White, Chocolate

 

This is entirely in my head, I know, but it seems to snow in Birmingham a lot.  Well, at least it seems to snow a lot when I visit.  I was last on this section of the Cross City line in March 2023, and it was snowing then.  I come back, and it snows the night before, and then again while I walk around.  Perhaps I'm simply used to endlessly mild weather, being a resident of The Leisure Peninsula itself, the Wirral; we hardly ever get snow.

I was here to close off the last remaining gap on the line, the four stations between Bournville and Longbridge.  This is, of course, the home of Cadbury's, purveyors of fine chocolate, and the local factory has contributed to its station by painting its metalwork Dairy Milk purple.

That's the beginning and end of its contributions, mind.  The rest of the station is the tin shed aesthetic common on the line.  I'd hoped there'd be a bit of extravagance here, perhaps a giant Caramel bunny or benches shaped like a Freddo, but the purple was all you got.  I headed down to the street and took my sign picture.

I was tucking my camera back in my pocket when a man in a car at the neighbouring lights called out.  It took me a few moments to process that he was talking to me, and so I'd not been paying attention.  If I don't expect chat, my brain is simply not listening for it; it has to go back and rewind and process it.  I said, "what?", because I am a master of witty repartee, but he didn't say anything more and drove off.  

My brain finally deciphered the words from the thick Brummie accent and I realised that he'd said "ain't you never seen snow before?"  This immediately put me in a bad mood.  I wasn't doing any harm.  I was amusing myself.  And this bloke decided to pop up and police it.  Reader, if you see someone doing something innocuous you disapprove of, keep it to yourself, or do what I do: bitch about it on social media where they can't see it.  Calling out to random people and judging their behaviour leaves them feeling angry and vulnerable and socially awkward, and I'm all those things normally anyway.  Don't add to them.

Cadbury's is directly opposite the station, and it's an intriguing mix of architectural styles.  There's this half-timbered Olde Worlde building, but right behind it is a high brick factory, while access roads give you glimpses of steaming vats and loading bays.  A more modern office block and reception desk has been squeezed onto the street.  It'll never be confused for Willy Wonka's place, let's put it that way.

Not that it's stopped them trying.  Cadbury World is at the back of the factory - annoyingly, quite a walk from the station - and was opened in 1990 as a visitor attraction with interactive displays and histories and a lot of opportunities to stuff your face.  

I would not be visiting Cadbury World on this visit.  For starters, I've already been, back in 2010 with my friends and their children.  You shouldn't really visit unless you have children present, because the exhibition is very much aimed towards them.  A single man wandering around that place would get some funny looks.

Secondly, I don't really like chocolate.  I'm not sweet toothed at all.  I'll occasionally get a craving, and I'll get a Dairy Milk or a Fruit and Nut, because Cadbury's is the best; I've tried those supposed luxury bars that are 60% cocoa beans or whatever and they all taste bitter and unpleasant.  Otherwise, I can do without it.  In fact, once on holiday in Yorkshire, we visited an artisan chocolate making factory, and I had to go outside because the sugary sweet smell was making me feel ill.  I'd much rather have a packet of crisps or a pasty.  (The BF is the exact opposite, and he was extremely disappointed when I came home from my trip without a sack of Roses for him).  

I was far more interested in visiting Bournville itself, the model village built by the Cadbury family around the factory.  It was constructed as an ideal place for working class people to live - all working class people, not just workers at Cadbury's.  George Cadbury was a Quaker and it was his intention to create a community that was airy and well-maintained and with good architecture.  It was a contrast to the small homes and squalid conditions most employees could expect at that time.

In addition to hundreds of houses, community facilities, parks, churches and shops were built - but, as a teetotaller, George refused to allow a pub to be built.  Bastard.

Bournville's homes were far grander than those in Port Sunlight, its Scouse model village cousin.  I got the feeling that the Levers spent their money on the art gallery at its centre and the houses were not a priority.  Port Sunlight's gardens are largely communal, and the houses are more cottagey than the proper semis and detached homes here.

If it had been a nicer day, I'd have happily wandered around Bournville for hours.  Unfortunately the snow was really coming down now, leaving me cold and wet, so I did a loose circuit then headed back to the main road to continue south to my next station.

