Paradise Circus – Page 36 – A Birmingham Miscellany

Get the Bus

Three don’t come along all at once, we’re never late, we’re never early. We never stop, we pause but we don’t stop. It’s cheaper that way, most repairs can be completed without stopping – dangerous but better than the alternative.

You could automate this, but what’s the point? A job’s a job. There are so few about, that even one that involves hanging off the back of a moving bus isn’t something you can turn down. There’s something stuck around the back driver’s-side wheel, wait for a nice straight bit of road and get out there. I strain from a sweaty chrome handle, one foot jammed against a vent and I can see something flap round. Like some filthy brown bird, it wheezes and waits for its chance then coils and springs round again. I’ve got to catch it before it disappears and dislodge it, set its carcass free.

I grab, miss, grab, miss. It’s getting wound more and more round the axle. If we have to stop, lose time, then we’ll be late and lateness isn’t an option.

Stretching, last chance, push harder away from the bus, swing almost.
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Drink in the Sun

Life in the sun just feels better. I think there is a strong case that the notion of the Judeo-Christian God always watching over us is just a bastardisation of the visceral good feeling of being in the warm summer sun.

So the sun is shining and everybody in England runs outside as naked as they can get away with, to drink as much free vitamin D through their dappled, pasty, flesh as they can. And I’m alright with this.

I’m outside my favourite pub in Birmingham: canal side, listening to the geese honk up to the balcony for scraps and fag butts to be thrown down, presumably to eat. This is Birmingham and finding out that our waterfowl need nicotine patches wouldn’t surprise me.

I’ve always loved this place, even during the brief period when me and my friends were so barred the staff would phone the police if we even walked past.

But time be time, and now I’m free to watch the sun slink behind the overpriced apartment blocks, drink my beer, and silently pray to the uncaring fiery god for one of the cyclists or joggers to hit a stone and fall into the canal.

King Kong, Sex and The Americas

Discovery is subjective.

When Europeans discovered the Americas, they didn’t let indigenous races spoil their narrative: that continent was discovered and it would stay discovered, damn it.

They say that every generation of teenagers thinks it’s invented sex. The moment we become sexually active we reinvent the wheel (you ever tried it? I’d advise you stretch first) and simultaneously project our parents into a sexless hinterland (a bit like Telford, where fittingly Philip Larkin worked), denying them a sexual history despite being embodied evidence of it.

Brummies have an Americas: it’s the King Kong statue, a monument forever being discovered.

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Waiting Room – Tips for sleeping on New Street Station

I didn’t really visit New Street Station very much as a kid. For a start we didn’t go into town that often, and when we did the train was very much more expensive than the bus. The buses, at least for a time, were 2p to anywhere*. There were lots of muggings on the trains in those days and they were very much grottier than the buses. I can still smell the mixture of piss and ripped seat foam that permeated the Walsall to Birmingham line. I don’t think many of my generation have ever got back into using the local trains. New Street Station became a place for longer trips—one I’d still get the bus to get to from Great Barr.

The odd day trip, most memorably to an all-but closed Llandudno—”Change at Crewe” the guard bellowed as we got on the wrong train back—and then as I got older travel to gigs, friends and festivals all over the country. The staff were always helpful, even if the place was dark and the WH Smith’s was expensive. On my first visit to the Glastonbury festival, my two mates and I queued up at the ticket office with not a single clue between us where the place was, nor the train station we’d need to get to. They found out, gave us tickets, and charged us about 30 quid. A lot for the pleasure of standing up all the way there and back but some things don’t change. Except of course all the money now goes to Richard Branson.

For a while I’d feel a lift of spirits as I descended the escalators from the Bull Ring. And along with that a desire to touch the advert for whatever local radio station was pushing its dire breakfast show as footballers do leaving the tunnel at Anfield. Now I live in another town it’s just a point on route. But let me tell you about the time I kipped overnight at New Street.

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New Street Station: Platform to the Stars

Photo CC Ingy The Wingy

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.