Concretopia

Regular readers (hello you!) may be a little discombobulated at this point.  "Aston?" you may be thinking.  "Didn't he already do Aston?  Are you telling me we're going to get all this nonsense for a second time?"

Well, yes, you're right.  I have already been to Aston (though back then, it had a Network West Midlands sign rather than a TfWM one, so at least it's slightly different).  I wasn't here to collect the station, specifically, however; I was here to visit an icon.

One thing the recent (brilliant, thrilling) Eurovision coverage of Liverpool hammered home is just how photogenic and famous the city is.  Drone shot after drone shot took in the landmarks.  It almost became embarrassing; yes, here's the Pier Head, and the Liver Building; now let's have a look at St George's Hall, or the Cavern; quick zoom past the cathedrals and now a break bumper based around the Albert Dock.  There was an embarrassment of instantly recognisable, beautiful buildings to take in and appreciate.

Birmingham, I'm afraid, doesn't quite have the same appeal.  What's famous in Birmingham?  The BT Tower, which is a less attractive version of the one in London?  The Library, which is only a few years old and still unfavourably compared with the old one?  A shiny Selfridges?  You don't really have an embarrassment of riches.  

Birmingham's most famous landmark isn't a building at all - it's a road.  Junction 6 of the M6, in fact, at the point where it meets the A38(M).  This is Spaghetti Junction, or, as it's known to its mum, the Gravelly Hill Interchange.  Five layers of roads, two layers of railway and a canal all contrive to swing upwards and under and around one another.

I walked to it from Aston station and soon disappeared underneath the concrete flyovers.  As you'd expect round here, the car is king.  Pedestrians are hived off to the side, forced to wait between long gaps at pedestrian crossings.  The road took me towards Salford Circus, a glamorous name for a big roundabout, but that would mean I wouldn't experience Spaghetti Junction proper so I left the street and headed down to a canal towpath.

In the countryside, canal towpaths are a shortcut through nature.  The combination of water and vegetation is soothing.  In a city, it becomes a danger.  You're plunged onto a narrow, single path, no escape, no way out, adorned with graffiti and hidden.  

This canal path was even darker.  The concrete of the roadways lowered the ceiling to almost touching height.  It sucked out the light, creating stretches of deep blackness, broken up by huge columns that concealed the view ahead.  It was disturbing and dark.  Now and then hatches had been punched into the roadway to give some light to the canal below, but when it illuminated graffiti that looked like a message from the Riddler it wasn't exactly reassuring.

I was alone on the path, which was fine with me.  This wasn't a place where I wanted to be accompanied.  The view soon opened up, and I was taking in the sweep of roadways, the curves of access routes.

I began to feel a new emotion: awe.  This was a tremendous achievement.  The way the roads took you from one level to the next, never making you stop, always moving.  Over the canal, under the railway, over another road.  I pictured the engineers back in the days before computers planning this.  Compasses, slide rules, T-squares.  Then the pouring of concrete, the thousands of work hours, the absolute precision needed to make each slab connect and work.  Each pillar at just the right height to accommodate its cap.

Alone, under those unforgiving concrete views, I should've felt vulnerable.  Instead I felt a weird sense of pride.  Humanity has blighted this planet, corrupted it, changed it and destroyed it.  But it has done so through its own genius and Spaghetti Junction was, to me, an expression of the human genius.  It was an incredible achievement.  What a piece of work is a man.  

Almost as if the universe wanted to remind me that actually, humans are awful after all, at the exact moment I was marvelling at man's genius I encountered a tribute to its cruelty: a memorial to DC Michael Swindells, a policeman killed on the towpath.  There was a fresh wreath, because it turned out I was there one day after the anniversary of his death.  

The path swung upwards and over the canal via a small bridge, accompanied by a second that carried electrical cables and warned me of death if I got too close.  I saw another person at that point, a shirtless man with his dog; he looked unwell and unhappy.  I took the path under more flyovers, through a compound of road workers in hi-vis who watched me pass curiously.

I got a moment of panic that there was no way out of here; up ahead was a firmly locked gate.  But then I spotted the pedestrian exit via a kissing gate, and I emerged into the car park of the Midlands Greek & Cypriot Association, founded after the invasion of the island by Turkey.  It's a building that combines community facilities, a school and a church, plus a cafe and a sports field.  As I passed, two men in suits emerged from the inside and began picking up litter.

