Memories of Spaghetti Junction's lost pub - the site today has a much more mundane use
For a few days only, one of the more unlikely tourism destinations in the Midlands has been Spaghetti Junction.
And if you are a tourist sampling the delights of the Gravelly Hill interchange on the M6, as the traffic roars above your head – or stutters, if there is a jam – you're going to want to take a break for a refreshing drink, aren't you?
Folk who paid to go on the organised tours as part of Birmingham Heritage Week have wandered among the supporting columns and along the canals which lie beneath the elevated carriageways, admiring, if that is the right word, the landscape and the wildlife which has moved in to this man-made environment.
But in 1972, the year of the opening of Spaghetti Junction, they would also have been able to pop into a temporary pub created in its shadow. If you don't believe there was one, this photo from our archives proves you wrong.
It dates from January 1972, so a few months before the interchange, a complex whirl of roads by the then new Aston Expressway, Gravelly Hill and Tyburn Road, was opened – that came on May 24 that year.
It was an M&B pub occupying a portable building and, although it's a bit difficult to make out the pub sign, we think it was called the Erdington Arms. It stood on the corner of Powick Road and Slade Road. Sorry, you've missed last orders, because the site is now a filling station.
Presumably it was erected to ensure the regulars at the traditional Erdington Arms pub which was demolished as part of the creation of the interchange still had somewhere to go. Among other properties demolished to make way for the road scheme were a factory, a bank, 160 houses, and a block of flats.
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