The village has become an incredibly desirable place to live in the century since it was built, and this has extended to the areas around it with a similar postcode.  If you can't afford Bournville proper, then the terraced homes nearby will give you that same frisson of middle class glamour.  It's why a flat row of shops, a strip that I'd seen all over the country that would normally house a corner shop, a couple of takeaways and a hairdresser, instead included a Zero Waste supermarket and "Birmingham's first organic butcher".

Linden Road went up and down over the hills, sliding down the social scale as it did.  They'd tried to make the council houses vaguely in keeping with the model village, but it was done on a budget, with none of the Arts and Crafts styling or elaboration.  It's a shame that uber-capitalist George Cadbury's hopes for the average person's home were undone by capitalism itself, firstly by restricting the money spent on public homes, then by selling them off and putting them out of reach of your working man.  Nothing like Bournville is being built today, and if it was, it certainly wouldn't be affordable for someone who worked in a factory.

Kings Norton was a messy stretch of shops spread around a junction.  Buses idled at the side of the road.  People inched their way along the pavements, remarkably clear in the main, but with the threat that the stuff falling would settle.  Chicken shops and pound stores and the Kurry Kingdom in an extremely impressive building.  I hummed Heather Small as I walked past Pride Dry Cleaners and avoided the queues of people getting their lunch from Sophie's Pizza and Pasta.

The bus layby came with another of Centro's pieces of art, a pair of metal feathers on top of the transport information board, but unlike many of the other ones I'd encountered during my visits to the West Midlands, this one still had its information board, telling me about the work and the artist.  I'm not sure if that's because of a commitment to informing the public or more likely nobody's got round to taking the poster down.

It means I can tell you these are the Feathers of Freedom and were designed by Paula Woof in 2001; they are made from stainless steel and represent "the sense of freedom felt by generations who moved here from central Birmingham".  So now you know.

Kings Norton (the apostrophe seems to be an optional extra) is about to get a lot more important.  The Camp Hill Line once carried trains direct into Curzon Street, but, starting with the replacement of that terminus with New Street and continuing through the improvement of other lines that shadowed it, it slowly fell out of use before closing to passengers in 1946.  It continued as a freight line but that was it.

It's now, excitingly, rarely, significantly, being brought back into passenger use, albeit incredibly slowly.  Three new stations have been constructed along the line and, eventually, trains will split off at Kings Heath for the city centre, making this an interchange station.  Fortunately it's already got four platforms to accommodate the two lines.

I mean, that's the theory.  As is usual for British infrastructure, it's both hopelessly late - it should be open right now but they're still working on the stations - and also done on the cheap.  Those extra platforms are going to remain out of use, because the money isn't there, just as the money isn't there to build a viaduct at the other end to get Camp Hill trains into Moor Street (where there is capacity) instead of New Street (where there is not).  These will, presumably, be completed at a later date, when all the engineers have gone home and the planning permission has lapsed and they'll have to start all over again from scratch.  Clever.

I got off the train at Northfield behind a man with an enormous snuffling pit bull, running from side to side all over the platform and clearly not enjoying that the snow hadn't been cleared.  His stomach dragged through the piles and he hopped pathetically to try and avoid it (the dog, not the man).  The snowy platform added to a feeling that Northfields was a little unloved and deserted, a feeling not helped by a local network map on the wall being so old it still showed the Metro terminating at Snow Hill (a stop closed in 2015).

I followed two Eastern European ladies down the steps from the platform, listening to them chat merrily to one another, then passed through the subway under the tracks to the other side.  There was another piece of Centro art and, once again, there was an information piece for it, confirming my suspicion that these are only still there when someone at TfWM forgets to take them down.

This one is the All Seasons Tree by Rosemary Terry.  Erected in 2003, it's intended to represent the network's dedication to providing a service in all weathers - especially appropriate on a day like today, where the snow had given it a festive dusting.

I walked down the hill from the station entrance, past a garage advertising £40 MOTs and onto a side road.  The snow had stopped falling and the thaw had started, leading to a great river of water cascading down the drains.  I stepped into a patch of open land, breaking the snow with my feet, and following a short path into a copse of woods.