Beyond was a small estate of flats and maisonettes and then the stretch of green that was Brookvale Park, with a playground and then a couple of closed kiosks that had been politely restored.  They were somewhat overshadowed by a pair of steel columns, glinting in the sun, designed by the sculptor Tim Tolkien (great nephew, since you ask).  They're nice enough, but if I'm honest... I prefer the kiosks.  They're less fussy, more charming.

From there it was a steep climb on terraced streets up the hill.  I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this isn't the most charming of Birmingham's districts.  There was a meanness to the houses, an attitude in the way even the cars were parked.  One of them had a bumper sticker with the FakeTaxi logo on it, something I have only recently learned is a series of pornographic films.  I wonder why you'd put that on your car?  Isn't that like declaring your devotion to masturbation?  Why not stick a sign saying "Massive Wanker" on your parcel shelf?

The road undulated, down, then up, and I found myself walking behind a large lady with a headscarf, carrying a bag of compost.  She dangled it from one hand, lazily, tired.  Across the street, a quite patently stoned man spotted her.  He was stood on the pavement outside his house, swaying gently, the joint between his fingers.  He called out to her.

"Alright?"

"Yeah," she replied, noncommittally.

"Knackered?"

"Yeah."

Gravelly Hill station was tucked down below the street and, quite unforgivably, didn't have a totem to its name.  There were signs affixed to the brickwork pointing you in the direction of your platform but there wasn't a single prominent sign to attract your attention from the street.  I had to snatch a picture with one of the platform signs in the few moments before my train arrived.

Note that it's is called the "home of Spaghetti Junction".  They won't even call it the Gravelly Hill Interchange on a sign that already has Gravelly Hill on it!

The briefest of journeys brought me to Erdington station, the next on the line and the last uncollected station between New Street and Four Oaks.  Another ramp took me down to street level.  While Gravelly Hill had no street presence at all, Erdington was overburdened.  Allow me to present the railway bridge sign:

and the totem version:

Christ but I've got a big square head.

There was also this, which I am assuming is some kind of artwork but, as is usual for the West Midlands, they didn't bother with any actual interpretation boards to tell you what it was or who it was by.  Perhaps it was a piece of art, perhaps it was just a large stone they couldn't move out the way.  Who can tell.

The station was in a row of shops that hinted at the varied ethnic mix for the area - salons with black hair a speciality, a supermarket with a dozen national flags laser printed on its front, a Turkish barber and a Thai masseuse.  On the corner, Tyler's Kitchen offered Jamaican mutton curry and rice and peas while promising that everything it served was 100% Halal.  I darted across the wide junction, where an imposing building was now a wedding house, and walked past terraces and closed pubs.

"Fatagain" City Scaffolding?  Fat Again?  Ok.

At Marsh Lane, the road suddenly opened out into a dual carriageway in the way that Birmingham's streets seem to do without thinking.  It's a city based entirely around cars and it can't help itself; every now and then it panics and bulldozes a highway through a residential to make sure its drivers aren't delayed for more than eight seconds.  This was at least a green dual carriageway, with no-mow May in full effect and giving it an almost pastoral feel.

A man came out of one of the houses that lined the street and walked to the pavement - across his neighbour's front garden.  There was something about him that radiated bad news.  A general vibe of unpleasantness.  He gave me a look over his shoulder as he reached the roadside, one that was just a little too long, and I felt a quiver of anxiety.  He paused to light a cigarette and I took the opportunity to pass him but I could feel him walking behind me.  Fortunately, I walk very fast, and I was soon leaving him behind, but I will admit that when he shouted across the road to his mates outside a corner shop I was fully expecting them to join him in ambushing me.

A Co-op that hasn't been upgraded to the new branding is a sure sign that a district isn't at its best.  Head office are clearly wavering over whether to spend the money on it, or close it altogether.  Erdington's centre, meanwhile, was a five-way crossroads, surrounded by shops and a pub and a cinema turned bingo hall.  One of the stores had a "night hatch", for service until 3am: a handwritten post it in the corner of the window said We do not serve single's Please do not ask, which gave me a flashback to the pupils at school who'd buy a single fag from the dodgy newsagent round the corner to smoke ostentatiously round the back of the Rondy.

