Space Age Birmingham: Looking Up

The plan had been simple. Get the train from New Street to Gravelly Hill, have a look at one of the most amazing feats of applied concrete in the world, get the train back from Aston, have a coffee.

The concrete in question being Spaghetti Junction, Birmingham's ZOMG-scaled Mario Kart track, which weaves the arterial Aston Expressway (an alien nomenclature, sounding more like a corner shop than a road in England) with orbital M6, on its happy way to Walsall.

For those not familiar with the Junction, some Wikipedia stats add flavour. 30 acres of fun where 18 roads intermingle in the air, propped up by almost 600 columns. It forms part of Brum's pre-70s-oil-crisis efforts to embrace the motorcar wholesale and enable the speed that the future traveller will demand. Our past future, of course, us back then.

As one might imagine, the houses lining the road from Gravelly Hill station to Spaghetti Junction are less desirable than they were before someone poured quite so much concrete. Once-pleasant Victorian confections, with parti-coloured brickwork and generous front gardens, these houses are now unsaleably blighted by the knot of carriageways tangling together at the bottom of the hill. One house, patched up with unpainted plywood, had a couple of smashed-up hearses on its drive, scattered with soiled clothes. A dirty protest, or perhaps a sacrifice to some pagan poo-god.

Reaching the bottom of the first slip-road, I was surprised to find that provisions had actually been made for the pedestrian to exist underneath the network of roads, this realm of cars. Entering through a subway of Croydon-underpass mosaic tiling, the explorer finds himself in a large sunken space, a walled garden with a forest of concrete pillars like petrified trees. It's deserted, and frankly very weird. Although not really any weirder than the sort of person who goes down there and finds it.

There is something powerfully over-the-top about the size of the soaring curves and improbably mass of all that concrete on such tall, slim columns. The Scalextric set of every boy's dreams. It'd make a mega Rainbow Road.  It's not as loud as you might imagine, despite the hundreds of cars and lorries overhead. Presumably the sound bounces upwards and outwards, and contributes further to Gravelly Hill's grimness.

Although it's not fashionable to see it any more, the Junction is magnificently sculptural. The loops and arcs and inclines take functional roads and make them into something inscrutable, something awe-inspiring. The structural similarities with Stonehenge are perhaps not accidental.  The scale is insane. Like the fearful experience of a penitent serf gazing heavenwards in a cathedral, it's dizzying to stare up at this mystery in the sky. From underneath, it's impossible to work out which roads lead where, as they split and merge in the air. Appropriately, the junction can really only be comprehended in aerial shots; a deity-eye view of something man-made and yet so inhumanly-sized. It's another piece of our space-age future, which has since become dirty and disliked. But the ambition! How incredibly different to the Victorian high-street, or simple ring road of a New Town like Basildon.

Pressing further onwards, the landscape takes on a industrial wasteland / Doctor Who outside broadcast / dystopia-on-the-cheap feel. The spaces under the roads, voids really, are unlit and a bit scary. A network of canals appears to consist of 80% traffic cones, 20% lurid green water. The only way to escape the Cyberman invasion force would be to swim for it, and hope the underwater cones aren't secretly Autons </geek>.

There is apparently a cycle route running through this double-complex of canals and roads, although I wouldn't advise using it as the paths are slippy and the dark is full of Daleks.

I took a snap of a wonderfully passive-aggressive sign for passing barges. Actually, I think you'll find that people like you shouldn't collide with our wall, please. Thankyou.

There's also a canal sign that some patriotic soul has un-metric'd from kilometres to miles. Take that, EU Commission! Wonder what BCN stands for. I imagine it's just short for Bacon.

There are a couple of plaques down there in the gloom. One (sans serif, brushed aluminium) celebrates the physics-defying feat above, the other (serif CAPS, picture of cottagey house) harking back to a rather more twee time when the canals were the engineering masterpiece of their time. Somehow strange that it's socially more acceptable to have a romantic view of waterways than roadways. Perhaps it's because the roads still hold some utility, and we struggle to enjoy things until entropy has begun weathering them to dust. Ruin Theory still runs deep within our collective consciousness. What will future archaeologists make of Spaghetti Junction?

In the dark, there are further engineering works ongoing, presumably to sure-up parts of the concrete above. I found myself trapped somewhere between canals, concrete, rivers, railways and fences, and eventually had to concede defeat and double back to the drizzly gloom of Gravelly Hill.

Aston may be lovely. I do not know.