The drips of the melting snow were everywhere around me, accompanied by the rustle of bushes as lumps fell to the ground.  One or two pieces careened off my forehead, and I briefly considered the humiliation of being discovered unconscious in a wood having been accosted by frozen water.  I'd have to lie and pretend I was mugged.

I decided I'd swing back to the main road, rather than persist on my country walk.  The River Rea crosses The Mill Walk as a ford here, something you don't really expect to see in suburban Birmingham.

Immediately after I took this photo, a BMW appeared and crawled through the ford.  The driver then burned away at a ridiculous speed, his engine roaring, in case you thought that his slowness through the water indicated some sort of reserve or timidity and you didn't realise that he was actually an extremely masculine man who was manly.  Needless to say, I was extremely aroused, and definitely didn't assume he had a micropenis.

The main road was a wide straight boulevard with space for trams in the middle if they ever decided to restore them - which of course they won't - and plenty of shops.  On the corner was a JobCentre, which was pretty essential, as I was now entering Longbridge.

If you're of a certain age, the name "Longbridge" brings back memories of news reports, first about strike action, then about decline and closure.  This was the home of the Austin Motor Company, later British Leyland, later Rover, the builders of dozens of legendary British cars and a hotbed for complex industrial relations for over a century.  The factory took up a huge expanse of land and employed thousands of workers locally, before slowly declining over the second half of the twentieth century for a million different, equally sad, reasons.  The plant shrank and contracted until its very last stub - making MG cars for its now Chinese owner - was closed in 2016.

This leaves the question of how to regenerate the fallen area.  Housing has been a key part of it, of course, with flats and houses filling the former assembly areas.  The people who live there need jobs though and so a new Longbridge town centre has been constructed.

It's heralded by the South & City College Birmingham, housed in a truly hideous building that strives for "iconic" but actually ends up as "messy".  Architects and city planners have looked at the likes of the Bilbao Guggenheim and their takeaway seems to be "weird angles, gotcha".  They've avoided building square boxes and have instead embraced lumps, shards, spikes, all layered with coloured cladding.  They are, almost without exception, hideous, and will be demolished in about twenty years time when they stop being fashionable because nobody will want to refurbish them.  

Beyond it is open space, a series of terraces and flower beds beside the River Rea that form Austin Park.  There's also Austin Way, Cooper Avenue and Princess Street, all named after the former marques, which seems off to me.  Imagine being a former engineer at the plant, spending decades crafting those vehicles, and now having to trudge down Ambassador Avenue to get to your job fetching trollies in Sainsbury's car park.  That's rubbing salt in the wounds.

Because Longbridge has now been reborn as a shopping centre.  The signs might pretend it's a civic heart, but make no mistake; this is an out of town retail park that has been allowed to bloom here.  It was surprising to me how bad it was.  We've learned over the past few decades that making a place is the future of retail, that now we can get anything we want delivered to our homes, we have to encourage people to venture out.  

This is an L of boxes arranged around an open-air car park.  You could've put in a pedestrian square here, a space for exhibitions or events, or arranged the shops into more interesting avenues to be explored and enjoyed.  You can hear the developer grumbling: "we gave you that park, isn't that enough?"  It shows how big business can take advantage of down on their luck areas.  With the closure of the car plant, no doubt Birmingham was simply happy anyone wanted to build anything that would provide jobs, and waved it all through.  

It was lunchtime and I had time to kill before my pre-booked train home so I decided to sample the delights of a Hungry Horse.  I don't think I'd ever been to one before, but it wasn't exactly a surprise; sub-Wetherspoons decor, blandly unthreatening, plenty of seats and a reliance on food rather than the odd old bloke nursing a half of bitter.  It was a Tuesday, which meant the special was a "sizzler" for nine pounds.  This meant I got a skillet of vegetables with some breaded chicken, some onion rings and some chips, plus a mysterious powder that was supposedly a salt and pepper herb mix.  It was, technically food, but only technically, because food usually also has flavour and texture.  This was more like eating polystyrene that had sat next to an air freshener and had picked up a bit of the scent.  However, after several hours of walking in snow and getting soaked and frozen I was simply glad to get something hot inside me.

Also, they served beer.