You may, of course, be wondering where the hell I was going.  With my last station collected I could've got back on the train and gone home.  That wouldn't have felt right though, so I'd planned a final, fourth station to visit.  Unfortunately I'd gone the wrong way.  Halfway down Slade Road I realised I was on my way back to Gravelly Hill and, no offence, that was not top of my wish list.  I hate to turn back on myself so I cut down a side road, getting a brief vista of Birmingham from a distance, and then I walked to the edge of Brookvale Park - yes, that exact same park I walked past earlier.

I followed the outer road round the park, north this time.  There were dog walkers and parents with pushchairs.  One car pulled up and three women in full burqa got out; their driver, meanwhile, was a man wearing a t-shirt that said Show me a trick and I'll give you a treat.  The sun was warm and I felt lazily content.

The park gave way to another dual carriageway and I was back on the right path, skirting the Witton Cemetery and encountering the M6 once again.  There was an enormous dead space beneath it, acres of grey tarmac with discarded fast food boxes hinting at its night time uses.  I don't know what you can do with these big empty lots in our cities - they're such a waste of real estate.  Too dark for vegetation, too grimy and noisy for civilised life, instead existing as a void to be filled by people who are drawn to the edges of our society.  

Alongside the viaduct were industrial units, garages, warehouses; the businesses we tuck away where we don't want to see them.  Radios pumped out music to drown out the clatter of metal and tools.  There was a scent of oil and burning.  I ducked down a side road and there was the canal again, the same one I'd followed earlier, though somehow it looked even shabbier now in the open than it had hidden beneath Spaghetti Junction.

I was now headed into that most dreadful of places: the business park.  Unfriendly signs warned me that although I could walk on their footpaths, they'd really like to remind me that they were only letting me do this out of the goodness of their hearts, and at any point I could be bundled into a van and taken away to the public highway where I belonged.  To show just how special their hallowed paths were, they weren't paved like normal streets, but were instead made up of bricks.  This probably seemed extremely classy in the 80s when they were laid but decades of encroachment by the roots of the surrounding trees was making them pop up in mounds.

I walked on, the only person in amongst the trucks, past a factory that had its No Smoking On Site sign in both English and German, which gave it a pleasingly stentorian tone.  Rauchen Verboten sounds so much more frightening.  The charming scent of a council tip signalled that I was back on public roads, and then there was a set of allotments, with an Asian woman pausing over her spade to enjoy the sun on her face.  This felt like an area where things were hidden away; there was also a custody suite for the police.

On the main road again, there were grimy empty patches of land, and signs pointing to the sports facilities hidden behind the houses.  A billboard with a cheery smiling man in a rubber ring asked "Back in the dating pool?  It might be hard, but safe sex is easy."  Then there was the greyhound stadium.  I'm increasingly surprised that greyhound racing still exists.  It seems like something from another era, like cock fighting, something we collectively agreed wasn't really on and quietly dropped.  At its height, there were more than seventy greyhound stadia, but now it's down to twenty.  (A quick look at the Greyhound Board of Great Britain website tells me that there aren't any racecourses left in the north west, with the nearest course to Liverpool in Sheffield, which I'm weirdly pleased about).

Perry Barr seems to be hedging its bets a little, advertising its speedway races as much as its dog races.  It's also starting to look a little out of place because, it turns out, Perry Barr has had a heck of a makeover since I was last here.  This wasn't a surprise to me.  The main athletics stadium for the Commonwealth Games is up the road so Perry Barr was the main point of arrival for visitors; obviously it was going to be spruced up.  Even when I'd visited in 2019, there was a protest about the demolition of the flyovers at this point (only in Birmingham do people complain about flyovers getting knocked down).  

I'd not realised how comprehensive the redevelopment was.  Suddenly there were tall blocks of flats, good ones.  The traffic had been calmed and cycle and bus lanes were introduced.  There was actual greenery.  It was a complete transformation.

Key to this has been the rebuilding of Perry Barr station.  When I visited in 2019 I didn't mince my words - I called it ugly.  Its sole moment of charm was a British Rail era sign that had somehow clung on into the 21st century.  The whole thing had been knocked down and rebuilt to a design that was eventually worth having - TfWM's first attempt was so ugly there was a huge public outcry - it seems people want their railway stations to be beautiful and welcoming and not to look like a portakabin that slipped off the back of a lorry.

The new design is bright and airy and clean.  The weathered metal on the outside has got silhouettes in it to make it look interesting.  You can walk from one side to the other, unencumbered, and take a lift down to the platforms.  There's a ticket office.  There's even a pedestrianised station square, with seating that was actually being used by people, something that normally only happens in CGI renders.

