theft and crypto.  Why wander into a Barclays full of CCTV in a balaclava when you can tap a few keys and rob eighteen million TwatCoins off an anonymous Brazilian YouTuber.  

I ended up on a hefty main road, streaming with buses and dangling Birmingham's skyscrapers in front of me.  There were student castles here and a Domino's that promised that they'd delivered until 5AM.  I salivated briefly at the concept of breakfast pizza, while also being thankful that they don't deliver to the Wirral.  

St Paul's is tucked away from the main road, down a slight alleyway: a problem with building a light rail network on paths designed for heavy steam trains.  The tracks don't tend to be where you want them to be.  I dashed by a handful of Eastern European men in hi-vis who were poking at the ticket machine with apparent professional interest and jumped on board a tram as it slid into the platform.

I'd bought a Daytripper ticket from Wolverhampton station, meaning I could travel on the trams and trains (and buses as well, though who'd want to do that?) and I dutifully showed my bit of orange card to the conductor.  I thought the arrival of ticket machines at the stops would mean the end of them, but I guess they've got a good union, and they are a reassuring presence on the trams as well.  It's always good to get a ticket check and feel like paying your fee was worth it.

St Chad's tram stop never used to exist.  When the Metro first opened, the line terminated within Snow Hill itself, and this is where I'd boarded with Ian and Robert back in 2013.  (Goodness we were young and fresh faced then!).  This put the Metro on the edge of what you would consider to be the city centre proper, and also meant that when they wanted to expand the network, they were up against a literal brick wall.   

Hence: St Chad's.  A new stop built on a viaduct that could interchange with the back of Snow Hill but also, more importantly, descend to street level and continue onwards into Birmingham.  I tried the back exit first, a series of steps down to the road (announcements had been warning me all morning that the lift at St Chad's was broken) and on the landing I paused to have a look at the view.

 

That looked like a proper city.  Tall glass buildings, big roads, muscular churches and traffic.  It felt like I was in a real metropolis all of a sudden.  One thing it didn't have, however, was a sign at street level for the tram, so I schlepped all the way back up the stairs for the obligatory selfie.

The ramp down from the viaduct to street level created by the tram also created a new thoroughfare and an opportunity for property developments to pay for it.  The result was three office blocks, called, rather irritatingly, 1-3 Snowhill - all one word.  I'm not sure how they were allowed to get away with that.

What I actually did next was head down into Snow Hill for a train.  However, in retrospect, I should've done all the tram stuff first and then done the trains.  So I'm going to do a neat little edit there.  I'll come back to Snow Hill at a later date.  

 

 

Instead, let's go to Bull Street, and the stop there.  This is a stop that will acquire a new importance in years to come and you can see why in the picture there.  In the foreground is a junction.  At present, all the trams head right there, on to Edgbaston Village.  The straight part coming out the front though is part of an extension to Digbeth.  That'll have four new stops - Albert Street, Curzon Street, Meriden Street and Digbeth High Street - and will pass underneath the new HS2 station.  

 

At present it's a mess of course, and with the ongoing dramas of HS2, who knows when the extension will open.  It was hard to tell what buildings were in a state because of the works and which ones always looked like that: The Square shopping centre alongside Bull Street was closed and blocked up, though apparently that was because of "fire risk" (and definitely not because its owners have spotted its value has shot up since Curzon Street station appeared on its doorstep).  A temporary terminus by the Clayton Hotel will enable a couple of stops to open early, before they can get access through the HS2 site, but until then the Digbeth section will remain stranded from the rest. The line is planned to continue on to Solihull, and received a bunch of money from the Government this month to pay for it, though how and when they'll connect the two points is a mystery.  
 

A tram from Bull Street took me one stop to Corporation Street and the commercial hub of Birmingham - the bits that aren't in the Bullring, anyway.  

 

This was the Great British High Street.  Long rows of grand buildings, highly decorated at their roof and upper storeys, their ground floors indistinguishable from any other town centre branch of Greggs or Santander.  Pedestrianised precincts that wove among maturing trees while shoppers clattered back and forth waving their carriers about.

New Street was home to the places to pause, the coffee shops, the fast food joints, the casual dining restaurants.  Here and there were hints of an older style - I was delighted to spot the Piccadilly Arcade at one side, looking like it's escaped from a Poirot, if you ignore the boba tea shop and the virtual clay pigeon shooting.

The building that really caught my attention was more recent.  Grosvenor House was built in the 1950s and today houses offices with retail on the ground floor.  It's gloriously styled, playful and interesting. 

I love the way the front of it zigzags.  It's Grade II listed, as it should be.

 

New Street opened up at its peak into Victoria Square, a properly impressive public space.  A lot of this is down to the heft of the Birmingham Council House.  Nineteenth Century Birmingham was an extremely wealthy city but it doesn't feel that way to walk around.  The Twentieth Century came in and knocked it about, so while Liverpool still retains most of its Empire-era grandeur, Brum seems to hide it.  

At Victoria Square you finally get the pomp of a large Industrial Revolution city shouting about its riches.  The square was redeveloped in the late 90s - the water feature dates from then - but it's only enhanced it, and the number of tourists pausing for selfies was testament to how it worked.  Obviously I'd planned extremely badly and arrived on a Monday, when the museum was closed, so I had to admire it from afar. 

There she is, the miserable old sow.  It's funny how the Queen (Elizabeth II Edition) has been dead for three years now and we're not exactly overwhelmed with statues of her across the nation while there's a stout inanimate Victoria staring out over most of our towns.  There have been a couple here and there - the quality of which has been variable - and this week they announced the official memorial would be a bridge in St James's Park, but you'd have thought they'd have chucked up a few more statues.  Regeneration projects are always looking for focal points and HMQ - the longest lasting monarch in British history and pretty well liked, all told - could be up there on a pedestal in Elizabeth Plaza or whatever.  I suppose she does have an awful lot of things named after her, but come on, where are the bronzes?  Certainly I'd rather have a ten foot concrete tribute to Lizzie the Second over, say, Tony Blair or David Cameron or jesus christ almighty Boris Johnson.

Weirdly, the Town Hall, which gives the tram stop its name and is also on Victoria Square, isn't a Town Hall as we would know it; it's actually a Victorian concert hall, with the administrative facilities for the city housed in the Council House.  It's more like Birmingham's St George's Hall, though it's probably not great to use that as a comparison because the Town Hall very much comes off in second place (as do most buildings, to be fair).  

How have I taken this many words to write about five tram stops?  I really should shut up for my own good.  Come back later for the rest of the Midland Metro line.  Oh yes - I'm going to finish this.