Distance: just over 3 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: easy

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

Walk from New Street Railway Station in Birmingham city centre, to the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal, and on towards the Gravelley Hill Interchange aka Spaghetti Junction.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

The Angel of the Midlands?

On 24th May 1972 the Gravelly Hill Interchange opened.

Slicing through north Birmingham this mighty megastructure which some have compared to a cathedral, is better known by its nickname, coined by local reporters in 1965: Spaghetti Junction.

Supported by 600 concrete columns, Spaghetti junction lives up to its nickname. It is where the M6, A38M, A38 and A5127 conjoin and cross over each other. Beneath it flows the Grand Union, Birmingham and Fazley and Tame Valley Canals, along with the Cross City and Chase Railway Lines. Reminders, alongside the local road network and pre-World War II bridges across the River Tame, of earlier major transport networks which still exist subsumed into the motor era megastructure.

On visiting the area you unsurprisingly find it very noisy. Parts of it, especially those under the massive decks of the Bromford Viaduct, built to carry the M6 along the course of the River Tame into the Black Country, are barren. Other areas, especially those in the middle and around the fringes of the massive motorway interchange are surprisingly verdant. The fact that humans whether in vehicles, on pushbikes, or on foot quickly scurry through the area, has made it an unlikely haven for plants and wildlife.

The sheer volume of work required to construct Spaghetti Junction was prodigious. Planning began in 1958, meaning that it was 14 years before the first vehicles rolled up and around its vast ramps. Construction work began in 1968 and was largely complete within 2 years, though it took the best part of a further two years to complete the finishing touches. The final cost of the project was £10million, a £2million increase on the initial budget. 

Part of the project included attempting to relocate 1,000,000 fish from a pool under the proposed junction which was due to be obliterated by the megastructure. As the works neared completion thrill seeking drivers were known to sometimes break onto the interchange so as to race around it. As the opening date approached in 1972 the complex became a local tourist attraction, with a Burton-upon-Trent coach company running sightseeing tours for 65p a head.

Spaghetti Junction’s legacy is a complicated one. Its construction necessitated the flattening of a vast area of northern Birmingham. Not just for the flyover, but also for the access roads required to funnel motorists towards the motorway box. The sheer volume of traffic constantly rushing through these massive tears in the urban fabric heavily impacts everyday life in adjoining neighbourhoods like Gravelly Hill. There is no way that it could not. Another effect of the gigantic motorway shafts and the towering decks they support, is to create a no man’s land which cuts off north Birmingham communities like Erdington, Kingstanding and Castle Bromwich from the heart of the city to the south, and vica-versa.

Social impacts aside, whilst personal automobiles and the trucking of vast quantities of goods at speed long distances, have enabled the majority of the British population to live lives of relative abundance undreamt of by previous generations, the effects upon the environment have been unfathomably huge. In the face of the growing climate emergency it is impossible not to see Spaghetti Junction as an all too visible symbol of our society’s overconsumption far beyond the limits of what could possibly be sustainable. Whilst today the megastructure is deeply embedded in the urban landscape and seldom questioned, might it in decades to come, become a hated symbol of how the most recent generations – not least those in the global north – have greedily consumed resources on a scale that future life on earth will have to pay for?

For better and for worse Spaghetti Junction has become an urban icon. The sheer percentage of the British population that has travelled through it at some point in their lives means that it has become an indelible signifier for Birmingham and West Midlands county more broadly. Alongside New Street Station it has helped create the (not entirely inaccurate) impression that Birmingham and the West Midlands are grey, atomised and utterly in thrall to the motor car. 

No wonder then that whether in the Cliff Richard vehicle Take Me High (1973), Tony Garnett’s grim and gritty thriller Prostitute (1980), Heart ByPass (1998) Jonathan Meades’ half hour long appreciation of Birmingham for BBC2, or Locke (2013) which consists of Tom Hardy’s conflicted quantity surveyor driving fast down the motorway, traversing Spaghetti Junction is the ultimate signifer of arrival in or departure from England’s second city.  The first series of Line of Duty, the finest programme to be implicitly set in the contemporary West Midlands, naturally features a scene filmed in the bear pit where pedestrian underpasses interchange beneath the megastructure.

