Spaghetti Junction and
Last week marked the 50th anniversary of Birmingham’s Spaghetti Junction. Like it or loathe it, IAN FRANCIS looks at how the landmark has seeped into popular culture - and it all started with Cliff Richard
ITRY drawing it, just to get my head around it. It’s a dizzying tangle no doubt, but the nickname seems unfair. This is carefullywoven Tarmac, a labyrinth of lanes, an elegant puzzle.
Perhaps an over-complicated solution to a relatively simple problem, the function of this junction has receded into the background as its cultural capital has grown. It’s now a logo, a totem, a punchline.
But if Spaghetti Junction was the answer, what was the question? And how has its role changed over time?
The PR around the launch in
May, 1972, presented the Gravelly Hill Interchange as the “missing link”, a motorway hub that would open up 1,000 miles of new roads.
And sure enough, its completion removed the last impediment to a frictionless six-and-a-halfhour drive between Glasgow and London, with not one roundabout or traffic light encountered en route.
The junction itself was not really a “motorway hub”, though – it connected the M6 with Birmingham city centre via the Aston Expressway, along with a bunch of other smaller trunk roads.
Its real function seemed to be symbolic. Welcome to Birmingham, Motor City.
For locals, the new structure provoked awe, annoyance and anxiety. A good deal of the coverage in the run-up related to worries about getting lost or stuck.
The Birmingham Evening Mail printed a four-page pull-out guide. Policemen appeared on the news making reassuring noises. Some Pathé news footage from 1971 shows the interchange almost complete, intertwining ribbons of virgin road captured from a helicopter.
We see a solitary Rolls Royce driver living the dream; reversing up slip-roads, pulling U-turns, going the wrong way down the M6.
Already it feels like a foretaste of life after the apocalypse, when this crumbling concrete behemoth will stand deserted as a monument to a mysterious past. Someone I know who grew up in that time remembers it being described in their house as “a Cathedral to the Great God Car”.
Spaghetti Junction’s big-screen debut was in Cliff Richard’s ill-fated Take Me High (1973).
Although unimpressed by his first encounter with the Aston Expressway – “Just as bad as I expected, even worse” – merchant banker Cliff is swiftly won over by the city’s blend of earthy charm and rampant brutalism. Later we see him beneath Spaghetti, bombing along the Grand Union Canal in his mini-hovercraft like a provincial James Bond.
The film’s title makes very little sense until you see the cover of the soundtrack LP, with Cliff’s head framed by a lattice-work of soaring flyovers. He seems to be inviting us to join him for the rollercoaster ride of our lives.
By this point the junction’s cheerleaders were getting drowned out by the doubters, as it became a lightning rod for concerns about car culture.
Gravelly Hill residents talked about lining their bedrooms with mattresses to muffle the constant hum of the motorway and litter raining down into their gardens from passing cars overhead.
A scientific study began to investigate the levels of lead in the blood of local children.
Speaking in Parliament in November, 1972, Erdington MP Julius Silverman railed against the “intolerable noise, fumes and dirt” which the development had brought.
“As an engineering construction it is superb. As a work of art it is one of the greatest monstrosities which any Government has inflicted upon any section of this country.”
A few months later, the city’s Labour leader Stanley Yapp admitted: “If we had known what we know now, I am certain we would not now have Spaghetti Junction in its present form.”
Just before Take Me High’s release, the oil crisis hit in late 1973. As petrol tripled in price over the next year, and UK car manufacturing entered a steep decline, the assumptions underlying Birmingham’s motor city strategy began to look decidedly shaky.
Other cities, including Leeds and Glasgow, called an abrupt halt to their grand ring road plans.
Where once the local media had been full of civic boosterism and stats – 500 pillars, three miles of slip roads, 175,000 cubic yards of concrete – road stories now tended to involve pollution, congestion, corruption or decay.
It had become clear that corners were cut in the building of both Spaghetti Junction and the ring road, and maintenance costs, were mushrooming.
A one-off BBC drama for Play for Today and later a series in its own right, Gangsters (1975) catches the swagger and seediness of mid-70s Birmingham. The idea was to create a Midlands spin on The French Connection.
