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.

Map To The Stars

Last week I went to see Robert, because I'm a gracious person and sometimes you have to bring joy to the little people.  We were heading into town from Aigburth station and I spotted something on the line diagram on the platform:

Do you see it?  Computer, zoom and enhance.

The map has been printed with Liverpool Baltic station already on it.  According to Robert the sticker covering it keeps being ripped off, an act of vandalism I absolutely support.  A two minute journey time from Central seems about right for an inner city service, and has me eyeing that four minute gap between Moorfields and Sandhills that happens to pass the new Everton stadium.  This comes as the planning application for the station was lodged with the council.  All wonderful news, apart from the fact that they've still not built it, which is the main annoyance.  Get on with it!

Somebody Take My Money

I was going to write a different blog post.  I had one lined up about Merseyrail that was very nice and complimentary and optimistic.  I would've written it yesterday, but an existential crisis about the state of humanity set in for some reason and I lost heart.  This was actually for the best, as now it means I have something to write that isn't furious and angry and will act as a palate cleanser to the one I'm about to share.

I went to buy a ticket today at my local station, Birkenhead Park.  I wanted to travel to West Kirby.  I arrived at the ticket window and there was a man behind the counter.  Also pinned up on the window was this:

I was confused.  Did that mean I couldn't buy a ticket?  He was stood there, looking out, after all.  I hovered, unsure what to do, and the man behind the counter looked me in the eye and said "buy it at the destination".

I travelled to West Kirby without a ticket.  When an inspector appeared on the train, his body cam pointing in my direction, I had to produce my phone with this photo and explain what happened.  I'm an anxious person, and I don't like travelling without a ticket, no matter what the reason.  He was fine with me, and wandered off down the train but still: nerve racking.

My point is that it's 2024 and this simply should not be happening.  When I went to Gobowen a couple of weeks ago I bought the ticket on my phone in a coffee shop before I arrived at the station.  I had it ready to be produced for anyone who wanted it.  It was quick and simple.

Staff need breaks, of course; they can't man the desk while they're having a pee.  But it's ridiculous that there is literally no alternative for me while they're away.  Why isn't there a ticket machine at every station as well as a ticket office?  I could have gone to that instead.  I would have gone to that instead.  Why can't I buy a ticket on the app?  What is stopping Merseyrail?  Why are we still acting as if this is somehow difficult?

You might have noticed that I do a fair amount of train travel.  The only place I have a piece of card is on my local network.  Everywhere else it's an e-ticket.  Every other train company in the UK allows this.  Merseyrail doesn't just reject it, it actively discourages it.  If you buy a ticket online you have to go to the station and get it printed out before you can use it.  For anywhere else in Britain I could've bought my train ticket before I'd even left the house, had it on my phone, and produced it for checking at any time.  

I have long given up on Merseyrail introducing ticket barriers across the network.  A day pass to beat the old Saveaways remains an impossible dream.  But how is it that they can't simply buy the software that everyone else uses for e-tickets?  Surely this is something that would raise revenue?

I was stood in Birkenhead Park station wanting to hand Merseyrail some money.  Absolutely dying to.  And they didn't want to take it.  They made it actively difficult for me to do so.

Because I am a good, responsible person, I did buy a ticket at my destination.  I didn't have to.  There was nothing to stop me.  West Kirby is barrierless, there was nobody checking tickets, I could've walked off and into the town and nobody would've stopped me.  Merseyrail would've lost four pounds seventy and it would've been entirely their fault.

Fare evasion is a blight upon the network and costs people like you and I actual cash as fares are raised to cover the costs of those who don't pay to travel.  But if you make it actively difficult for people to give you their money, you lose some of the high ground.

PS As Paul pointed out on Bluesky, the sign claims that today is the 6th November when it is actually the 7th.  It was also ten to eleven not twenty to.  This is also very annoying.

PPS This blog post covers more or less all the same points that I made in one in January 2022, with the exception that a Wirral Day Saver is now sixty pence more expensive.  Nothing has changed in the intervening thirty four months.  But I needed to get it off my chest.

Warning: Contains Sexual Swear Words

 

For reasons far too dull to go into here, the BF had cause to be in Shrewsbury late at night.  "But wait!" I said, in that slightly annoying way that he has tolerated for nearly 28 years.  "I have to collect Shrewsbury!  We can make a trip of it!"

