Hidden City: Curzon Street Station & Cat

To Curzon Street Station today, on one of the incredibly rare occasions when it is open to the public. It is actually well-known as a landmark, seen from the train as you approach from the Coventry side of the city, a rare glimpse of loveliness for years & years among the abomination of desolation that Eastside used to be. It was Birmingham's original railway station, opened in 1838, & remained so until New Street opened, so that the posh people coming for the attractions of New Street didn't have to see the slums of Park Street. It was designed by John Hardwicke, who also designed the now-demolished Euston arch in London, & is a seriously sexy building. I have been gagging to get a glimpse of the inside for literally decades.
This is a blog primarily about witchcraft, so it can only be expected that my slant on things is often going to be somewhat...unusual. I won't hold back, therefore, from going straight into the weird shit about Birmingham's railway stations. There is an irony about the Victorians moving the main station to New Street. I will grant you that the Park Street area of the city can be a real challenge, in energy terms, as it were. Even the slightest hint of psychic ability allows one to pick up on the resonances of the teeming slum that that side of the city once was. Personally I don't feel this to be related to the grave yard, I feel it is related to the long history of chaotic living & conflict that that area would have known. What you *see* therefore as you come into the city, is almost a battle ground. For a psychic, the irony is that the atmosphere of what is now called Eastside is not half as bad as that of New Street Station. I feel one of the reasons people love to hate Birmingham is what they land up in at New Street is a literal cesspit. Even cowans pick this up: New Street is notorious both for suicides & its hauntings (I have resisted writing an actual spirit of place post about New Street, but see for example http://blogs.sundaymercury.net/haunted/2008/12/ghost-trains-and-haunted-railw.html and http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/local-news/birmingham-new-street-station-haunting-179968).
Anyway the result of opening Curzon Street station for an exhibition of pictures of normally-unseen places in the city (ten till three daily, this week only) was a huge crowd of people with cameras. Obviously I'm not the only one who's been gagging to get in there for years. The actual building is all I was hoping it would be, in fact better. It is a seriously sexy building, whose predominating atmosphere is of dignity & solidity. It also isn't half as wrecked inside as I thought it would be: it is certainly in better nick than Moseley Road Baths, also 'looked after' by the council.
One of the reasons people were so snap-happy was that, while the pictures actually featured in some supplements in the Birmingham Post - & may therefore have been missed - the places were in reality a mixture of places you have *some* hope of seeing (such as Perrott's Folly) & places that you actually have no realistic hope of seeing in the near future or ever. These would include the inside of the Grand Hotel (been there, actually I've been asked politely to leave the bar, but it doesn't look like that's reopening any time soon), New Street Station signal box, the famous underground telephone exchange, the ballroom (didn't know about that) at Aston fire station, Steelhouse Lane custody suite (no, I have *never* been there), & the actual Big Brum bells (in the tower of the council house). And all this in a gorgeous building that is *almost* never open to the public. There are a few more sights that I have passively viewed on urban exploration sites, such as the bank on Broad Street - it's been done, it's been done to death. It's open sometimes for things, anyway, & looks...well, the way you'd expect a bank to look behind the scenes. The majority of these places I personally have at least seen pictures of, so I think the main point of the exhibition is to get into the station in person. In fact if you missed them the pictures are on the website related to this exhibition: http://www.hidden-spaces.co.uk/ .
Now you wouldn't know it was me if I didn't somehow turn the sanest of subjects weird, so I have to bring in the Curzon Street cat, surely a hero of this story. I was hoping to meet the subject of such a genuinely old magical practice, but he or she didn't make an appearance & anyway I feel probably would be a terminally pissed off dead cat. Don't try this at home, kids: this is a genuinely old magical practice that you won't find in Silver Ravenwolf or Scott Cunningham. It appears here as an antidote to the naffness of much modern paganism (I was going to write a whole post about the said naffness, timed carefully to coincide with the solstice junket to Stonehenge, but felt I would come across as snarky even by my standards. & rather post about something that interests *me*) & as a reminder that magic, indeed life itself, comes down to blood & bone. Our encounter with that life is what enables us to turn one thing into another.
'Birmingham's most bizarre Victorian relic is on track for a purr-fect journey to immortality.
'A mummified cat – buried alive under the floorboards of Birmingham's Curzon Street train station in 1838 – could have pride of place in the new station to be built in the city as part of the controversial HS2 high-speed rail network.
'The Birmingham terminus – initially linking to London but later to other major cities – will be on the site of the old station.
'And the cat and other curios from Curzon Street could be included in a sale by Birmingham City Council, which owns the site, to the company behind HS2.
'It is believed that the cat was originally placed in the station as part of a gruesome Victorian tradition to bring the building, and its future staff, good luck.
'The custom required a live cat to be placed under the last floorboard, or the final brick in a wall.
'The cat would naturally die, either from lack of oxygen, starvation or thirst – or all three – so the 'lucky omen' was far from lucky for the victim.
'The standard of workmanship in the Victorian era was so high that the floorboard void, or the bricked-in cavity, was airtight.
'So instead of decaying, the corpse mummified.
'The feline remains – and other artefacts – were unearthed by builders carrying out major construction work on Curzon Street Station in the 1980s.
'It was decided to retain the curios and place them in glass-fronted display cabinets set into the walls of the building.
'The mummified cat was a quirky – but little-known – attraction at the former station when it served as offices for several training organisations.
'Birmingham City Council has owned the freehold of Curzon Street station since 1980 and it has been unoccupied since 2001, although a few art exhibitions have been staged there in between.
'The cat, which never appears to have been given a name, was removed for safekeeping from Curzon Street by the city council and it is now in safe storage.' (http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/local-news/curzon-street-cat-rise-up-4703773)
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