Birmingham Moor Street

Almost old, almost new

One wet Friday recently I found myself with a few minutes on my hands in the middle of Birmingham and I decided to peer inside Moor Street station. Its gabled brick structure is a standard design of the old GWR, created by their Superintendent Engineer W Y Armstrong in 1911–1914 as a kind of detached annexe to the nearby Snow Hill station, and acted as a terminus for trains from Warwickshire. It was good to see that the old building had been restored in 2002–3, and was still looking well cared for with its GWR brown paint, historically aware signage, and modern buffet facilities that don’t dominate the concourse too much.

Nowadays trains go from some more recent platforms to one side of the original station, from where they still make for Warwickshire destinations such as Stratford upon Avon, as well as London. Steam-hauled excursions depart on summer Sundays and a locomotive stands at one of the old platforms as a reminder.

This view of the station looks across the original platforms towards a building of our own era – Future Systems’ dramatic, blob-like, aluminium-disc-covered, Selfridge’s. This building is now well enough known to be no longer shocking. It’s such a familiar symbol of the rejuvenated centre of Birmingham, indeed, that the overused word ‘iconic’ has been applied to it a few times too often. It’s still a surprise to come across in this context, though, and as odd as the contrast between the steam locomotive standing insouciantly at the platform and the modern, advertisement-emblazoned omnibus beyond. The almost-shock of the nearly-new.

Moor Street, London

Soho has always been a small world apart from the West End. Home to successive generations of outsiders – Huguenots, Italians, Chinese – its small houses and shops contrasted with the luxuries of Piccadilly and the commercial go-getting of Oxford Street, the thoroughfares that mark the boundaries of Soho to the west and north. In the 20th century the area was known for a heady mix of film companies and restaurants (some patronized by West End theatre people and bohemians from nearby Fitzrovia), plus London’s dark side – brothels, lap-dancing clubs, gambling dens, protectioneers, drug-dealers.

There’s not so much of the old Soho left now. There’s the odd Greek restaurant, all formica and cheapo ouzo, the occasional old-fashioned barber, a sex shop or two. There are also the cherished and precarious survivors – Maison Bertaux with its pastries and rickety stairs, the bohemian Colony Club in a building that seems so fragile it might be held up by the thick green paint on the walls. Mostly, though, the lights are brighter and the businesses less seamy or steamy than they were.

One area where the dodgy Soho clung on was the bit known to the police as the Moor Street Triangle, bounded by Old Compton Street, Charing Cross Road, and Moor Street itself. Fronted by restaurants, a hairdresser’s, a taxi office, and defined at its corners by a diner, a pub, and a bookshop, this enclave also sheltered drug-dealing, a lap-dancing club, and the kind of rooms you hired by the hour. The properties in the triangle had been unofficially converted and adapted – extra ceiling height for the lap dancing, lower ceilings for the more horizontal activities above, lean-tos in the courtyard to provide extra kitchen space for the restaurants, interconnecting corridors allowing those in the know to enter from Moor Street and exit via Old Compton.

The triangle is being redeveloped now. Gone are the jerry-built additions; gone the low-ceilinged bedrooms; gone the tawdry shop fronts. Out have come the detritus of sex slavery and cheap restaurant food, together with the desiccated python, star of an exotic dancing act, that escaped and lurked in the yard, living off kitchen scraps. The Soho-Georgian parts of the facades are preserved or replaced with finishes that are in keeping with what’s already there, and the corner buildings – diner, bookshop, and pub – remain as they were. It’s a neat scheme, which looks as if it will resist the temptation to sanitize completely this knockabout corner of London. But no doubt the shady businesses that once traded here have set up shop elsewhere.