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.

Tram... Stop

The naming scheme for the Midland Metro is... opaque.  In the city centre, they seem to favour the street the stop is on, which makes sense because those are some famous (to Brummies) streets.  Bull Street.  Corporation Street.  Then it goes a bit mad.  We'll get to the pure insanity of Grand Central later, but naming the stop Town Hall instead of Victoria Square is strange.  And Library?  Yes, this is where the Library is, fair enough.  But it's also where the convention centre and the Rep and a bunch of other stuff are.  It's on Centenary Square; call it Centenary Square.

Not that, if I'm honest, Centenary Square is much of a draw.  The Wikipedia page for the square details its tortuous history over the past hundred years, where plans for a great civic quarter were constantly thwarted.  Bits of it were built, then something intervened, or some redevelopment was needed, or, unbelievably, a piece of art was burnt down in an arson attack, until we've reached what is currently its final form: a big patch of concrete.

That's, perhaps, unfair.  The square is designed to be the place where the city gathers for events - New Year's, Remembrance Day, and so on.  It's there to be open so you can cram it with Birmingham's citizens.  When there's nobody there, though, like, for example, on a Monday lunchtime, it's very bland.  The interest is solely provided by the buildings around it - the pleasingly modernist Rep, the none-more-80s convention centre, a few newer office buildings, and the Library.

I'm normally a big advocate of modern, ambitious buildings, especially public buildings, especially ones that don't try to blend in or disappear.  But in the Library of Birmingham's case?  I hate it.  I'm sorry.  I think it's ugly.  I think it's basic.  It's some boxes piled up on top of one another.  Why is one of the boxes gold?  It just is.  Why are there are those circles on it?  That's your artistic flourish, mate.  It's simultaneously boring and over fussy; it's trying to be ICONIC but lazily.  It reminded me of the Bling Bling Building on Hanover Street, one of the first pieces of Liverpool 1 to be completed; a perfectly ordinary corner block that got some gold boxes whacked on it to make it "different".

Outside is a circular plaza, cut into the main square and accessed from the library, which is currently home to two ping pong tables.  I'm not entirely sure what it's for.  Is it meant to be a cafe space, or somewhere to hold meetings, or what?  A bit of landscaping might give it a purpose - imagine some trees bursting out above the level of the square - but as it is it seems like an architect's whim.  Bet you in about ten years it'll have been glassed over to form an extra room for the library. 

I went inside and that's where it truly shines, which made me think of Guy de Maupassant eating lunch at the Eiffel Tower every day because it was the only place in Paris he couldn't see it.  The interior of a library is of course the key part; this is what we're here for.  Books everywhere.

(I bet those dangling fairy lights aren't part of the original architect's plan).  It does seem slightly afraid that you might twig it's a library and get bored and run off.  The fiction was the "book browse"; the reference was the "knowledge floor" (isn't every floor of a library the knowledge floor?).  But there were plenty of spaces to sit and research and it was well lit. 

I ended up on the terrace, the sticky-out box at the front of the library, and it was a lovely place to sit.  There were curved benches and landscaping.  It certainly seemed to be a popular place for lunch, as people turned up with their sandwiches and took a seat. 

 

 

I wandered over to the balustrade to take in the view.  The square was beneath me, and then beyond that a mix of vacant lots and big, thrusting buildings.  Birmingham builds at a vast scale; everywhere in the city centre seemed to be a massive development, high or wide or long.  The concept of "infill" seemed alien to them.  Entire blocks were knocked down for new spaces.  And yet... I didn't see many buildings I actually liked.  That one at the back of shot, below, The Cube, is one of the ugliest things I've seen in my life; square, yet with cut outs, and a flared top, and covered in plus signs, and just hideous.  

 

 

I went back down to Centenary Square and through the Convention Centre.  This opened in 1991 and, pleasingly, the central aisle is open for the public to wander through and use it as a shortcut.  At least, I think it is; certainly that's how I used it.  The G8 was held here in the late 90s - that's when Bill Clinton was photographed having a pint - and it's really of its era, all exposed metal ribs and bright colours and marble.  A sign warned me that photography was not permitted but at great personal risk I took this picture anyway.  See you in the gulag.

