Paradise Circus

New Street Station: Platform to the Stars

With considerable local fanfare, the new New Street Station opened to the public this week. The re-development is still only at the halfway stage but the changes visible so far have already made a surprising and positive impact on the layout of the city. I experienced this first hand on Monday morning when I got off the bus in front of the old main entrance (which is now a building site), and strolled down the new walkway for a quick nose around before heading north on another bus.

I expected the short walkway to deliver me inside the new station concourse, but as I neared the other end I noticed sunlight and buildings. When I eventually emerged on what I discovered to be Stephenson Street I stopped, genuinely amazed. Up until this point it had never occurred to me that the New Street entrance and the bottom of ‘the ramp’ were so close together, or even on the same level. The layout of the city as I’ve known it all my life had changed.

According to a friend of mine, who in a previous life was travel correspondent on The Birmingham Post, architects and council officials had been saying for many years that the New Street building was a barrier to pedestrian movement in the city. The appearance of this walkway absolutely proves their point.

I was suddenly filled with Brummie pride and in a moment I became convinced that we might finally get a train station that does the very thing that the old New Street had so miserably failed at: provide a decent first impression of the city. Having not previously paid much attention to the development (I’m not a train user, I’m a bus kid) I immediately became a convert and a supporter of the project, and that was a tremendous feeling to have at 8am on a Monday morning. Prior to this mind-bending trip through a wormhole the most exciting thing to ever happen to me at New Street Station was when I became close personal friends with Hollywood actor Luke Wilson.

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“Meet me by Burger King at 2pm”: New Street, New Start for the social map of Brum

Every town has a rallying point. Growing up in Guernsey it was “outside Boots”. Perfectly located at the intersection of the three main pedestrian streets (and a killer flight of steps from the sea front), and with good drop off points, Boots was the rendezvous for all my teenage adventures, shopping trips and, well, rendezvous (nudge, nudge). In Birmingham, for me, it was the New Street station Burger King.

The New Street Burger King Sign — Image apologetically provided by @charlie_spotted via Twitter

Perfectly located at the intersection between two sets of entrance doors and the platforms (and a killer escalator ride from the Pallasades Shopping Centre), and with the added advantage of selling chips, Burger King was the kick off spot for most of my City Centre expeditions and this lists everything about all the advantages of this location of this busy joint.

So where will I meet now that New Street has changed? One of the downsides of rejecting any sense of being a ‘hyperlocal blog’ is that we no longer get invited to the opening of envelopes across Birmingham: we’ve not been inside and so I can’t tell you where the new rally point will be. This is, of course, as it should be. Over the next few months we’ll begin to redraw our social map and we’ll all collectively learn the new New Street. Many rendezvous points will be attempted and slowly one will emerge as the repeated favourite. We’ll test this place out and wear it until it feels comfortable and then folksonomically we agree where the optimal meeting point is.

A new meme will be born – I’ll meet you there at two.

Finale

Say goodbye to the Premiere video club, Old Walsall Road, Hamstead. This is at least the third premises for the ‘club’ along one stretch of shops on the edge of Brum—it first opened in the eighties when easy availability of ‘Driller Killer‘ and the movie ‘Shag’ (which seems to have vanished from existence) on VHS or Beta was upmost in the minds of the Great Barrians and quickly expanded.

Like the universe what expands must eventually contract, and the tapes are finally disappearing in a gnab gib.

Saturday Bridge

Just where Sandpits becomes The Parade the road becomes Saturday Bridge. In a car on the B1435 you probably wouldn’t notice it at all, so brief is the time you spend above the canal, so integrated into the road the bridge has become. From the top of a bus or the pavement you might get a glimpse of the NIA at the far end of the canal and realise that for a second you were borne over water. From beneath, on the towpath, Saturday Bridge is more evident.

As I run down the towpath I can see the cars fly over on Saturday Bridge and as I approach it the route is briefly slightly restricted by the bridge structure itself. Down here on the waterside, the bridge also tells me its story. A plaque on the wall says it got its name from the practice of paying boat workers at this point on the canal on Saturdays. I pause to reflect on that for a moment and I become aware that a few feet above me one can often see a queue form down Saturday Bridge, waiting for the Job Centre Plus to open up. Fate has served me up a tiny, quirky piece of irony, its own geographical comment on the post-industrial economy of Britain and Birmingham.

Now jog on.

An Urban Fairytale

The locations and dwarf holes mentioned in this tale are based on fact. The people and all the rest are not.

I walk along the canal and look above wondering how much concrete is necessary to prevent the entire elaborate junction from collapsing. The pillars holding up metal and flesh appear to be the legs of giants while the traffic travels along their spines. The graffiti at the bottom gives it the look of elaborately painted nails. Or like a tattoo that marks the owner’s individuality.

I look at my right hand and frown at what I’m holding. Have I been drinking? Focusing on the bottle of vodka it suddenly occurs to me that my mind is in the process of being drowned by a tsunami of ethanol. I look at the water rippling on the breeze. My attention is drawn to the sound of a bell from a cyclist. I move out of the way. The cyclist nods at me. The universal body language of greetings, acknowledgement and thanks. A small attempt to make a connection with a human being that you would in all probability never see again. I walk towards the darkness created by the cavernous arch of a large bridge.

