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.

Town and Country

Perry Barr was ugly.  There's no other way of putting it.  I'm a great supporter of British Rail's 1960s stations, built as electrification swept the country - your Coventry, your Stafford - but Perry Barr was done on the cheap.  It was concrete above the tracks, it was concrete by the tracks.  There were metal fences by the steps and you stepped up to an overbridge wedged behind the dark ticket office.  It was how I imagine it must be to get transported to prison by train.

Step outside the station and you're in a parade of grim shops, trapped on a dual carriageway, with a flyover blocking out the sun.  Barriers hold you onto the narrow pavement.  A homeless man begged for change in the doorway.  It was dystopian.

The one good thing about Perry Barr station was also a symptom of its neglect.  Above the doorway was a real old British Rail sign, a weird mishmash of styles that had somehow clung on through decades of rebranding.  It was all-caps, which was a no-no in later BR rules, and I'm not even sure if that's Rail Alphabet.  I'd guess it was from a period when British Rail was still a bit loose with how it applied the rules, and then for fifty years, it's entirely passed under the radar.  Someday West Midlands Railway will replace it with a huge piece of laser printed steel that has Perry Barr in big letters and the corporate logo front and centre, and that'll be sad.  In the meantime, enjoy it while you can.

I threaded my way through the busy pavements and across the road to the One Stop Shopping Centre.  Don't be deceived by appearances; it may look like a miserable 1980s shopping arcade, but it's actually worse than that.  The One Stop Shopping Centre is a retail park with a massive Asda and outlet shops built surrounding acres of parking, and this run of glass is merely a front so the entrance from the bus exchange looks half-decent.  It is nothing.

I walked past the succession of bookies and round the side, to where the delivery bays opened out onto the street frontage.  There was an unusual sight under the flyover; a man dressed in full John Bull garb talking to a journalist on the central reservation.  My heart sank as I wondered what nightmarish Brexit lunacy he was peddling, until I saw his sign: God Bless Our Flyover.  It seems the Perry Barr flyover's days are numbered, with the council planning to demolish it and calm the roads to improve the area ahead of the Commonwealth Games (the nearby Alexander Stadium will be the main location for the athletics events in 2022).  Only in Birmingham would people be fighting for a flyover; anywhere else in the country people would be grumbling about its existence.  There were no men in giant hats campaigning for the Churchill Way flyovers in Liverpool to be preserved, put it that way.

I choked back the traffic fumes and turned down a side road by a pub, the Seventh Trap, a low squat building that could be open for business or abandoned - I suspect it looks pretty much the same either way.  A bunker with barred windows.  I was heading for a small side road, really an access route for the backs of people's houses wedged alongside the River Tame.  A sign warned me there was No Dumping - £20,000 Fine, a sign which was comprehensively ignored by everyone.

I walked past the mattresses, fridges, and general building waste that had been dropped in the hedgerows.  Around halfway I realised that this was probably a dumb idea.  I was here in a strange city, wandering down a clearly unpleasant back alley, vaguely hoping I was going in the right direction; if I was raped and murdered here, even the Crimewatch reconstruction would say I was asking for it.  I proceeded anyway, with the blithe confidence of an idiot who has Google Maps and a bloody-minded refusal to backtrack.

I pushed through a gateway that took me to a turning circle for the One Stop centre's delivery vehicles; a skip was full to overflowing, any hope of it ever being picked up abandoned.  There was a set of steps and I went down them and into a different world.

The mansion at Perry Hall existed for hundreds of years, passing from knight to knight, until in 1927 it was finally abandoned.  Birmingham City Council bought it and its lands and turned it into a public park for the benefit of its residents.  Now Perry Hall Park occupies a large swathe of the city, with grasslands, ornamental gardens, and sports pitches.

The shift was sudden and welcome.  Yes, I could still hear the constant drone of traffic in the distance, a grumble that never left, but now there were trees and grass.  I'd felt small by that flyover, intimidated and insignificant; I felt small here too, but in a different way.  Now I was overwhelmed by nature.

There's a green island in the park, surrounded by a curious channel with square corners; this is all that's left of Perry Hall mansion - the moat.  Where there used to be a stately home, there's now a very posh bird island, a flat expanse of lawn.

I crossed the River Tame and followed a high bank around the edge of the cricket pitches.  The grass acts as a flood defence, swallowing overflowing water before it reaches the city, but on a crisp October day it was nothing more than a quiet vista.  The more I travel in the West Midlands, the more these whipcrack changes of pace have become familiar.  In most other cities I've visited, a park like this would be feted and celebrated, and surrounded by beautiful streets.  In Birmingham I'm always finding sudden changes - incredible ugliness that snaps into picturesque views.  Old village centres surrounded by roaring motorways, blackened industrial estates next to dense woodlands.  Far more than Liverpool or Manchester, I'm never entirely sure what I'll find when I step off the train.

My path meandered through meadows, where dog walkers stood still and waited for their retrievers to retrieve, and then I was in a quieter corner of the park.  The path dropped low down to the level of the river so it could pass under the railway bridge; across the way, builders shouted obscenities at one another, which kind of ruined the pastoral mood.  Up again, and I was at the backs of houses, until I finally emerged on the Hamstead Hill.

Yes, that's Hamstead, no p: this was very different to its London namesake.  While that is an enclave of prosperity, Hamstead no p is a former mining village swallowed up by the city.  There were no exclusive boutiques or elegant wine bars - instead I walked past Topps Tiles and the offices of a housing association, while the yellow sign of a Lidl caught the light in the distance.  The road rose up over the railway and I wandered to the Birmingham-bound platform. 

The ticket office was closed for refurbishment though, if I'm honest, I hadn't expected it to be open anyway; most of the ones I've encountered close at lunchtime and don't reopen until next morning. 

When I'd planned this day out, it was intended as a way of completing that loop above New Street.  I liked the idea of closing off that circle (well, more of a triangle) in one trip.  However, the map is slightly disingenuous.  There are fast and slow services on the loop, and the slow southbound services all go via Hamstead and Perry Barr; it wasn't possible to go direct from Hamstead to New Street on that left hand line.  (I would argue that you should move the station mark away from the branching point, in that case, and put it firmly on the Perry Barr line, but it is occasionally used by fast trains when engineering works close the Witton branch, so they're clearly hedging their bets).

The west side of the loop will have to wait for when I visit Walsall.  In the meantime... it's good to be back.

(Yes, I do need a haircut).