In short, the new Perry Barr station is fantastic.  You see, Birmingham?  You can do it when you try.  Well done.

Up The Villa

I've been going to Birmingham a fair while now.  I've just about got to grips with New Street Station - although I have thoughts on it, to which I will one day devote an entire blog - and its many exits.  I know where Moor Street is in relation to New Street.  What I haven't quite grasped is the best way to get between the two.

At first, I walked on the pavement to get there.  This involved crossing the service entrance to some shops, cutting across a pedestrianised plaza, then taking a ramp down to the road across from the station.  It was a bit grim, and there were usually a couple of aggressive homeless people begging en route, so I switched to cutting through the Bullring shopping centre.

This had its own problems.  As a vast indoor shopping centre, they're very keen to get you in, but not so keen to let you out, so the building carries you along without really letting you know how to leave.  It doesn't help that the entrance from New Street is on the first floor, but the slope of the city centre means that the exit to Moor Street is on the level below.  I never know how close to get to Selfridges before leaving; is it before or after?

On this occasion, I picked the wrong door, and passed a Pizza Hut and a Handmade Burger Co. to end up at the foot of Selfridges' giant lumpy form, and across from the back of Moor Street's platforms.  The entrance to the station was quite a way away (so far, in fact, that they recently announced a new back entrance to be built in this exact spot) but luckily, I wasn't getting a train this time.  I was just using Moor Street as a landmark.  Where I was actually headed was HS2 town.

Behind Moor Street, long strips of hoardings seal off a vast stretch of the city centre as work proceeds on making a brand new high speed railway station.  Curzon Street will be the terminus of the first phase of HS2, from London to Birmingham, and the former Parcelforce depot on the site has been levelled while builders and engineers smash it into shape.  Everywhere I walked there were hard hatted men in high vis pointing and waving bits of paper about.

There was so much work going on, in fact, it boggled my mind that it is under the threat of cancellation.  If the government decides not to proceed with HS2 the diggers and trucks will quietly back off and leave a huge scar in the centre of the city - which presumably will be flogged off to property developers at dirt cheap rates to claw back some of the money spent.  Then in twenty years time the railway between London and Birmingham will be even more clogged than it is now, HS2 will be resurrected, and they'll realise there's nowhere to build a station any longer.

I skirted round the edge of the building site and into Eastside City Park, a wide expanse of grass and stone and a pleasing new open space for the city centre.  Overlooked by the now quaintly dated Millennium Point, it was intended to be at the heart of a whole new district, though the HS2 station has kind of knocked that redevelopment back for the time being.  None the less, a mass of blocky university buildings have been built along the northern edge.  It was a good place for a breather, and there were plenty of people about enjoying their morning, but it still felt a bit bland and corporate.  It had a slight whiff of Milton Keynes, rather than Britain's second biggest city.  Perhaps it's because of all those low slung buildings, rather than the skyscrapers you'd expect, perhaps its the black archways over the walkway that reminded me of the car parks on Midsummer Boulevard in MK, but it was all a little bit clean and scrubbed and bland.

More impressive was the remains of the original Curzon Street station.  Opened in 1838, the London to Birmingham railway terminated here, and the grand entrance building housed the original ticket offices, waiting rooms and refreshment spaces.  In 2019 it looks tiny; a cube with some columns.  It looks hopelessly inadequate for such an important service, and indeed, it quickly became overwhelmed.  New Street opened twenty years later, and almost all the passenger services were diverted there, with Curzon Street becoming a goods station instead before closing altogether in the sixties.

The plan is now to incorporate the Curzon Street building into the edge of the new station, a tiny piece of history clinging to the massive new expanse of railway lands.  It'll be little more than a monument, a kind of Grade 1 listed noticeboard to let you know where the station's back entrance is, but it's pleasing to think that two hundred years after it was built, it'll be used for London-Birmingham services again.  (I will be writing a letter of complaint to HS2 regarding its claim on the hoardings outside that this is the "world's first mainline passenger railway building"; the present building at Edge Hill isn't even the original for the Liverpool to Manchester railway, and it's still older than this one).  In the distance I could hear the grinding and churning of trains leaving New Street and heading east.

I wandered down and out of the park, among hordes of young happy students looking optimistic and bright, and hated them all.  How dare they make me look old and miserable.  At the far end I collided with the dual carriageway of the A4540, streams of traffic separating the shiny city centre from the inner city residences.  It was a stark and sudden change.  On one side, gleaming shiny modernism; on the other, low terraces and old pubs.