I tottered out an hour later with a couple of pints sloshing around and wandered towards the railway station.  TfWM have constructed an enormous multi-storey next to it, with the hope of making Longbridge a park and ride.  As you'd expect for an area formerly filled with factories, there's a good road direct to the M5 from here, and the hope is that this will become a hub.  Network Rail, too, want to make Longbridge into a secondary rail centre, getting people to change services away from the overcrowded city centre termini.  As usual, there are lots of lovely reports, and not much in the way of action.

Longbridge has, at least, got a flashy new building out of the redevelopment, with a completely pointless architectural flourish over the roof, which was probably called a "placemaker" or something in the plans.  

The Centro artwork is, unsurprisingly, themed around the former factory, and is called The Genie of Industry by John McKenna.  It's a stark robot in an area that's increasingly softened.  I couldn't help thinking it would've looked far more part of the landscape when it was unveiled in 2002.

As I took the picture of the statue, a man lurched out of the bus stop and towards me, clutching a bottle of Stella.  Obviously I disapproved; one should confine one's alcoholism to inside spaces.  Like me.  I moved away quickly, down to the platform, and was able to almost immediately jump on a train.

Then I began to get a niggle at the back of my head, a light tap of disquiet.  Something was up.  I picked up my camera and scanned through the pictures and - yep.  I'd not taken the sign selfie.  

This is becoming disturbing.  My brain is starting to forget to do the one thing I have always done when I visit stations.  I've been doing this for nearly eighteen years.  Is this how dementia starts?  I got off the train at Northfield and transferred to the southbound platform to go back on myself.  This meant that, sadly, I wasn't able to visit the refurbished University station as I'd planned; two long waits for trains put me dangerously close to my train time from New Street and my anxiety was raging.  I'll have to check it out another day.

Still, I'm sure you'll agree the trip back was totally worth it for this magnificent photograph.

Don't answer that.

A Waning Moon

The reason I started this blog, way back in - jesus christ - 2007, was because I like railway stations.  Yes, there was a completist, nerdy part of me that wanted a project, plus I have a general fondness for infrastructure and transport, but by and large my interest was the buildings that form a station.  It means that I like to see a station at its very best, and will often delay visiting when I know it's undergoing refurbishment, for example.

As such, I would like to offer an apology to University station.  I was under the impression that it got a big new ticket office last year and, indeed, that was the plan.  The University's sport centre hosted events during the Commonwealth Games and so money was allocated to build an entirely new entrance for a station that's already at capacity.  Since the Games had come and gone I thought the work was finished.  Sadly not.  There were delays with extending the platforms, then Liz Truss tanked the economy and the price of everything shot up.  Suddenly the budget allocated for the rebuild was no longer sufficient, meaning that there is an almost, but definitely not in any way, new ticket hall at one end of the platform waiting to be finished.

The platform itself is decorated with posters plugging the University's achievements, as you'd expect from the only station in Britain specifically built to serve a university (although, fun fact, if the City Line had been plugged into Central as planned back in the 1970s, there would have been a station built specifically for Liverpool University, and it would've been underground i.e. the best kind of station).  When you get up the stairs, though, it becomes clear that it desperately needs work.

This was mid-morning on an ordinary weekday and we were queueing on the footbridge to get out.  It was a ridiculous situation, and to be honest, it made me side-eye Transport for West Midlands for waiting until the Commonwealth Games to do anything about it.  University is one of the busiest stations on their network and is clearly overcrowded; a solution should've been found years ago.

I finally made it out through the narrow ticket hall and into the street.  University was opened in 1978 and its building is very much of that era - red brick and practical, its only moment of excitement being the triangular roof light.  You can see its brothers all over the country, as budget cuts and a downturn in passengers saw British Rail build only what they needed to without any fancy fripperies.

The eagle-eyed among you may have spotted that it was a little bit snowy in Birmingham.  I'd managed to pick the one day to travel down where there would be a comprehensive blanketing of the white stuff.  I picked my way down the hill from the station into the campus, taking delicate, careful steps on the slush and ice formed by the hundreds of students ahead of me.  They busied around me, laughing, happy, joyous, some even having snowball fights, while I moved at a fraction of my usual pace in case I slipped and broke a hip.

