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.

Two

 

Long before I started my way down the Midland Metro tram line, I casually mentioned it as a concept in the DMs to a venerable blogger who shall remain nameless.  "Seriously, don't start on it," they warned.  I replied that I could handle it.

"I have no doubt that you can, but that doesn't mean that you should."

Those words came to mind as I got off the tram at Black Lake.  I'd been travelling all morning, and I thought I must be near the end by now.  It came as a shock to realise that I was on the cusp of Zones 2 and 3.  There were still loads of stops to go and, to be frank, it was a little difficult differentiating between them.  Black Lake did at least have a stretch of canal for me to cross and a bit of greenery, but I was soon on a main road with a factory, as I had been for an awful lot of the day.

I nipped across the road and returned to the side of the tram tracks.  There was a footpath following them to my next stop, which was a bit of a cheat, but I didn't fancy going ridiculously out of my way to walk along a busy dual carriageway.  At least this way it was a little scenic.

The path took me under road bridges, some old and made of brick, some newer and concrete.  Very soon I'd reached the next stop and I dutifully took up a spot on the platform.  After a few moments, I remembered the sign picture, and I ran up the steps to snap it before the tram arrived.  This is getting to be a nasty habit.

The full name of the stop is Dudley Street Guns Village; this being an area that was traditionally associated with the armament trade.  It's not very 21st century to boast about that kind of thing.  I understand when developers want to give their new developments a heritage sheen and call them "the Custard Factory" or "Miller's Quay" because of some tenuous link to a long-closed industry, but naming it after a profession devoted to murder is a bit much.  Certainly the local school thought so, and changed its name in 2017, noting that some websites blocked it from searches.  If this blog is even more unpopular than usual, it's because I wrote "Guns Village" in it, and not because nobody cares about a middle aged man looking at tram stops.

Dartmouth Street signalled the edge of West Bromwich town centre.

I decided to detour to the High Street, just for a look, as the next stop was very close indeed.  I walked down a typical Victorian terrace, ending up on a corner where a ghost sign promoted the Independent Order of the Rechabites.  These were a Victorian religious sect who believed in temperance and who gradually moved into financial services, operating as a mutual building society.  They're no longer a religious force in the UK, but still have a few adherents in Australia.

Their advert could, in some ways, be seen as provocative, because on the opposite corner was Society House, the former HQ of the West Bromwich Building Society.  This one was founded by Methodists, and still exists today, though its gloriously 1970s headquarters is now vacant.

The plan is apparently to turn the building into 100 apartments, though there didn't seem to be much work going on as I passed.  The West Brom moved a couple of streets away to a new headquarters next to a Travelodge.  

The glory days of this stretch of West Bromwich were clearly the 19th century, with a sandstone Town Hall and elaborately decorated buildings - churches, schools and the like - repurposed into more secular and dull purposes.  Lodge Road backed onto the Edward Street Hospital and was located in a deep cutting.  

There was a lift, but it was one of those lifts that you absolutely know is going to smell of piss before you even  press the call button, so I followed the staircase down and round the shaft to the platform and took a seat.

The seats were decorated with the original logo for the Metro.  For a network that only turned 25 years old this year, it's been remarkably changeable; the current diamond logo is the third in that time and the trams are the second batch.  I bought David Voice's book The West Midlands Metro and Very Light Rail a while back and it paints a somewhat haphazard picture of the network's evolution.  My favourite detail was that the line used to have ticket machines at every stop, but they kept breaking down; finally someone was sent from the manufacturer in Italy to investigate.  They were horrified to learn that the machines were installed on outdoor platforms in wet Birmingham; they'd been designed for indoor use only and were not weatherproof.

It felt a little like the West Midlands invested in a tram, not because they wanted to, but because they could; as though they'd seen Manchester had one and had got jealous.  It explains why, for the first sixteen years of its existence, the line ended at Snow Hill station and didn't go anywhere in the city centre, thereby cancelling out the usefulness of a tram route.  Its extensions are bitty and piecemeal, and I can't help thinking that its chaotic birth - plus the financial and engineering disaster that was the construction of the Edinburgh tramway - effectively killed off trams for the rest of the country.  We'd probably have Merseytram sailing down Paradise Street if they'd been a little more prudent.

