Guided excursions of Britain’s Spaghetti Junction so common they’ve offered out

Over the weekend, tourists packed in for an eye-opening guided tour beneath the famous Spaghetti Junction.

It’s been such a hit that tickets for the next two months are already sold out. Throngs of sightseers are rushing to snatch up spots to uncover what’s under the UK’s busiest motorway junction, known as the most unlikely tourist hot spot.

Priced at just £13.50 per person, these tours dish out the dirt on the mysterious underworld beneath the criss-cross chaos of roads looping over Birmingham.

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Just yesterday (Sun), a group of a dozen curious explorers delved into the unseen depths of the Gravelly Hill Interchange.

The hour and forty-five-minute adventure had them discovering hidden canals, riversides, parkland, a serene lake, towpaths buzzing with wildlife and captivating street art.

Included in the crew was William James, a 27 year old physiotherapist, brand spanking new to Brum and keen on learning about his fresh digs.

William gushed: “I actually really like how it looks. It’s quite strange and dystopian. Everyone has seen it from above but I’ve never been beneath it before.

“The tour stood out to me because I find things commonly thought of as being undesirable or ugly innately interesting.

“I’m aware there’s distaste towards things like Spaghetti Junction and it not being something to be proud of in Britain.

“But stuff like this a crucial part of our history.

“I just wanted to take the opportunity to do it and be informed by somebody who is passionate about it as well.

“It’s been really good. I now like Spaghetti Junction even more than I thought I did.

“To learn about its history and relevance and how is still has a vital role in modern society and how important it is to Birmingham was really interesting.

“And how also so many people were displaced when it was built, I don’t think many people consider that, but it gives context to the monument that is the motorway.”

The M6 interchange, a maze of roads, is one of the largest motorway junctions in Europe, with over 200,000 vehicles traversing it daily.

This 52 year old concrete structure even holds a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as “the most complex interchange on the British road system’.

According to Explore Birmingham, the organisers, all four tours have been fully booked to their capacity of 12 and tickets for the next two months are already sold out.

Tour guide Al Hassall, 49, said: “It’s just unique to Birmingham, you don’t really get places that look like that here. I believe the popularity is down to it being a lot more interesting historically than people think.

“Everyone knows it. It’s synonymous with Birmingham for not so great reasons.

It was a hugely impressive feat of engineering in the first place. But most people don’t realise it’s got a complex water system below it.

It’s got a lot of history. There was a whole community and shops that were lost.

“For me, I live nearby, but had never actually been under it. I only went underneath it 18 months ago and it’s not as loud as you think.”

Spaghetti Junction was opened in 1972 and took some four years to complete at a cost of £10 million.

It has 559 concrete columns – some reaching 80 feet high – is reinforced by 13,000 tonnes of steel and covers an area of 30 acres.

If you wanted to drive along every road at Gravelly Hill Interchange, you would need to travel about 73 miles and it also serves 18 different routes.

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