It had always felt like huge cave when we used to play as kids. Billy used to call it the Bat Cave. He was Robin to my Batman and the adventure was always the trek to get here. Granny’s house was on the corner of Wheelwright Road and Gravelly Hill so it wasn’t far. Our parents didn’t mind as when I reached thirteen, I was considered capable and mature enough to look after myself and a ten year old. A different time that seems an aeon away. I smash the bottle against the wall of the bridge. I’m in the dark. I have been for days.

I think about granny and her stories about the building of Spaghetti Junction. Me and Billy always thought the Giant’s Junction was a better name as we never liked spaghetti. Unless it was in tomato sauce that we both did like and that granny always had tins of when we visited. It was during such a meal that we both heard about the dwarf holes. We splashed sauce while eating as we were told about where Copeley Hill is now, there were caves dotted around the landscape. People used to live in them and the caves were there for centuries. Then they built the motorway and were not seen again. Granny kept saying that they were now gone forever but children always have the impression that adults say such things to stop them from exploring. We had already made up our minds that we were going to find them.

Picture of Flyovers above Salford Circus — Spaghetti Junction 1/08 by Ted and Jen

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101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 26: Local Radio

It comes into it’s own in a crisis, you know. It’s how people know that roads are slippery or schools closed because it snowed, other than that the ground is covered in snow. And despite attempts by both ‘market forces’ and ‘stupid government pandering BBC Director Generals obsessed with nothing more than their jobs and the bottom line’ it’s still going.

It’s the place for the gentle discussion, followed by great tunes from M People. Or on commercial local radio: an advert for a local loan shark, followed by an advert for the best cash advance app around, then M People and the Lighthouse Family, broadcast from an industrial estate in Greater London. But what would we do without it, eh? Especially in minicabs.

And, of course, what would we do without Birmingham? “Witton calling” were the first words on Radio 5IT, a station based on Electric Avenue Witton in 1922 and it was the first BBC radio broadcast outside London. A commitment that the national broadcaster hasn’t really kept up. Local radio—another export we’ve given to prop up Manchester.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 25: A nice cup of tea and a sit down

A cup of tea and a nice sit down — Image CC Ant McNeil

There is a very simple principle to the making of tea and it’s this – to get the proper flavour of tea, the water has to be boiling (not boiled) when it hits the tea leaves. If it’s merely hot then the tea will be insipid.

A watched pot never boils but an electrical kettle does, and so every properly nice cup of tea has poured from the over-flowing cup of wonders that is Birmingham. That’s right, the science behind the modern electric kettle – and a decent cuppa – comes from Brum: Arthur Large created an immersed heating element and the boffins at Bullpit & Sons added a cut off valve. Thus was born the nice cup of tea and a sit down, and with it the space to think and ponder, to reframe the problem that you can’t solve while you refresh your mind and body.

How many more great ideas and inventions stand on the shoulders of this giant? How many innovations would not have come to fruition but for a soothing cup of PG Tips?

Too many to count – and we’re only going up to 101.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 24: Vile Products of the Welfare System

Every tragedy has a beginning, and sadly one of the greatest tragedies of our time begins here, in fair Birmingham. For it was here, in the workshop of the world, that social housing was really born and with it was wrought death and ruin upon the land.

For decades sick-lefitsts have praised their liberal hero Joseph Chamberlain, for giving them the Lebensraum to live feckless lives, and for granting them the license they needed to beat the women they hate within the walls of homes paid for by hard-working Britons like YOU. Joe saw the slums and ramshackle utility production provided for the poor of Birmingham by private enterprise and his communist instincts kicked in. The Stalinist before Stalin’s Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act paved the way for huge slum clearances and building of ~~social housing~~ dole-dwellers mansions on our beautiful countryside. His work was the start of nearly one hundred years of pandering to those who just don’t want to work hard.

Thankfully we are beginning to turn a corner, and once the precariat are rightfully stripped of shelter, murder will once again be the rightful preserve of those who do the right thing: men of good social standing, the educated, and the hard working business owners who make Britain great.

If they want a 3D TV, they’ll have to pay for it out of their allotted fifty three pounds a week.

A Bull Ring Notelet

My good lady Fiona was digging through the detritus of her youth and came across a heartfelt letter penned by a teenage chum. The letter was written in a notelet, a sheet of A4 paper folded to A6, with an illustration on the front. The illustration is of the old Bull Ring shopping centre, a marvel of its age, rendered in a delicate pencil. The letter would have been sent in the 80s, a couple of decades after the centre was completed, so I presume it was nabbed from the bottom of an old drawer without a second thought. It certainly didn’t relate to the prose written inside.

File next to “postcards of the Queensway“.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 23: The Post

Imagine a time before always-on instant communication with everybody. Imagine a world where you had to add your seal to a document in hot wax and have a messenger run it to its recipient. By the time they got there, no-one would care just how lovely the fucking cupcake you were eating was.

That’s why we needed the post, reliable, accessible communication that was open to all, across the country and for a reasonable price. And it was all but invented by a chap from a suburb of a city not all that far away from us now.

The phrases “special delivery” and “emptying sack” are also a godsend for smut merchants worldwide, and who do we have to thank? Sir Rowland Hill, a schoolteacher in Edgbaston and mates with Joseph Priestley and Tom Paine, wrote a pamphlet entitled “Post Office Reform its Importance and Practicability”. The report called for “low and uniform rates” according to weight, rather than distance and pre-payment by the sender.

The dude later went on to lower train fares, for that too we’d lick his reverse side.

Come back Sir Rowland, we need you.