I was now in West Brom proper, at its Central stop.  The problem with tram stops is they're not especially exciting.  Without ticket offices and waiting rooms and all the accoutrements of a railway station they're basically a couple of shelters and a walkway.  It was, of course, a proper train station once but all that is gone now.  There's something slightly demeaning about large towns like West Bromwich and Oldham losing their railway connections.  It's a shame that they couldn't keep a fast connection into the city while also having the convenience of a tram link.

They've tried their best to make this a gateway to the town by landscaping it and calling it Metro Plaza, with specially themed signage (in the old pink and blue of the Network West Midlands branding, but anyway).  It might be more successful as a space if it wasn't stuck round the back of the shops, overlooking the bus station.  It didn't put off the students from the nearby Sandwell College, though, who were spread all over the seats and walls eating their lunch.

I'd bought a wrap from Sainsbury's for my lunch, but it was in my backpack and I fancied something trashy so I walked down the High Street in search of something to munch on.  I was out of luck.  West Brom's main shopping district was one of the most down at heel I've seen in a long time, a parade of pound shops and local marts and charity shops.  It didn't feel welcoming or a place to linger.  The few food places I saw - somewhere I could buy a quick hot snack - seemed cash only places, and it's 2024 and I didn't have any cash on me.  (In fact, I'd forgotten my wallet entirely, so I couldn't even access a cash machine; I spent the entire weekend on Apple Pay).

The pedestrianised strip ended and I thought "well, that's that then".  I'm very sorry if I missed out on some delightful culinary treats but nothing called to me.  I decided I'd walk on to the next stop and have that wrap after all.  This end of town was even less appealing, a rat run to the bypass, and next thing I knew I was waiting to cross at a busy intersection by a factory that made jeans. I like to imagine there are Brummie versions of  Ivy Tilsley, Vera Duckworth and The Blessed Ida Clough bellowing at a modern day Mike Baldwin in there, demanding endless tea breaks and absolutely refusing to do any actual sewing.  

Outside the tram stop was a set of railway wheels, mounted on a pedestal, a reminder of the old iron way.  At least I think that's what they were.  As usual in the West Midlands there was absolutely no signage to advise me what I was looking at.  It might've been the remnants of an HGV that got stuck in the mud and fell to pieces for all I know.

I went down to the stop and took out my wrap for my lunch.  Ah.

Apparently the conditions in my backpack had not been great, and the miles of walking had pummelled it into a pancake.  The contents had squeezed out the ends so what I really had was a single flat piece of bread with a smear of vegetables.  I decided I'd do without.

Kenrick Park was another stop where it was actually better for me to follow the tram tracks.  Alongside much of the route was the West Bromwich Parkway, which, despite its name making it sound like a car park, constituted a walking and cycle path that shadowed the trams.  This was the quickest way to my next stop, The Hawthorns.

As I walked along the path, alone, unbothered by scenic views, it came to me that I really wasn't having much fun.  The wise and venerable blogger was absolutely right - this wasn't a route worth bothering with.

Part of the problem stems from it being a converted railway line.  For a hundred years the region turned its back on the tracks, hiding them away in cuttings.  This is fine when it's a heavy rail route because you only get the odd, large station to interrupt it; it's fast and direct.  Trams are more circumspect and need more stops, and those stops were wedged in inelegantly.  While railway stations become hubs and centres for the community, the tram stops were afterthoughts, tucked down side roads, buried under bridges, away from places you'd actually want to be.  I'd seen this before on the Metrolink, but that network was big enough to provide variations, and they'd really embraced the trams and tried to make them part of the city.

The West Midlands Metro didn't feel like a proper tram route.  It reminded me of an airport shuttle, the little monorails you get that take you between terminals at big hubs, an anonymous vehicle designed to get you from A to B without hassle or glamour.  It could be so much better.

The Hawthorns, of course, I'd already been to.  Somewhat unbelievably, it was this year, back in January.  That feels like an age ago.  2024 has been a very odd year for me; we're approaching the end and I'm not entirely sure I can remember most of it.  It's simply been... there.

Unsurprisingly, The Hawthorns hasn't changed radically in the nine months since I last visited to collect the railway side.  I did find a delightful little surprise though: bands of decorated bricks inlaid into the platform walls.