After a night in a perfectly lovely Premier Inn by the river, we wandered into the town centre for breakfast.  It's a little surprising to me that Shrewsbury is still a town after all these centuries.  It's been an important marketplace since the Dark Ages, straddling kingdoms of Wales and England and providing a place for both of them to meet.  It's built in a deep bend in the river Severn which gives it a valuable defensive bonus that was exploited by many fortifiers over the years.  You'd have thought it would've got city status by now, especially when you look at some of the places that have got it - look at Wrexham, for pity's sake.  It has put in bids in the past but it's never won and now that the Queen's gone, the opportunities for Jubilee anointments may have dried up.  I can't see Charlie clinging on until he gets a Golden.

Looking at Shrewsbury on the map brought back memories of seemingly thousands of Geography lessons reading about oxbow lakes.  In my head it took up roughly half the year; reading about them, drawing them, looking up at the board as the word "erosion" was repeated over and over.  I do like oxbow lakes, and always enjoy spotting them, but somehow they'll never lose their taint of sitting in front of Mr Master's desk hating his guts while he hated me back.  (That's not conjecture, by the way, he actually told my (unknown to him) best friend that he hated me because he thought I was a know it all.  I then got an A at GCSE Geography so seemingly I did know it all Mr Masters.  HAHAHA.)  Anyway, looking at that map, I wondered if global warming will one day cause the Severn to burst its banks, take the short cut it's been dying to do for millennia, and make the railway station waterfront property.    

Shrewsbury, it turns out, is a delight.  Medieval streets curl back and forth among historic buildings.  Tiny alleyways connect with cobbled byways.  There's a rise to the centre - as I discovered to my cost the previous night, when "a quick nip to Tesco" meant I had to clamber up about five flights of stairs - then down again to the riverside.  

In the centre is The Square, traditionally the home of the market until it was moved indoors in the fifties, and still with its magnificent market hall.  Around it were coffee shops and small boutiques and restaurants, plus the Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery.  We'd still not eaten though, so after a tour of the square, we headed into Côte for a French bistro breakfast.

The BF insisted I put this in, because he's a bitter little man, and he complained about it for the rest of the day.  We were shown to a seat in the window, the middle of three tables in a restaurant that had only one other diner on the other side of the room.  A couple then came in and picked the table next to us.  Thirty other tables and they decided that they wanted to sit next to the portly homosexuals in the window.  It was incredibly rude and made us very uncomfortable, but judging by their uptight demeanour, advancing years, and comfy slacks, we decided they were extremely Brexit and therefore a disregard for the feelings of others was to be expected.

I'll be honest.  I wasn't that bothered about all of this because I wanted to get the breakfast out of the way (nice though it was).  I'd spotted a sign pointing to Grope Lane and now it was all I could think about.  Shrewsbury has a Grope Lane, which hardly ever happens any more.  I had to visit it.

The bowdlerised story of how this street got its name is that it was so narrow, on dark evenings, you'd have to "grope" your way along it to find your way.  This is absolute nonsense.  Until the last couple of centuries, many cities had their own Grope Lane.  Except they used its full name: Gropecunt Lane.

Medieval streets were named after what you found there.  Butcher's Row.  Fish Street.  Market Square.  There was no subtlety.  And if you were a gentleman who wanted to be provided with the company of a young lady for a short while, you went to Gropecunt Lane.  It did exactly what it said on the tin.  "Cunt" wasn't an obscenity then; it was a descriptive term, if a little vulgar, and it was only as puritanism and then Victorian morals swept England that these streets lost their colour.  (Name wise only, of course; prostitution continued and thrived even under the most tyrannical moral outrages).  The oldest profession was, if not permitted, then at least ignored if it was contained in these areas.  Most of them were renamed as time went on.  London had several in its day until they became something more wholesome.  Oxford's version became Grope Lane, then Grape Lane, then Magpie Lane; Opie Street in Norwich was once called Gropekuntelane.  Shrewsbury's Grope Lane, close to the market square so that visiting traders could partake, is the last one left.  It should be celebrated.  History is dirty and reckless and, above all, human, and we should applaud the sex as much as the violence.

Grope Lane brought us out by the Bear Steps, which were disappointingly not a gay Gropecunt Lane for those of us who prefer the huskier gentleman, and behind that was St Alkmund's Church, which I initially misread as St Almond.