This makes me sound unnecessarily miserable and grumpy.  In truth, I always find walking round university campuses invigorating.  They're often well laid out, pedestrianised in the main, with careful architecture and landscaping.  They have a pleasing non-corporate air - this is a place of learning, a place where books and computers and minds are in charge.  And they have the energy of youth fizzing through it, electric, exciting, a place dominated by active and forward thinking individuals.  A campus stroll lifts me up.

Perhaps it's nostalgia for a time when I had no concerns other than reading the odd book and drinking pints.  I don't think so.  Emerging into Birmingham University's central square, white rather than green today, it felt like a wonderful place to be.  A huge open space surrounded by educational buildings and capped with a beautiful clock tower that chimed twelve as I looked at it.

I walked up to the road behind a girl who delighted me with her cliched student appearance.  She was wearing pyjama bottoms, with a puffa jacket and a woolly hat crammed over the top; a bottle of cider poked out of her coat pocket.  I don't know where she was going or what she'd been up to the night before but I strongly suspected paracetamol would be involved at some point.

Pritchatts Road mixes the university with the real world.  Over the years they've bought up houses for offices and lecture areas and the university infirmary, but peppered in among these buildings are expensive detached homes behind driveways who I expect regularly put in complaints about the students.  Living by a world-famous, highly respected campus brings prestige and a certain element of desirability, but it also brings nineteen year olds who can't hold their booze peeing up against your gateposts.  

The roads were fairly quiet though, through a combination of middle-class luxury and the snow.  I was entering Harborne, which has been one of Birmingham's more desirable suburbs for centuries, and so the district is peppered with cricket pitches and tennis courts and private schools.  Outside one of them, a lorry put his foot down so that he could soak me and a mother and son with slush, which was wonderful.  This kind act of charity also brought to my attention that I had a hole in my walking boot, a hole that would allow more and more slush and water to get in and soak my sock over the course of the day; truly, the driver was a hero.

I reached the end of Harborne High Street but instead of turning down it I pressed on.  The road sloped downwards and my already clumpy and hesitant walking became even more so.  Ahead of me, an Asian woman barrelled along, talking into her phone (a rather mysterious call from the Far East?) while I clutched at railings to avoid plummeting to my death.  I never used to be this cowardly.  I think lockdown may have done it for me; it's put fears into my head about being out and about that never used to be there.

I was making this diversion for one specific purpose: pilgrimage.  There is a row of houses on North Road, opposite the park, and at one end there is a small commercial unit.  In 1986, this entered television history as the home of Acorn Antiques.

Here I was, at a little shop on the outskirts of Manchesterford.  Obviously the main sketch itself was filmed at Television Studios but very brief, very terribly directed filmed inserts were made here, along with the title sequence where Miss Babs enters the shop while Mrs Overall puffs a fag in the window.  It's a spot of television history and it can be yours.

Acorn Antiques is up for sale, though not with Dorcas & Hincaster, the Manchesterford estate agents, but instead with Wentworth & Rose for £560,000.  You could fill the place with antiques for that, and still fit a new cistern into the downstairs cloakroom into the bargain.  Sadly, it no longer appears to be called Acorn House, and unforgivably, the estate agents make absolutely no mention of its pivotal spot in Western civilisation.  Perhaps because they realise that having dumpy homosexuals turn up on your doorstep to snap selfies isn't really a great selling point.

I was of course thrilled to be here.  Victoria Wood is, and always will be, one of the touchstones of my life; she was an inspiration and a legend.  Her writing crafted how I see the world and how I write about it myself.  She went way too soon, and I'll always regret never being able to somehow meet her and tell her how much she meant to me.  

Blimey, oh-fiddley-bob: no pillar box.

Having walked down the hill, I now had to walk back up it, though that didn't feel quite so arduous.  Probably because I couldn't see the slide to my certain death while it was behind me.  I walked up a road lined with worker's cottages that are probably astonishingly expensive these days and reached the High Street.

Like everywhere else, it was having a tough time, though perhaps not to the same degree.  Bensons for Beds had closed and left a large hole in the retail offering, but there was still an M&S Food and a Waitrose, and a jewellers selling Patek Phillipe watches.  The main source of disquiet was outside Greggs, which was for some reason closed and locked, denying a group of anxious buyers access to their lunchtime steak bake.