Nechells had been slums for decades until the city's authorities took the district in hand in the 1950s.  They levelled street after street and replaced them with tower blocks and modern flats, surrounding them with grass and playing fields and making a new, clean future.

Of course, you know how this turned out; the Council didn't care for the flats or their residents, the buildings rotted and decayed, and forty years later they started demolishing those slums and replacing them with new homes.  Some of them still cling on, but across the city they're being knocked down and replaced with three-bedroom homes on cul-de-sacs.  Living in the sky is reserved for the wealthy denizens of the apartment blocks sprouting inside the ring road.

I followed the Vauxhall Road, avoiding the heavy man in a heavy metal t-shirt who emptied the content of his nose onto the pavement, and ducking round the hijab-wearing mums who were chatting over the heads of their kids in the pushchairs.  There was the headquarters of the Fire Service, and a couple of schools, then a deserted shopping precinct with almost all its shutters down.  The only shops that were open were a Halal butcher and a newsagent; the only person I could see was a homeless man sat on the bench with his bin bag full of possessions.

High green fences surrounded the brightly coloured buildings of the Heartlands Academy.  It was lunchtime but I couldn't see any sign of the kids.  Are they even let out of the school at dinner now?  Is this one of those things that children are warned against, in case they fall prey to paedophiles or worse, a local chip shop, and make Jamie Oliver sad in the process?  I imagined that somewhere behind that fence they were being filed into the dining hall to be fed extremely healthy and nutritious food and they were hating every single mouthful.

Further up a mosque had taken over a building that I'm sure in a previous life would've been a pub; a two storey building at the base of some flats surrounded by tarmac.  They had a sign up appealing for funds for refurbishment, which made me imagine that they still hadn't got round to stripping out the interior, and they being were forced to pray under packets of Big D peanuts and posters for Heineken.  It's hard to be truly close to Allah when you bend down and get a whiff of fag ash wafting out of the carpet.   

Duddeston station brought with it a pleasing surprise: art.  The lift shaft was decorated with this figure, made out of holes punched into metal.  There were similar artworks mounted on the platform though I couldn't find anything to tell me who it was by or where it came from; I suspect that in the continual shuffle to rebrand everything from WMPTE to Centro to Network West Midlands to Transport for West Midlands the explanatory signs went missing and never reappeared.

I took my sign selfie - much to the amusement of a young girl who emerged from the station just as I was snapping away - then headed across the tiled floor and down to the single platform.

Things get a little bit confusing with the next train indicators at Duddeston.  All the trains that pass through here also pass through New Street, and the destination boards all mention this - Walsall via Birmingham New Street, Wolverhampton via Birmingham New Street, and so on.  Thing is, Doddeston is the first station out of New Street if you're heading to Walsall, so it's a little jarring to see it still listed on the destination - especially on an island platform, where both trains indicators scroll via New Street next to one another even though they're patently going in different directions.  I mean, I've been on trains all over the place, and I still double checked against the timetable before I got on a train.

(Incidentally, as I was about to board, a man I'd seen milling about came up to me and asked if this was the New Street train.  I said no, that was the other platform, and he went away quite happily.  It was only as the train left the station that I realised that of the dozen or so people on the station, only me and him were white, and he hadn't asked any of the black or Asian men which platform he needed to use.  I don't think this was accidental).

The train wound its way from Duddeston, up and up, until it finally dropped us off at Aston on a viaduct.  I walked down the steps to the street, only pausing halfway to take the obligatory sign picture.

Aston, of course, means only one thing: Aston Villa.  Outside the station, purple banners guided the new arrivals towards the stadium.  Part of me wanted to head in the opposite direction, so that I could see Spaghetti Junction, but I decided to save that for when I collected Gravelly Hill, what with it being technically the Gravelly Hill Interchange.  Instead I turned up Grosvenor Road and passed under the first of many Match Day Parking Restrictions Are In Place signs. 

