The Bitter End

There are a lot of stations on the West Midlands Railway map.  One hundred and seventy, by my count, if you include the tram stops and the ones that don't actually get a railway service (I'm looking at you, Wedgewood).  It's a big old mass of orange that splays across the centre of England.

 

In 2019, I decided I was going to visit them all.  

 

I'd already been to some of them.  Crewe, Macclesfield and the like; the ones that overlapped with the Northern map.  And one day in 2013, I went to the three stations at the heart of Birmingham: Snow Hill, Moor Street, and New Street.  I didn't need to go back.  I'd already collected them.  But I didn't feel like I could, in all conscience, say I'd finished the West Midlands Railway map unless I went back.

 

 

So here I was: older, fatter, greyer.  Stood outside Birmingham Snow Hill taking a picture.

 

Snow Hill is one of those stations that closed in the Seventies for reasons that feel unfathomable today.  A mainline station at the head of an underground tunnel is something most big cities would kill for in 2025: a Victorian Crossrail.  British Rail did close it, though, and in true Birmingham style, it now sits underneath a multi-storey car park.

It reopened in 1987 thanks to the local transport executive's persistence and is now a key gateway into Birmingham.  It's smaller than it used to be, and undeniably uglier, but it's the best they could manage given that the original station was completely demolished.  What a marvelous waste of everyone's time and money.  

There's something sneakily charming about its ugliness, like a dog that has a protruding tooth or a cat with a mangy ear.  It's perfunctory but it is practical; it does the job.  There are some escalators (in one direction) and some toilets on the platforms.  

The former tram platform is still there (excuse the elbow).  Bringing it back into use for heavy rail would be a great idea, everyone knows that, which is why there's no money to do it and it's still vacant years later.  Snow Hill feels underappreciated and unloved.

The opposite is true of Moor Street, one hop on the Cross-City Line later.  It's long been the position of this blog that Chiltern Railways is Tory.  It just is.  There's something about its entire network, its entire existence, that says it doesn't mind what they get up to in their own homes but do they have to rub it in our faces?  (One of its stations is called Denham Golf Club for pity's sake).  It's a vibe I've picked up as I've taken their trains over the last six years.

Back in 2013, I didn't know this, and so the nineteenth century cosplay was delightful.  It was like being in the golden age of steam, only without the steam!  Now, with my prejudice against Chiltern Railways fully installed, it makes me grumpy.  It's not "beautifully preserved", it's "the good old days" in station form, a flashback to the 1950s when England was great.  Moor Street would've absolutely voted Leave.

This is grossly unfair of course.  Moor Street works as a station; it's bright and airy, it's well-maintained, it's got ticket gates and electronic next train signs and PA systems.  It's been brought up to date without smashing the old station to pieces.  If more stations had done the same the network would be a much more pleasing place to visit.  I'm just a miserable old sod.  This is what twelve years does to you, kids.  Be warned. 

Last time I was here I got a picture under the basic sign outside the front.  This time I used the full expanse of my arms to manage a shot under the tastefully minimal gold writing along the side of the building.

Of course, there's a fourth mainline station coming to Birmingham city centre - the biggest one of all: Curzon Street.  It's alongside Moor Street, though it won't interchange with it directly; similarly there are actually tracks to New Street running between both stations, but they won't get platforms or anything.  

I negotiated the barriers, diversions and general chaos that comes when you're building a tram extension next to a massive new station and ended up at Eastside City Park.  It's a pleasing strip of proper greenery in the middle of town, a nice place to wander and gather your thoughts among manicured lawns and hedges. 

Or rather, it would be, if the length of it wasn't currently dominated by one of the largest building sites in the United Kingdom.  Curzon Street is absolutely huge.  The diagrams around the worksite give you a clue to it:

A long tongue, stretching from the Middleway to the Queensway, swallowing up entire streets and disappearing them underneath tracks and platforms.  The railway will arrive here on concrete viaducts above the city and they're crawling closer and closer to the front, gleaming white, the future pushing its way into Birmingham. 

In the middle of it all is the original Curzon Street station, opened in 1838 and closed again less than twenty years later, already overwhelmed by traffic.  For nearly two centuries it's been looking for a purpose - it was a goods station for a while, then it sat empty in front of a parcel depot - until the new Curzon Street turned up on its doorstep and it became part of the plans.

 

What the plans are is strangely vague: there will be a new square here and it might be part of the entrance building to the HS2 station, or offices, or something?  It's Grade I listed and a huge heritage asset so everyone's keen to give it some purpose but at the same time... what do you do with it.  In the renders it clings to the underside of the station, overwhelmed, at an angle to the viaducts and ignored.

I have, somewhere in my soul, given up on HS2.  I can't follow it any more, what's getting built, what isn't, when it's going to open, which bits will open.  At present it seems to be an embarrassment to everyone and I'm not sure I'll ever get to ride it.  I wandered around the site, thrilled that such a huge station was coming to life, and at the same time, wondering when it'll be done.  

