Spirit of Place: Spaghetti Junction and City Sigils

Today I 'did' the charity shops in Erdington. Birmingham is a city of two halves & you tend to feel comfortable in only one or the other. I have never liked north Birmingham, and Erdington is best known to me for its psychiatric hospital. My great aunt Lucy died in there: she used to bite people. One of her brothers was a drag queen, & the other was a gunsmith (another local industry) whose business went down the pan & he shot himself. One of the weirder things about my mother's side of the family is that after all this I was intrigued to find out what another man, whom she always called the 'black sheep' of the family, had done. When I eventually wheedled it out of her, it turned out that 'he drank, dear,' was all.
So anyway Erdington doesn't feel homely to me. Then some hatchet-faced cow in the Scope shop told me that a carrier bag would be 1p, which I told her was fine, put it on the bill. So she told me she clothes I bought came to £10, and I told her £10.01 with the carrier bag, and she told me she couldn't ring up the carrier bag until I'd paid for the clothes, which was plain nonsense. So I told her again that my purchase came to ten pounds one pee: you may tell by this time that since I'd decided she was being a cow volitionally I was going to match if not exceed her bovine behaviour. So she told me to pay ten pounds, so I gave her my debit card and told her to add the penny on and I would pay the whole lot by visa. At this - I'm not making this up - she stamped her foot and called for manager. It turned out the manager when she came was a woman who'd already walked through me so I was looking forward to pursuing my campaign of awkwardness. Unfortunately the manager took the wind out of my sales by being nice as pie, adding the penny to my balance and letting me pay. She did try to tell me that some people like to pay a penny in cash for their carrier bag, but didn't try to pursue this when I told her that that may be some people but I had actually told the woman, who was scowling at me, that I didn't want to do that & she still wouldn't let me. I then smiled sweetly at the woman, said, 'There, that wasn't difficult, was it?' And left, leaving discord and ill-feeling in my wake. Another successful morning.
On the way back into the city centre the bus passes over part of the famous Gravelly Hill Interchange, better known as Spaghetti Junction. It turns out that there are other roads called Spaghetti Junction in the world, but this was the original, started in 1968 and opened in 1972. The pattern is as iconic of Birmingham as the rotunda or bullring, which is the real point of this post. Magically sigils mean something, and often the plan of a city, or some part of it, will become an egregore of the city itself.
The local knowledge is important because it contributes to tapping in to the whole spirit of the city. I suppose another example of this would be knowing where the station names on the London Underground map come from, to add psychic depth and shades of meaning to what the sigil represents. The Spaghetti Junction equivalent could include the rather esoteric knowledge that since the interchange passes over several canals and rivers, the pillars had to be placed the allow the passage of horses on the towpaths: quite different to the apparent imposition of a concrete monstrosity on the strangely verdant background in the first picture. The other thing it is famous for locally is the famous 'Birmingham beach': a sandbank under Spaghetti Junction, completely surrounded by heavy industry & totally unsuitable for building sandcastles.
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