St Alkmund was an Anglo-Saxon royal who ended up dead and, because getting to be a saint was pretty easy in those days, he was canonised and brought to Shrewsbury in the 10th Century.  Since he was actually from Derby, this was kind of rude, and he was sent back there in the 12th Century where he has remained ever since.  I like it when English churches are named after obscure local saints.  Chester's cathedral is dedicated to St Werburgh, a woman whose existence is only really known to people in a very small area of Cheshire and Staffordshire, and that's how it should be.  Anyone can have a St Mary's or a St Peter's.  I want a Guthlac of Crowland, something that positively reeks of pious martyrdom in the face of the grimmest English winter.

We headed down Wyle Cop, past the Henry Tudor Inn where the king once stayed and which has a claim to being one of the oldest pubs in England; opposite it is The Nag's Head, whose sign claims it is a "14th century historic pub" but which never had a royal kip there so nobody cares.  "Oldest pub in England" is one of those titles that can be endlessly debated and never resolved, like "greatest Briton" or "best James Bond".  (It's Timothy Dalton, by the way).

We crossed the river for a bit, walking down streets of council housing and small apartment blocks.  We passed a vet's surgery that had once housed the Shrewsbury nuclear bunker and a pumping station museum whose next open day was "postponed".  A sign from Severn Trent Water gave a phone number to call if we saw pollution being dumped in the river, and I wondered if anyone actually answered those calls or if you were mysteriously redirected to an answering machine in a basement somewhere in Bulawayo.

Back over a footbridge and onto a long stretch of lawns and amenities provided for the good people of the town to enjoy.  It really was a lovely place to be, and both of us were enjoying it immensely.  It was sort of like Chester, only without the tremendous sense of its own importance.  Historic, compact, pretty.

The Shrewsbury School quite literally looked down on us.  Its alumni include Michael Palin, Willie Rushton and former Luton Town Chairman Nick Owen, but also an awful lot of people who have Wikipedia pages purely because they have a title.  There were facilities for the school lining the bank, and it all looked very pretty, but I once again discover that this exclusive public school has a "Controversy" section on its Wikipedia page, which the vast majority of state schools do not.  

The town returned with this piece of art which is an homage to Charles Darwin, the town's most famous son.  It's entirely abstract and so it's up to you how you interpret it, but as it's called Quantum Leap, I mainly interpreted it as a tribute to Dr Sam Beckett who sadly, never returned home.  

We'd reached the railway station by now, so I said goodbye to the BF so he could go to the car and I entered the station so I could cross it off my map.

Long term readers (hello you) may have noticed that I actually visited Shrewsbury station back in 2012.  I'd been passing through, changing trains from Wales to Chester, and I'd only managed to go outside because of a curiosity in the station's layout.  Platform 3 is accessed separately from the rest of the station, up some stairs from the forecourt, so when I'd changed trains, I'd happened to pass the sign.  This time it was deliberate and I looked forward to enjoying the actual station's beauty.

The idea was that I would head north on the train and then the BF could intercept me and we could get home.  (We had a very dull appointment to keep later that evening).  I picked Gobowen as the next station north and, as a bonus, one I'd never visited, so I bought the ticket on my app and headed into the main hall.

The Gothic exterior extends to inside with elaborate wooden decorations and a tiled floor I loved.

I might get that in my kitchen.

I looked up at the board to find where my train to Gobowen was going from.  That was where I learned it was going from... platform three.  The platform I'd already been on, that was outside the regular station.  Disappointed, I wandered back out and up the stairs.

Across the tracks, the temptations of an open waiting room (ours had been closed due to "antisocial behaviour") and a Starbucks and a toilet called to me.  Us platform three types - we were outcasts.  Unwanted by the rest of the station.  I hoiked up my collar and sulked on the sidelines.

A packed train arrived to take us onwards.  This was the train from Cardiff to Holyhead, a route that literally travelled the entire length of Wales, and as such TfW had decided it only deserved two carriages.  Unsurprisingly, it was absolutely rammed.  I was glad to squeeze off at Gobowen.

The undoubted highlight of this small station which, despite how its name sounds, is actually in England, is the shelter outside.  It's been constructed to look like a railway carriage and is no doubt an epicentre for the local teens of a Friday night.

I stood in the car park and waited for the BF to arrive.  Shrewsbury is lovely.  I'd highly recommend a visit.  Even if Gropecunt Lane has been gentrified.