On the other side was a canal basin, with an actual canal boat going by.  That fact about Birmingham having more miles of canals than Venice is always a technicality to me; yes, it might be literally true, but there are canals and there are canals.  Nobody's singing about Cornettos on these, and instead of 007 shooting around them on a Bondola you've got Cliff Richard and Victoria from Doctor Who on a barge yakking about beefburgers.  The glamour is very much absent.

The area around the basin had been developed into a one-stop shop for getting drunk and eating passable food, with all the favourites - Slug & Lettuce, Gourmet Burger Kitchen, Las Iguanas.  Put on a clean shirt and some decent shoes (no trainers) and enjoy.  Beyond was Brindleyplace, a development that's grown since the 90s to be Birmingham's centre for offices and finance.

The bland, corporate inoffensiveness continued.  You wouldn't go out of your way to go to Brindleyplace - not least because it's styled as a single word and not two - but if you worked here or you were passing by you might nip into the Costa or the Pret.  The National Sea Life Centre was wedged in one corner - because when you think "Midlands", you think "ocean life" - and beyond it was an acre of corporate space that looked public but was very much private.  A neat sign warned me for safety reasons, do not enter the water feature, so don't take your kids there for a paddle on a hot day.  Don't loiter or remain or do anything other than consume.

It was all very pleasing to walk round, in the same way that Canary Wharf is pleasing to walk round, but you wouldn't go there if you didn't have to.  It's a spot for commuters to come to and then go home to nicer, livelier, more interesting places.

There was always a bridge here over the canal, but it was blessed with the boring name of Broad Street Bridge.  An enterprising local hoping to drum up tourist trade came up with the idea of renaming it the Black Sabbath Bridge, after the city's most famous musical sons, and a bench with their heads on was installed to commemorate them.  

 

I am unfamiliar with the works of Black Sabbath, beyond Paranoid, so I've had their best of playlist on in the background while I wrote this blog.  My main question is: are those all different songs?  Are they not the same one over and over again?  I wasn't entirely sure when one ended and the next one began.  I'm not a heavy metal person, which puts me at odds with West Midlands' fine musical heritage; I'd have been more excited by a Duran Duran Bridge, or a Mike Skinner Boulevard, or a We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It Plaza.

I descended down some tight narrow steps to the Gas Street Basin, the heart of Birmingham's canal network, and still thronged with boats today.  There was a towpath that took me past some more pubs and bars, and the Mailbox up ahead.  The very first time I'd visited Birmingham had been nearly thirty years ago, when the BF had a friend who lived in the flats near here and we came to visit.  I couldn't remember which block he lived in; I'd never seen it from the canal side.  He was long gone, and the flats by the water that had seemed so glamorous and desirable in the late 90s now looked tired.  The fashionable part of the city had shifted somewhere else and these apartments were left behind.

I doubled back on myself, walking past the city register office and the rehearsal space for the symphony orchestra, and ended up at Brindleyplace tram stop.  I reached into my pocket for my Daytripper ticket and... it was gone.  I checked all my pockets.  Nope, it wasn't there; it must've fallen out when I pulled out my phone or my camera.  Considering how often I'm on trains you'd think I'd have learned to stow my ticket safely by now.  

Grumbling slightly, I went to the app to try and buy a new ticket.  It wouldn't have it.  I got an error message every time I tried to pay and the whole thing hung up.  After three tries I went to the machine on the platform, but again, it didn't want to take my money: the slot refused to let me insert my debit card, and the contactless wouldn't work.  I had to cross to the other platform, the city-bound one, and buy a ticket there.  And, of course, nobody then checked it on any of my subsequent tram trips, so I could've saved myself a few bob.

Behind the tram stop, incidentally, on the front of a closed bar, was a large photomural celebrating the achievements of UB40 (3 UK Number 1s! 17 Top Ten Singles!  100m+ Record Sales!).  Obviously someone was annoyed they'd not got a bridge named after them and decided to remind the locals of their prowess.  UB40 have had one of those acrimonious splits that means there are two versions now touring, and the one depicted here was the version without Ali Campbell and Astro - very much the Bobby Gee Bucks Fizz to the Mike, Cheryl and Jay.  They might legally have the name but we all know which is the real band (although Astro has sadly passed away now).

