- Don't bother trying to find Spaghetti Junction on a road map - you won't find it. It's a nickname. The actual name is Gravelly Hill Interchange, or junction 6 of the M6.
- Roy Smith, a journalist from the Birmingham Evening Mail, is credited with coming up with the nickname in the 1970s. The name stuck, and even appears in the dictionary, if not on a road map.
- Construction started in 1968 and took four years to complete.
- The Junction covers 30 acres (121,406 m2). Or thirty Football pitches. It has five levels; 559 concrete columns, the tallest of which are 80 feet high; 13,000 tonnes of steel reinforcement; and 134,000 m3 (175,000 cubic yards) of concrete. It has two and a half miles of slip-roads, and even its own weather station.
- It cost £10 million at the time of its construction, and today costs about £7 million a year to maintain.
- During maintenance, blocks of concrete are cut out using jets of water rather than with physical tools. There is less vibration with this method and so less chance of damage to other sections.
- About 210,000 cars use the junction every day.
- Underneath the junction, the pillars had to be carefully placed so that horse drawn narrowboats could pass on the canal below. There's even a pile of dirt which has been nicknamed "the Beach" because it is within view of the canal.
- Birmingham City University Student Union has named their official magazine after it, and in 1998 Birmingham Cathedral had a set of vestments designed which included Spaghetti Junction as seen from the air.
- Several other countries in the world now have interchanges which are referred to as "Spaghetti Junction" including Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA.
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