During a slightly absurd car chase at the end, raised sections of the Inner Ring stand in for New York’s elevated railways as our flawed heroes Kline and Khan pursue underworld kingpin Rawlinson to a showdown at Gravelly Hill.
Traffic streams by in the background while Kline and Rawlinson tussle amongst the pillars, a baroque, lingering fight scene which calls to mind the wrestling in Women In Love – albeit in a canal under a flyo
Spaghetti Junction is established as a place where gangsters go to die, echoing urban myths about bodies that found their way into concrete struts.
ver, rather than on a rug by the fire.
Spaghetti Junction is established as a place where gangsters go to die, echoing persistent urban myths about the bodies that found their way into concrete struts during construction.
By the 1980s Spaghetti Junction had been domesticated by a steady trickle of Jasper Carrott routines and sitcom gags, familiarity breeding contempt and a good deal of affection – even amongst those who lived right next to it.
After years as a backdrop in thrillers and news reports, it took centre stage in forgotten youth drama Knights And Emeralds (1986), the road system more compelling and three-dimensional than the people in its shadow.
The story concerns two marching bands, one white and one black, and the two star-crossed lovers who play drums for each group. In his Gravelly Hill terrace Kevin hears the siren call of Melissa’s bongos from a nearby tower-block and decides to cross the tracks.
The inevitable climactic competition takes place at the West Bromwich Albion ground, where Kevin and Melissa and co take on a suspicious white crowd and win them over through music and dance.
The script is awful, the performances are all over the place and the racial politics are clumsy at best, but Knights and Emeralds has a weird kind of energy and it feels genuinely rooted.
We get a rare sense of Birmingham being comfortable in its own skin, embracing the beauty in its own ugliness, and the film’s love-hate relationship with its setting is summed up towards the end. “It’s like a dungeon down here,” says our hero. “It’s Aladdin’s cave, Kevin,” responds his mate Aubrey.
Spaghetti Junction’s status – iconic, but in need of rehabilitation – was confirmed in 1990 when the BBC’s Late Show invited five architects to dream up alternative ideas for it.
The results ran the gamut from the corporate to the avant-garde, from 16-storey clusters of offices and housing to a canalside service-station-cum-nightclub.
Environmental architects Higson and Pearson proposed a rainforest of redwoods with rope bridges strung between the pillars and above them the Birmingham Gate, “a 200 metre-high latticed tripod which could be lit by lasers at night.”
The most classical solution came from Robert Adam, who also emphasised the junction as a city gateway with three monolithic towers linked by suspension bridges. The experience for drivers would be “thrilling, like flying through in a helicopter”.
None of this actually happened, but a couple of years later the artist collective Fine Rats performed their own reimagining of the territory beneath the interchange.
Over the course of one weekend hundreds of people experienced a series of site-specific spectacles on a suitably grand scale, from ghostly projections to an underground hair salon and “an aisle of dildos urinating fluorescent pee”, culminating in a bingo finale where greenhouses smashed to the ground from a crane.
On the eve of Spaghetti’s 40th birthday in 2012, Fierce Festival mounted a sequel of sorts to the Fine Rats happening when they invited artist Graeme Miller to lay down Track, his “moveable participatory installation”.
One hundred metres of rails ran beneath the M6 and parallel with the Tame, a team of T-shirted volunteers slowly pulling camera dollies bearing horizontal audience members.
Despite the rattle and roar overhead I remember a feeling of submission and peace as I lay down to be tugged along through the edgelands, trees and sky giving way to a soaring concrete ceiling.
Aside from ongoing concerns abou its longevity and its environmenta impact, Birmingham is much more bullish about Spaghetti Junction these days.
Along with the late Central Library and the now-dormant New Street signal box, it has become a popular subject for art prints.
Steven Knight, the city’s unofficia global spokesperson, sung its praises after making it look moody and magnificent in the opening sequence o his film Locke (2013).
“Spaghetti Junction is the mos beautiful thing you’ve ever seen a night... I would love an artist to come along and to do an installation and make a work of art of it.”
Fifty years ago MP Julius Silverman also described it as a work of art, bu in far more damning terms.
The Gravelly Hill Interchange is the product of a particular moment, and having witnessed the loss of so many brutalist landmarks Birmingham is perhaps beginning to appreciate it as a rare asset.