Class

When I disembarked at Blundellsands & Crosby, there was a girl ahead of me.  She was about seventeen or eighteen, wearing a loose thin shirt over a crop top and tiny white shorts.  In the crook of her right arm was a cooler.  She peered into the window of the waiting room and then, when she couldn't see whoever she was meeting, she pulled out her phone and began hastily tapping.

I guessed that she was on study leave from her A-levels and was using the opportunity to go to the beach with her mates.  I didn't blame her.  It was an incredibly beautiful day.  The blue sky seemed to reach up and over us, a huge dome of bright.  

Blundellsands Road West, the route to the beach, is a parade of elegant Victorian mansions and classy villas set behind long gardens.  Some of them have been converted to flats, but a lot haven't; large cars with personalised number plates park on block paved driveways.  In between them are prep schools and junior schools and kindergartens.  It meant that I heard, in the mid morning air, nothing but the joyous sound of children playing.  

The road ended in a merger between land and nature, a no man's land where the grass and the sand butted right up against the tarmac.  There was a sign indicating where the nearest toilets were in both directions, and then, a little way behind it, a memorial bench for someone I never met but none the less mourned.

Seb Patrick was a writer and podcaster who grew up on Merseyside, moved down to London for work, then returned in his thirties with his wife and daughter so that he could give them a better standard of living.  I knew him through his podcast, Cinematic Universe, and we followed each other on Twitter.  It was a social media relationship, where we would interact, swap jokes, but didn't actually know anything about one another.  I found him funny and interesting and the updates on his readjustment to living in Liverpool were charming.

Seb died suddenly in 2020.  He was 37.  All deaths are tragic, of course, but there was a real loss to this one.  He was too young, had too many responsibilities, had too much going on in his life.  

Social media is a strange phenomenon.  Every day I get small moments from people's lives sent to my phone.  Every day I quietly build up a picture of a person, a figure behind an avatar, a real human being with a cat and a house and a job.  I don't know them.  In many cases I don't even know their real name.  But I've been getting these little nuggets of their existence in my world for years now.  I've never met them but they are in some ways more real to me than actual relatives.  I have cousins I've not seen for thirty years and have no idea what they're doing now, while there are people I've never met at the other end of the country where I could probably write their autobiography for them.

Are these people friends?  No, not really.  But they do become a valuable marker in your life.  Humans are social animals and that social interaction can come from a million different ways.  It's why I get annoyed when people talk about the "importance" of social media, of Twitter and Bluesky as agents of change and political forces.  Yes that happens, but also, some people are watching a television programme and laughing and want to share it.  That's properly important to me.

The path rose up, slowly, over a ridge of dunes, as though it's holding off the view until the very last moment.  Then you see the long expanse of wide sandy beach and rolling tides and in amongst them, the Iron Men.

Another Place by Anthony Gormley is 100 iron men, based on his own body, and scattered across the beach staring out to sea.  The tide washes over them, deposits barnacles and sand on them, and they remain impassive throughout.  It was originally a travelling artwork, with Crosby Beach the third place to host it, but Merseyside fell in love with it.  After a good deal of campaigning - and despite resistance from the council - it became a permanent part of the landscape in 2007.  

It still unnerves you, to see them staring out to sea, but there's also something hopeful and pleasing about them.  Certainly the beach users that day were enjoying playing around them.  Small children ran up and stared at them while dogs danced around them.  It's a massive draw for the area and really, the best kind of public art; wanted, loved, cherished.

I followed the promenade south, taking in the view.  Crosby Beach has a strange mix of idyll and practicality.  The sands are long and glowing, but behind them are wind turbines, and oil tankers, and the red cranes of the Liverpool docks are constantly in sight.  It's a holiday but there's a reminder of work at all times.  It's probably done them a favour.  Anywhere else in the country and this stretch of uninterrupted sands would be a major destination.  Instead it's a secret Scousers keep to themselves.

Sand had swamped the path at some points, a bone of contention between the locals and the council.  They argue that the sand stops access to the promenade, which is true, but the council is forced to point at the sea and say "you know how this works, right?"  Sefton Borough Council is not King Cnut, and it can't stop the waves.  The beach wants to join the dunes behind it and it's not going to let a strip of paving get in the way.

The path opened up to real the frankly gob-smacking form of Crosby Leisure Centre.  It's a scifi vehicle that somehow arrived in suburban Liverpool; you expect a woman with a suspiciously large beehive hairdo to come sashaying out.  The architects claimed that the roof is to allow the sands to blow over the top without impediment.  I believe this is architect speak for "it looks really cool".

I followed the path round the edge, able to see inside to the swimming pool where people larked about in the water.  Sadly the building is not a full flying saucer.  Only the front half has the amazing sloped roof; at the back it's a brick block, tucked away from the sea where you can't spot it.  Still, what a front that is.

I walked onto Bridge Road, a strip between the railway and the beach that was showing signs of being gentrified.  It had a mix of industrial units and shops, garages and cafes.  The micropub was alongside an electrical wholesaler; the cash-only Chinese takeaway with the racially suspect cartoon in the window was over the road from a cafe offering breakfast-lunch-gelato.  