The unique situation, form and scale of the structure itself, has also intrigued visual and performance artists. The earliest example (I at least am aware of) is the documentary photographer Janine Wiedel who documented Spaghetti Junction in 1977-78 when she was working on her celebrated Vulcan’s Forge project exploring the workers in the region’s traditional craft industries. Since then the interchange has been the site of numerous art installations, interventions and projects, including in recent years by Bill Drummond of The KLF. For a fuller account of the rich cultural history of Spaghetti Junction I heartily recommend Ian Francis’ excellent essay on the topic reproduced on the I Choose Birmingham website.

Love it or hate it, in taking up a huge slice of north Birmingham, defining the West Midlands in a manner akin to the Angel of the North, and being a spectacular engineering achievement with 600 columns, 3 miles of slip road and constructed from 175,000 yards of concrete, Spaghetti Junction is a true regional icon. A problematic yet liberating megastructure awe inspiring and ominous in equal measure.

The Walk

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps Explorer enabling me to take them on my phone. Subscribe yourself via the banner above.

Spaghetti Junction is easily accessed from central Birmingham along the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal. If walked along in daylight both the canal and the area around Spaghetti Junction itself are fairly safe. However, it is best to take the usual care that you would in parts of an urban area where there are relatively few people around. Visits in the evening and at night are not advised, and many walkers prefer visiting the area underneath the megastructure in groups.

From Birmingham New Street Railway Station’s central atrium exit towards Stephenson Street and the heart of the city centre.

Here turn right and follow Stephenson for a short distance.

Take a sharp left turn and begin walking uphill.

Keep walking uphill following the route of the Midland Metro as Stephenson Street gives way to Corporation Street.

Keep walking up past the surviving cluster of tall late Victorian buildings at the bottom of Corporation Street, past the Rackham’s Department Store Building, through a cluster of shops built in the 1950s and 1960s to the Bull Street Junction.

Here turn left onto Bull Street and keep walking uphill following the tram tracks.

At the top of the hill you pass a short, strange tower block constructed from reflective glass, which was built in the early 1990s.

Here the road you are walking along merges with the end of Colmore Row.

At this point you take a slight right turn and begin following the road downhill heading in the direction of a large steel and clear glass office building constructed in the 2000s and 2010s.

On your right stands the bizarre cross shaped, ziggurat structure erected by the Wesleyan Insurance Company as their head office between 1988 and 1991. Architectural postmodernism at its most AI generated looking. 

Take a slight left and cross over the road via a set of traffic lights.

Once at the base of the modern glass office building which houses an accountancy firm take another slight right turn and continue downhill passing the headquarters of West Midlands Police on your left.

Just after the chief cop shop, you reach the very busy A4400, a tributary of the A38 which runs below ground beneath your feet.

There are traffic lights here which can aid you in crossing.

Having crossed the road take a slight right and follow the path downhill towards Constitution Hill and the Jewellery Quarter. The Pugin designed Roman Catholic cathedral stands to your right.

The Birmingham and Fazeley Canal runs at the bottom of the hill.

Cross over the bridge which carries the road across the waterway.

Then once on the other side turn right.

Here there is a short sloping footpath paved with brick running gently downhill.

Turn and head down along this path.

At the bottom you see a gateway leading off to the right onto the canal towpath.

Once on the canal towpath turn left.

You are now walking along the towpath of the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal towards Spaghetti Junction.

Around you lies the so-called Gun Quarter, filled with current and former workshops, the grey mid-20th Century municipal hulk of the West Midlands Combined Authority headquarters, and a large quantity of new student flats constructed for students at Birmingham’s five universities.

Some of the student flats have an appearance akin to the wipe down plastic of a funky looking household appliance.

Soon you leave them for a more quintessential inner-city canal vista.

Before plunging into a tight concrete chamber that carries the canal under the A38M speeding through Aston towards its confluence with the M6 at Spaghetti Junction.