(Controversial yet brave statement: I think the UB40 version of (I Can't Help) Falling In Love With You is better than the Elvis version, and the fact that it's the theme from Sharon Stone softcore disaster Sliver is the cherry on top).   

The next stop was Five Ways, but I rode the tram beyond that to Edgbaston Village, the end of the line.  The tram was barely full and I didn't want to suffer the judgement of the conductor by going only one stop.  

We got to the stop and he nipped out for a cigarette.  The terminus is barely out of the city centre - you can still see the ring road from it - and there were plans for the tram to go all the way along the A456 to Quinton but, as is usual for British transport projects, those plans failed.  The history of the Midland Metro is of a series of piecemeal, bit at a time extensions; the route through the city centre seems to have been opened one stop at a time, like Transport for West Midlands could only build the next section once they'd found some spare change down the sofa. 

I'd actually been here before, when I did the first section of the tram line; in fact, this blog post about Albrighton and Shifnal was written in the Starbucks next to the stop.  (You can put up a blue plaque if you like, I don't mind).  I'd been in Birmingham for the weekend to watch a showing of Live and Let Die hosted by Madeline Smith - it was, unsurprisingly, transcendent - and the next day I'd had to kill time until my pre-booked trip back to Liverpool.  

(I've stopped listening to Black Sabbath and I've put the Live and Let Die soundtrack on instead.  This is infinitely preferable).

I'd also had a wander round Edgbaston Village and it confirmed my long-held prejudice that anywhere in a city that puts "village" after its name is right up its own rear end.  If you can get a pizza delivered to your door in ten minutes, you do not live in a village, and no amount of preservation orders and conservation areas will change that.  (Exception that proves the rule is on Merseyside, where every settlement is a village, no matter how big or small, except for the city of Liverpool, which is "town".  Don't ask why, just go with it).   

I was back in familiar territory in another way, as I'd previously been to the Hagley Road when I collected Five Ways railway station.  There's a bit of a walk between the station and the tram stop so I again found myself descending into the open space at the centre of the gyratory, traffic swirling around above me, trees and grass around me.  Such a lovely idea.  Such a shame humans ruin it.

The gyros stall was open this time, but the owner was sat on a stool outside, smoking a cigarette.  He smiled at me as I passed and I felt bad for not wanting a slab of greasy lamb at this time of day.  Under the low bridge and onto a patch of land that didn't know what it was - pedestrian plaza, hard shoulder for the busy road, entrance space for the buildings alongside.  There was a statue, but the name was hard to read and I had to look it up when I got home.  It was Sir Claude Auchinleck, who was in charge of the forces in India and Pakistan at the time of partition, so perhaps his name being obscured was deliberate.  That's what we call a "complex legacy".  He had no connection with Birmingham at all, and was simply the chairman of the property company that built an adjoining shopping centre - a shopping centre that was demolished over a decade ago, so I'm not entirely sure why they brought him back.

 

Five Ways was now marked by a large brick box of an entertainment complex: cinema, gym, bars.  Like a retail park dropped into the city.  Its windows advertised lots of exciting times as people drank beers and ate chips and laughed.  Across the road an abandoned language centre had a sign in the window: Jesus = Heaven, No Jesus = Hell.  

I can assure you that my bright red face is purely down to the lighting.  I wasn't about to explode or anything.

Our tram clattered back through the city streets to take me to my final stop, the last uncollected halt on the Midland Metro: Grand Central.  Or, as it should be called, "New Street Station".  Yeah, yeah, corporate interests, private finance, etc etc.  It's not Grand Central.  It's the tram stop for bloody New Street, and nobody will convince the public otherwise.  I'd be very interested to see a survey of how many people call it by that name.  I'll bet the numbers are single figures.

When I rode the Metro back in 2013, I hated it.  It was the worst possible version of a city tram.  I'm pleased to say it's vastly improved since then.  Proper trams, proper stops, a proper route through the city centre that goes places you actually want to go.  The upcoming extensions can only make it better.  I'm quite looking forward to coming back for them.