A roadsign welcomed me to Brighton-le-Sands; I choose to believe they added "le-Sands" as a deliberate two fingers to the more famous Brighton's pebbly beach.  (It never fails to astonish me that Brighton's nudist beach is shingle.  You must be pulling stones out of crevices for days).  Squat office blocks were headquarters to engineering firms and vaguely maritime industries.  At some point people are going to spot that you can get a three bed semi a two minute walk from the sea for under £300,000 and suddenly the cash and carry will be a nightclub and the chippy will become a coffee shop but until then it's a nice mix of people.

I turned inland, past a row of neat new houses built with electric chargers and double driveways, and a missing cat poster ("Diddy").  I was approaching the railway line, and a cynical part of me thought that a missing cat within one street of an electrified rail probably isn't coming back.  I hope I'm wrong.

The other side of the line counts as Crosby, if not technically than certainly in the minds of the residents, and as such it has no need to be gentrified; it was always like that.  

Now we were in a world of elevated chicken shops with expensive burgers, of restaurants designed to be featured on the 'Gram, of "CAMRA Pub of the Year 2025".  Women in snatched outfits pushed babies in designer onesies.  Salons offered "natural facial rejuvenation".  And then, in the middle of it, a football ground.

Marine AFC play in the Northern League North, which, as far as I can work out, is the bit below what in my head is still the Vauxhall Conference.  I tried reading the Wikipedia page on it but my brain started closing down through sheer boredom.  They're below the proper football teams who play in the four divisions that I'm vaguely aware of, let's put it that way.   

They've played here since 1903, but that could all change quite soon: they announced plans for a new stadium in Thornton last year.  I'm not sure what's happening there, but Rossett Park will supposedly be retained as a "community resource".  A great ambition, if it happens; not to be too cynical but a large space in a sought-after residential area that's no longer being used for its primary purpose screams "flogged to a property developer for a huge profit".  Fair play to them either way.

I crossed the road with two yummy mummies to where a Carnegie Library occupied a triangular site.  The actual library closed in 2013, in the early days of austerity (ah, the memories of when we were told it was a bit of temporary belt-tightening) but because it's one of the marvellous gifts to the nation from Andrew Carnegie, it sat empty awaiting someone who could treat it with a bit of sympathy to restore it.

That new occupier is going to be Moose Coffee, the local breakfast chain that has people queuing around the block for their food.  I have a slight resentment towards Moose because their very first branch was round the corner from me in our village; however, that one rebranded as Home and Moose went on to become a Liverpool phenomenon.  It's a bit like seeing a really popular band in their early days.  I'm wandering around going "I was having Moose Coffee before they even opened a branch in Dale Street" but unsurprisingly it doesn't have the same cache as the Pistols at the Free Trade Hall.  

I darted across the road and into a small oblong of park.  It was thick with trees and dog walkers.  I paused for a moment and had a drink of water.  I realised how much I was enjoying myself.  This is going to out me as a terrible snob - well, this and everything I've ever written on this blog - but it was nice to be wandering around an area without worrying a drug dealer was going to leap out and accost me.  The run of Leasowe-Kirkby-Walton wasn't exactly showing the city region at its best.  Now I was in a nice area with nice shops and parks and it was nice.  

I followed Coronation Road into the centre of Great Crosby, another string of cafes and old-fashioned businesses that were somehow clinging on.  A carpet shop, a solicitors, a decorator's centre that ironically could've done with a lick of paint.

The centre of the village proper is a Y-shaped section of pedestrianisation.  Shops and bars line the pavement, tables spilling out for sunny days like today.  Even the Greggs had space outside for your al fresco steak bake.  A couple of new developments had inserted blocks of apartments into the centre, with more being constructed further down; a pleasing dose of densification where you'd expect the locals to fight against it.  

I wandered through its impeccably clean streets, wondering where to have my lunch.  I was tempted to go to Greggs and have one of its chicken sausage rolls in solidarity now that it's become a front in the culture wars (they only introduced them to get Muslims to shop there!!1!!1) but that felt a bit vulgar.  Besides I got distracted when I spotted a bookshop.

I need to stop buying books.  No, really, I do.  It's becoming a terrible, terrible burden.  I can't wander past a bookshop without getting the urge to run in and buy another novel I can add to the "unread" pile.  It's a total waste of money.  I walked round Pritchards, desperately trying to find something to buy, and at the same time, resisting every fibre in my body that said I should.  After a full circuit I was able to leave, empty handed, breathing heavily but relieved that I'd spent absolutely nothing.  (I have since bought two more books from other shops).

A walk back to the head of the pedestrian area, where there's a Sainsbury's, and I was able to spot a changing of the guard.  A phone box had been loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck and the workmen were preparing the way for a flatscreen advertising board - sorry, I mean a BT Street Hub, because you can technically still use them to make a telephone call, not that anyone ever will.  I'd never seen a phone box being carted off to the knacker's yard before and it gave me a momentary pang of sadness.  Then I tried to remember the last time I'd used one and I don't think it was this side of the millennium.  