Lovely.

Handsworth Booth Street turned me out onto a small access road.  I followed it down to beneath the railway bridge, where trucks clattered by with heavy loads.  Across the way, a garage had filled a narrow street with its vehicles, scattering them over the pavement and forcing me into the road.  Litter piled up between the cars and the walls.  I walked round a corner and a sofa had been abandoned on the corner, its seats torn open to expose the stuffing.

There was a brief glimpse of the city centre across a concrete driveway, then I was passing a primary school, where a teacher tried to corral his charges into a PE lesson on the playground.  The road was bigger, wider now, and I found the tram halt opposite a bus shelter that encouraged me to give the gift of gold this Diwali.  

Winson Green stop came with elaborate metalwork instead of a boring old sign, and was subtitled "Outer Circle".  This was where the Metro crossed the path of the legendary number 11 service, a bus route that encircles Birmingham and takes about three hours.  A vague part of me had thought about travelling on it, for a look, but then I remembered that I don't like buses really and the Metro wasn't exactly floating my boat either.  If you want to know what it's like, Diamond Geezer did it in 2015, and Jonn Elledge did it three years after that, so I wouldn't really have anything pertinent to add anyway.  

I was exhausted by now.  I'd been walking for hours.  The frequent trams and the short hops meant I'd never really had a chance to rest between walks.  I was hungry too, having missed out on my lunch.  It was, by now, nearly half two, and I thought about that lovely hotel room waiting for me from three o'clock.  I considered giving up there on the platform at Winson Green, getting the tram into town, and using the hotel bar until my room was ready.  Then I looked at the map in the shelter.

I'd started the day in Zone 4, and now I was two stops from the end of Zone 2.  I had to complete that much.  The city centre - the glamour stops - could wait for another day.  

I got off the tram at Soho Benson Road with an extremely good looking man in a wheelchair.  You know how a little awkward part of your brain registers the presence of a disabled person, and you immediately panic that they think you're staring?  I experience that anxiety, but from a different angle; I wanted to stop him and say, "I'm not looking at you because you're in a wheelchair, I'm looking because you're very hot."  

This was a proper inner city now: dense, traffic-filled, grubby.  Scrappy pieces of land were covered with parked cars.  New homes had been built as a regeneration attempt; cul-de-sacs designed to minimise crime, apartment blocks with gated entrances.  I took a well-used desire path across a patch of green and dodged a black bag of dog mess right in the centre of the walkway, with the grass either side littered with carriers full of who knows what and a torn mattress.  Over the railway tracks, the tall buildings of the city centre appeared again, feeling incredibly distant.

Pitsford Street had once shadowed the Hockley Goods Yard, a massive expanse of railway lines and vehicles with a passenger station, Hockley, at its centre.  In 1971, British Rail took the decision to close the entire line between Snow Hill and Wolverhampton, and Hockley stopped getting any services the following year.  The goods yard became an industrial estate, but the newly-created West Midlands Passenger Transport Executive swept in and protected the railway route.  BR may not have seen the value of trains between Wolverhampton and Snow Hill, but the WMPTE did, and it subsequently became the Metro.

There's very little left of Hockley station; as is often the case in the West Midlands, they rebuilt the road passing the site and knocked down what little remained.  This entrance from the corner of Icknield Street is about all that's left.  When heavy rail services resumed, the station was relocated further south, closer to the city centre, and named Jewellery Quarter.

That was going to be my final stop of the day, but first I had to reach it, so I took a stroll through a graveyard.  Warstone Lane Cemetery was a private burial ground, set up in the 19th century.  For a while it was a lucrative business, but the problem with graveyards is they start filling up, and after a while they ran out of space for corpses.  The business ended and it was taken over by the City Council.

Its undoubted highlight is the catacombs, two rows of chambers for the interring of bodies.  The day I was there it was being photographed by a professional, with a tripod and everything; I skulked off to one side and took a snap with my iPhone.

Jewellery Quarter station is in the next street and, again, I was here back in January.  I resisted the urge to visit that lovely little pub.  I needed a lie down and a sandwich.  The Metro was almost conquered, but it'll be a while until I return for Zone 1's stops.  Who knows how long.