Then out onto a short stretch where the towpath changes sides, passing cheerily postmodern office blocks and depots. Off to your right a loop south around the edge of the city centre runs down to the Grand Union at Digbeth, but you press straight on.

You press on passing through a vast concrete antechamber supporting some structure above the canal.

Then down a flight of locks on the other side heading towards Dartmouth Circus and the beginning of Aston proper.

The route from here is more or less straight for a couple of miles towards Spaghetti Junction.

Along the way you pass through a vista which is almost entirely commercial and industrial.

Past more 1980s and 1990s postmodern office parks. Constructed to fill the spaces that industrial and people who worked in industry, alike, left behind them when they departed.

That said, the presence of mid-20th Century industrial sheds and the gleaming chimneys of little furnaces indicates that some industry remains alive and well in north Birmingham.

This part of the city has been a major area for storage and transhippment ever since the canals first arrived in the late 18th Century. This continues today in the form the many warehouses, depots and marshalling yards which can be glimpsed on either side of the canal cut.

Presently you walk along the Cross City Line which shuttles people up and down the railway line from Bromsgrove and Redditch in north east Worcestershire, to Lichfield in south east Staffordshire. It, too, passes beneath Spaghetti Junction on its linear progress between the two halves of Birmingham’s home counties.

Beyond the Cross City Line the vista is little changed.

On my journey I was rather taken with this little branch canal, apparently long redundant, but still in pretty good shape.

Close to it, on the other bank of the canal, stands a little foundry hard at work.

It is situated, naturally next to another office park built circa 1990. Setting up an interesting contrast between still existent craft industry, and office work for firms like Securitas. Both offer hard, unglamourous work necessary for keeping society as currently structured ticking over.

Next to the Securitas office building stands an unremarkable canal bridge.

Beyond it in the distance after a straight stretch of unbroken canal, the Bromford Viaduct rises, the M6 and Spaghetti Junction are in sight.

You approach it past a tumult of earlier transport infrastructure, including an elegant early 20th Century road bridge, and a glut of ducts and piping housing other nameless pieces of critical infrastructure.

I will confess near the end of the walk to being a Spaghetti Junction agnostic. I find it very interesting, can appreciate its importance, its awesome scale and power, but I am not charmed by it and would not want to spend an enormous amount of time there. The noise of the traffic is incredible, but perhaps worth experiencing one or twice in a lifetime.

Having reached Spaghetti Junction you can turn right and follow the course of the River Tame and converging canals to the east.

Or you can turn left, heading towards the Black Country, following the concrete circulatory system of the Bromford Viaduct west.

This section includes the subterranean location where Bill Drummond sprayed his graffiti artwork.

As well as some surprising flashes of nature, greenery, and an interesting intermeshing of 18th Century canal architecture, and a Victorian railway viaduct with the functional concrete high modernism of Spaghetti Junction.

Alternatively you can opt to eskew the canal network, turn away from the River Tame, walking straight forward instead towards the bearpit that stands at the heart of Spaghetti Junction’s intersecting gyratories.

Reached by underpasses, the engineers who designed Spaghetti Junction created a sunken central square where numerous underpasses meet.

It has become over the decades a popular canvas for street artists of all genres.

Above this bearpit soar the ramps and gyratories which funnel different streams of traffic onto the right road to reach their destination.

It is here that the walk ends.

Getting Back

From the bearpit at the heart of Spaghetti Junction if you head north through the underpasses then you come out on the edge of Gravelly Hill. Head uphill along either the pavement beside the cavernous A5127 or along Slade Road, brings you after around 10 or so minutes walk to Hunton Hill. Hunton Hill is where Gravelly Hill Railway Station is situated. The station is on the Cross City Line offering regular trains in the direction of New Street in Birmingham city centre and south Birmingham, as well as north towards Sutton Coldfield and Lichfield. There are also buses that run along the A5127 back towards Birmingham, to destinations across north Birmingham and parts of the Black Country, as well as locales further afield such as Tamworth.