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...

Comments

  1. Phil.19 February 2026 at 22:13

    Used to trainspot here when I was about 9 or 10. Most Saturdays I'd get a train to Tyseley and go around the steam shed. Also, like you, gainfully employed by NCP on Saturdays but during 1972/3. Always worked on this spot, always with a delightful, massively unkempt, elderly, alcoholic cove called Kevin McNally. (He was Irish!) He used to disappear into The Old Contemptibles from 11.30 until about 2.00pm and then let me bunk off early at 5.00. Just time to get home, washed, fed and a bus up to The Chalet for the evening's entertainment. I never did understand how he tallied up all of the tickets and takings after that much booze. Trust AOK, Phil.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. sideways19 February 2026 at 23:14

      I think I remember Kevin from my time there: there was also another old bloke who was from the Potteries who knew the little town where my soon to be new college was... I worked in most of the damned carparks around Brum city centre: the most lucrative in terms of fiddle being Park St., an awful hellhole of a place that was constantly full of unmoving, stagnant exhaust fumes, and in which I could only ever manage a half-shift before nearly passing out. Still, it paid my way handsomely, despite the appallingly low basic pay ;0)

      Delete

Post a Comment

Followers

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des...
Read more

Messiah Complex

-
Image
A spectre is haunting... America; and it isn't communism. It isn't radical Islamism. It isn't even capitalism itself. It's Christianity. A particularly pernicious, politicised Christianity. 'In God We Trust', One Nation Under God', etc., etc., are the tropes of a 'nation' that is the result of the colonisation of a foreign continent by a motley bunch of assorted European disaffects several hundred years ago. That much is history, and the native peoples of America are still struggling to cling on to what is, after all, their birthright. Whatever good was squeezed from the sour pith of colony in the middle part of the last century: civil rights, racial emancipation and equal rights for women and LGBTQ+ people of all stripes, is not now simply being eroded, but actually bulldozed over the cliff edge that separates human rights & freedoms, and the return of enslavement by difference. Difference of skin colour, race, gender or sexuality: a pick 'n...
Read more

A Time of Connection

-
Image
I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...
Read more