Spirit of Place: Duddeston Viaduct

This post was inspired by the guy who grabbed hold of me on the canal bank, to the extent that I had to put him on his bus to get rid of him. We had to pass under the viaduct but he didn't realize, bless him, that the whole thing is called a viaduct and thought every arch was called a fire duct. He kept saying 'Thats another fire duct'... Since he didn't know I managed to hold in my hysterics and this is by way of getting them out. I couldn't explain to him because he was clearly explaining this to me and I would have laughed.

Duddeston Viaduct is one of my absolutely favourite things. There are two distinct rail routes through the centre of Birmingham, the result of a lengthy Victorian row between at least two different railway companies. I'm not going to lie, I have tried and failed to get my head round it but it is honestly so confusing, and it doesn't help that of course there are lots of professional and amateur historians of railways. Nonetheless an account of what happened can be found here. 

For my own superficial purposes suffice to say that you will see this in Digbeth from the train to and from Snow Hill station (you won't see it from the New Street train) and it is a fuck off great railway viaduct which has sat there since the 1840s and never carried a train. It's the viaduct with the greenery on the right side of the drone picture which heads this post.

Don't you think it's wild that it's just sat there for 180 years? It's never even reached as far as Duddeston which gives it its name because it ends quite abruptly in Digbeth, the point it had got to when the two rail companies came to an arrangement which obviated the need for it. Apparently it isn't unusual for this to happen because of the sheer speed at which competing concerns got involved in railways. I have read that there are some similar relics in New York, but I don't know whether that means the city or the state.

I keep reading that the viaduct has got planning permission to be turned into a sort of elevated park, which is about as sexy an outcome as you could want.

In fact it's not the only completely unused thing in Birmingham. I have tried repeatedly and failed to find pictures of it (they are alleged to exist) but the original planning for the Centre City building on Smallbrook Queensway dictated that in addition to offices it had to have a theatre. Now if you know the area you will know that it's within a stones throw of three other theatres and then three cinemas so what they were thinking I can't tell you. The result was that nobody would take it on and the theatre was never used from the building opening in 1975 to the council relenting in 1990. It's now used by the Probation Service.

Finally you may ask what kind of tinpot banana republic can have 45 government ministers resign (through self interest, not integrity, I should say) on the same day and not have a general election. And I would have to say, hold on because the new Education Minister gave the crowd the finger (What the Actual Fuck) so this isn't over. Personally I want this to go so badly we never have another Tory government in my lifetime and we get to see Johnson taken out of Downing Street by the army.

Meanwhile KFC in Westminster is the official restaurant of this blog: