Snow Hill

One place from my childhood still sticks fondly in my mind, sixty-odd years on: Snow Hill Railway Station in Birmingham: the Great Western Railway's hub in the Midlands, and a magnificent structure, to boot - pictured, the incredible glass-vaulted booking hall that fronted the place. Across the street, its facade reflected across Colmore Row, the entrance of the Great Western Arcade, a Victorian shopping arcade stretching from Colmore itself to Temple Row. Of course, over the years this architectural continuity has been been rather upset by progress, with the implied connection between station and arcade subsumed by years of messing around with Brum's inner-city road infrastructure; never to great end, but always serving the profit motive of the Midlands road transport lobby, aided and abetted in the sixties by Dr. Beeching's rather specious findings about railway efficiency [the roots of neoliberalism made flesh before we even knew it even existed?]

When I was a kid, we used to pay a few pennies to get the train from Snow Hill up to Smethwick and back just for the jaunt: the excitement of even such a short rail journey sufficient draw in itself. Snow Hill was the base for us as train-spotting youngsters, running beneath the tracks in the subways that connected one half of the station to the other, the thunder of locomotives above us adding to the thrill of it all. By the mid 1970s, the place had been criminally left to rack and ruin and turned into a National Car Parks parking lot. I worked for that heinous company during summer vacations for a couple of summers, mid decade, and was familiar with the place in its sad decline first hand. Today, although a shadow of its former glorious self, it at least is once again a working transport hub for mostly local destinations with one long distance line to London operating from there. So, I guess a kind of phoenix from the ashes job, but it ain't a patch on its glory days of glass, iron and polished wood. There you go, I suppose: at least it's still there...