Harborne's proximity to a large proportion of students means that its hospitality sector is thriving, to the extent that the Wikipedia page lists a pub crawl called the Harborne Run - hitting every pub in the street and getting a pint.  What else was I to do?

No, of course I didn't do the pub crawl.  This blog encourages responsible drinking.  Besides, I'm not a pub crawl kind of drunk; I'm a sit in a corner huddled over my pint and muttering to myself kind of drunk.  The pub I'd picked was one of the less trendy ones on the street, and I took up a table in the back while the barmaids unfurled their St Patrick's Day decorations from a box.  (This weekend, there will be one type of pub celebrating St Patrick's Day, and another type of pub celebrating Mother's Day, and there is no crossover between the two).  I gently toasted dry in the warm room.  I was wet through from sleet raining down on me, and my sodden foot was icy cold.  My glasses steamed up, over and over, as did the screen on my phone.

Finally I finished and walked to the end of the street, past a load of pubs that looked much nicer than the one I'd been in.  A beauty salon's window called out Doesn't your wife deserve a massage? while a modern church boasted a sign saying In all things love with an arrow through a heart, a weirdly secular, greetings card message to put next to a full sized crucified Jesus.

By now the sleet was driving, to the extent that it was easier for me to simply take my glasses off than squint through the impacted snow.  It means that many of the photos that follow will be of even more amateurish quality than usual as I basically pointed my camera in vaguely the right direction and pushed a button.  Sorry.

I ended up on a grand avenue with trees down the centre, the kind of lovely, well-laid out road you can find all over our cities.  They were laid out in a time when roads were for pootling, for promenading, an elegant way to travel, and so they were designed to make the experience pleasurable.  Now I walk along them and think about all the wasted space.  Stick a cycle lane in there, in either direction, and a tram line down the middle.  It'll never happen - this country loves its cars way too much - but nice as it was it felt like a lot of dead land that could be used far better.

Selly Oak began to rise up on the horizon with its tall flats and its ordinary semis.  It's one of those bits of Birmingham that everyone's heard of, though I knew nothing about it at all.  It seemed to be your standard inner city district - tower blocks and shops, paved over driveways to hold the cars, a couple of student halls plonked in the middle.  One of those halls, I'm guessing, housed some arts students judging by the snowcatperson outside.

The avenue became a lot busier, and a lot less charming.  Houses and flats were wedged in tight.  The snow had begun to melt and pooled in dips and cracks in the road.  The path no longer crunched as I walked, but instead sloshed.

I bounced across a series of busy roads, exhaustedly taking one dogleg after another of staggered pedestrian crossings.  The mud on the grass showed where people had tired of waiting for the green man and simply hurled themselves across the carriageway.  I ended up outside a giant Homebase, its car park deserted, and then the delightfully named Battery Retail Park.  In the distance were the giant funnels of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, an alien spacecraft crashed into the suburbs.

Ducking round the back of the retail park, past a deserted cycle hire docking station (their time really has passed, hasn't it?) I encountered more enormous student castles and then a canal.  

Selly Oak railway station predates its neighbour at University by over a century but it received a similar makeover in the 1970s.  Any hint of Victorian elegance was swept away for another red brick shed in amongst a sea of car parking.  

The only relic of its heritage is the nearby railway bridge, reconstructed in the 1930s.  They were so proud of it they wrote SELLY OAK RAILWAY BRIDGE on the side, which is completely pointless but at the same time quite lovely.

I tried getting a picture with the sign outside, but the combination of snow, an unfriendly set of traffic lights that favoured every single other direction rather than the pedestrian crossing, and a wet and cold and tired body, meant it was staggeringly inadequate.  Instead I walked up to the station and took a picture outside the ticket office.  If you don't like it, tough.

Once again I'll remind you that I couldn't see a damn thing.

I headed onto the platform for the train home.  Two stations might not seem much, but it was a satisfying cross off, even if part of me suspects I'll have to come back again when University's properly finished.  Until then, I'll keep myself happy with a delicious mug of home-made sherry, and a couple of sausage dumplings.