We're now going to have a brief foray into our regular series of Scott Talks A Load Of Old Bollocks About Football.  One of the interesting things about the West Midlands is that it's an absolutely massive region with half a dozen professional football teams and they're all a bit rubbish.  How do they manage that?  Liverpool and Manchester have two top flight teams, as does Glasgow.  Yet Walsall and Coventry City scrape around the bottom tiers while Birmingham City and West Bromwich Albion are in the Championship.  Aston Villa and Wolverhampton Wanderers are both in the Premiership, but they're fairly recent arrivals, hovering in the middle of the table and acting as three point donation schemes for the bigger clubs.  And ok, two teams in the Premiership is pretty good, but they're not exactly legends are they?  I can't see there being many excitable Far Eastern supporters getting AVFC tattoo'd on their ankle the way they do for say, Manchester United.  They're dull and a bit laughable.

As far as I can see Aston Villa's main claim to fame is attracting bizarrely posh fans who don't have anything to do with the local area.  Princes William and Harry are fans, and according to my research, neither of them hail from the West Midlands, while David Cameron claimed to be a fan (though like a lot of the things that came out of his mouth, this was probably a massive lie).  What do Aston Villa have that other clubs don't?  Is liking a London club seen as a bit parochial and alienating to the plebs, while liking a Northern club would seem patronising, so they split the difference and plumped for one halfway?  Do they have extensive helicopter parking?  Do they serve swan pies?

(I'm sure I will get complaints on Twitter and in the comments from people telling me all the trophies the Brummie teams have won and how actually you'll find they're fine teams with a great history and I would like to say in advance: I don't care, football is rubbish, nyah nyah nyah).

There were more slum clearances with blocks of flats receding into the distance beyond acres of grass.  It's strange how all this open space doesn't feel welcoming; how all the trees around the flats didn't create a beautiful landscape.  Theoretically these miles of green should improve a district but instead they made it feel abandoned.  Each home, each building, became a landmark in a sea of grass, an island; crossing from one to another felt like a massive distance. 

The road passed under the A38(M) Aston Expressway, a particularly exciting road if you're a nerd like me.  It's a motorway-standard road that runs from Spaghetti Junction into the centre of Birmingham and it's made of seven lanes with no central reservation.  Normally it's three lanes in each direction, with an empty lane in the middle, but at peak times traffic is redirected and it becomes four lanes in one direction and two in the other (still with the empty lane separating them).  There's no other road like it in Britain.  I've only been on it once, about twenty years ago, and sadly it was in three and three mode; I'd love to go down it when it was four-two.

(Yeah, come at me football fans; your sport is shite and not as interesting as a motorway.  THERE I SAID IT).

I was now getting into proper Aston Villa territory, as the banners had stopped giving simple walking directions and had instead moved onto rousing slogans for the supporters: FIGHT LIKE LIONS and ROAR WITH US and variations thereof.  The road split around the Holte Hotel; while the left hand road looked like it had the more interesting sights, I took the right, because while I wanted to see Villa Park, I wasn't actually that interested.

I walked up a little further, then popped up to take a look at the front of the stadium, with Aston Villa spelt out in brick.  It was alright, I suppose; like all English football grounds, it was simultaneously impressively large and a little bit shit.  I like looking at big stadia purely as an architecture fan - they're huge lumps of building and should be appreciated.  Villa Park was like a lot of the historic teams' grounds, a mish-mash of Victoriana and clunky metal framework and services wedged wherever they could find a gap.  The stained glass windows were an unusual and slighty kitschy touch.

As is usual, I took a picture of the ground and texted it to the Liverpool supporting BF to see what his reaction was.  Usually it's something mature like "shithole" or "tin shed"; this time he replied "bring Jack Grealish back with you", so the actual football was clearly bottom of his priorities.  Which is another demonstration that Aston Villa aren't that important - he couldn't even get up the effort to insult them.

I passed under the overhanging terraces of the Doug Ellis Stand and past the car park and club shop, before crossing the road to reach Witton station.  Witton is closer to the stadium than Aston, though it obviously has the disadvantage of a name that's nothing to do with the football club; there have therefore been occasional proposals to rename it Villa Park, but these haven't come to anything yet.  I dodged round a group of Turkish women who were very angry about a text they'd received and were shouting at the phone and ended up under the railway bridge taking a selfie in front of a lot of people waiting for a bus.

Unsurprisingly, Witton was built for crowds.  Long ramps lead up to the tracks, while the platforms were notably clear of benches or flower pots or anything that could get ripped up and chucked after a five nil drubbing.  There was a waiting room that was open on match days only, and the platform signs had the Villa crest on them, but the sportiest part of the whole station was a pair of trainers abandoned on the tracks.  It was a station that came with its own boots.