And bloody hell it's needed because New Street isn't any good at all.  I've tried, over the past six years, to keep my cards close to my chest about Birmingham's main station.  After all, it sees millions of users every year, and it doesn't get hopelessly snarled up.  Nobody died.  And it's just had that big expensive make over, too!  Network Rail deserves some kind of award for simply managing to rebuild it without causing chaos.

The fact of the matter is: New Street is too big and has too many services.  Having a central hub for England's railways sounds like a great idea, and indeed, if that's what New Street was it'd probably work.  If this was the spot where you'd change from a Plymouth train to a Carlisle train and that was all it'd be brilliant.   

Unfortunately, they also wedge in local services.  The stopper from Rugeley via Walsall, the line from Litchfield to Redditch, the new King's Heath service when that starts up.  These are trains that have no business running into New Street and sitting alongside routes to Edinburgh and London.  They should be under New Street, a whole different underground level, separated from the grown-up trains.  It should be like Stockholm Central, which I visited last year, with different levels for different distances: City for commuter rail, T-Centralen for metro, and then the top level for long-distance and terminating services.  There shouldn't be this endless shuffle of tracks and trains and platforms to try and accommodate every kind of service known to man.

The rebuild introduced colour coded "lounges" to try and keep passengers away from the platforms and to stagger them over the whole building.  Green, Red and Blue, though if you're changing trains, you need the Red one, and the Green one is sort of tucked away round the side and you can't really see it.  Perhaps I'm just thick but I still haven't got to grips with which escalator leads to which lounge from the platform.  I'll get off the train, head for the exit, and then get a surprise when I'm in the Blue when I need to be in the Red.  At least it has places to sit.

The real "wow" element is that massive open roof, and yes, it's very pretty and floods the top of the concourse with light (none of that light actually reaches the platforms, mind).  As a central space it's undeniably impressive.  It's also very hot.  Stupidly hot.  The ceiling is made of ETFE plastic, which is clear and easy to clean, and which you might remember was previously used at Manchester Victoria.  That station has a massive hole in one end where the trams and trains go in and out, meaning there's plenty of fresh air.  That's not true at New Street.  The trains are tucked away underneath the atrium and the entrances are all sealed with doors.  The result is a station so warm they've had to put in fans to try and keep the airflow going.

The refurb was paid for by putting in a large shopping centre over the top, the "Grand Central" that gives the tram stop its (incorrect) name.  It's really an extension to the Bullring and opened with a new flagship John Lewis store.

A John Lewis which is long gone.  It wasn't doing too well anyway, then the pandemic came along and closed the shop forever.  (The Solihull branch is still going strong).  The idea is that it will converted into offices with an atrium over the top, but the website doesn't seem to be working, and I've been coming here for years and not seen any advance.

Grand Central does have a decent food court, which is handy when you're waiting for your train, and there's a Foyles that I periodically wandered round.  And the toilets are clean and free.  I suppose it paid for the rebuild so we should be happy.

New Street also has a large mechanical bull, a legacy of the 2022 Commonwealth Games.  It's dropped onto the concourse next to Pret a Manger and while it's very interesting to look at - and the kids love it - I think most people would prefer some more chairs.  It also annoys me that it's been three years and "Ozzy" is still surrounded by very temporary looking barriers. 

The most notable legacy of the rebuild came in the form of the giant metal "eye" incorporating an LED video screen that overlooks the main entrance.  When the plans for the station were unveiled this was shown on the renders displaying the next few train departures.  "Haha" we all thought. "As if!  That'll be flogged as advertising space."  And yes, no sooner had the station opened than it was flashing up L'Oreal ads and dishwasher videos.  For a while.  The screens were turned off a few years back and now they're simply large black voids.  

What they should do with them - if they're not going to turn them back into advertising space - is write the words Birmingham New Street Station across the front, because at the moment, the signage is weirdly subtle.  I get discretion is very tasteful and all that but not for a railway station.  There you need massive three metre high letters and a double arrow so that everyone knows it's the station.  As it was, I had to take the sign picture in front of a small totem tucked into a floral arrangement. 

And that was, quite literally, the end of the line.  There is technically one more station on the West Midlands Rail map for me to collect: Bridgnorth, on the Severn Valley Steam Railway.  However, a landslip means that station is cut off from the rest of the route and there's currently no way of reaching it by train, and as we all know, if you don't get a train there, it doesn't count.

That was the end of the map for me though.  I went into the All Bar One in the station and ordered a glass of fizz to commemorate the occasion.  I was experiencing a lot of strange feelings, all colliding with one another, contradicting one another.  I'll put them in another blog post still to come.  There needs to be a proper coda to all this.

The prosecco tasted awful by the way.  I ordered a pint of lager instead.

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.