I'd done a full circuit now and was still no closer to finding somewhere for lunch.  I mean, there were obviously a lot of options, but most of them fell between "too posh" or "too generic" (yes, there was a Costa).  Finally I realised where to go, where I should've gone right from the start.

My thanks to The George for giving me the lunch I needed.

This trip - and also the pint of beer - was funded by your contributions to my Ko-fi.  Thanks once again!

5. Blundellsands & Crosby

Opened: 24th July 1848 as Crosby.  Renamed Blundellsands for Crosby in 1865, then Blundellsands & Crosby in November that year.  

Line electrified: 1904

Number of platforms: Two, with a waiting room on each.

Points of interest:  Quite a few, actually.  On the northbound platform is a blue bench, built by a local schoolboy, and dedicated to Brian Boggild.  He was the ticket man at Crosby for many years but sadly died of Covid in 2020.  I'm guessing he was an Everton fan.

Running under the end of the platforms is a small pedestrian underpass to allow people to continue on their way without the need for a level crossing.  It connects Blundellsands Road East with Blundellsands Road West.

The subway has been decorated with a cheery mural of children playing to celebrate Sefton Council's fiftieth anniversary.  I'm not quite sure what the connection with this underpass is beyond it being in Sefton but it's nice anyway.

It certainly makes what could be a pretty dark space that little bit jollier.

On the southbound platform there's another piece of art in the form of a mosaic depicting local points of interest.

I can't seem to find any information about who created the artwork, or when.  If you know, please get in touch and I'll happily update this page.  (Remember when Merseytravel had an entire Art on the Network programme?  Ah, the good old days before austerity).  The mosaic could do with a little bit of care, though, because it's been protected by a clear plastic screen, presumably chosen over glass because it's less likely to be damaged.  Which would be fine except the plastic has turned yellow in the sun.

There's also a small coffee shop, The Green Kiosk, which serves reasonably priced beverages from a tiny shed right outside the station entrance.

Attractive Local Feature sign: Considering all the other points of interest, and its proximity to Crosby Beach, it's a surprise to find there isn't one.

Original blog post: 19th December 2007

What's changed since then?  I've aged considerably.

Proof of visit:

Let Me Count The Ways

Patchway looks a lot more modern than it actually is.  A station first opened in the 19th century, it has upgraded lifts and a footbridge, as though someone actually cares about it as a destination.  The reason for all this up to date tech is simple: electrification.  The Great Western Main Line got wired in the 2010s, meaning that the footbridge here had to be rebuilt higher up, and inadvertently making it a much nicer place to visit.  It's yet another argument for electric trains across the entire nation, which is why it isn't happening.  Making sense isn't a good enough reason I'm afraid.

The station's main claim to fame is that it serves the Rolls-Royce manufacturing complex, and they even have their own entrance from the platform.  Looking at the acres of vacant land I wondered if this was going to be another part of the Brabazon new town, but apparently not.  Rolls-Royce are still doing well here, producing aircraft components, and probably also some terrifying murder machines that we'd rather not think about.  

I left the station by the car park, where a group of men in their sixties were meeting up for a trip into town, manfully shaking hands and being polite to one another.  Absolutely no hugs here.  Station Road is a small, narrow country-esque lane which, judging by the speed of the drivers who passed me, is used as a rat run.  There's an estate the other side of the trees, but they're weirdly kept separate, in case they go mad and decide to use public transport.

At the end is Gypsy Patch Lane.  Is that okay?  I don't know if that's okay.  It's a wide road that forms part of a chain crossing the top of the city, lined with corporation homes set back behind gardens and front gates.  I followed an elderly man returning home; he absent-mindedly picked a piece of litter out of his hedge before going into his home.  

Across the way was a pub called Stokers which, unlike a lot of estate pubs, still seemed to be thriving.  A quick look at their Facebook page revealed the reason for this:

SCOTCH EGG FRIDAY.  I repeat: SCOTCH EGG FRIDAY.  What a concept.  While other pubs are branching out into gourmet eats or tapas, Stokers is slapping down eighty scotch eggs and doing a roaring trade.  That's what you want with your pint, not some padron peppers or a croqueta or two: an egg wrapped in meat with maybe a bit of pickle chucked in as well.  I'm writing this from nearly two hundred miles away, and I'm furious I'm not there.  Admittedly, I'd probably get my head kicked in - it doesn't look like the kind of pub that welcomes fat train station spotters - but so long as I got one of those cheese and cracked black pepper bites first I'd be happy.  

Stokers also had a bonus claim to fame in the car park.  Computer, zoom and enhance.

Waiting to feed the students later that day was the legendary Jason Donervan.  I felt quite starstruck seeing it across the road, like when I went to Sunderland and saw Amy's Winehouse.  Also Jason Donervan never sued anyone for saying it was gay so it's already one-up on the Aussie soap star.

I was quite happily wandering around, hoping that those clouds wouldn't get any darker or more rainy, when I saw a bus stop.  The problem was, this bus stop was so good, I actually told it to fuck off.  Out loud.  Look at it.

It would appear that Bristol has a network called metrobus (no caps needed, it's the future).  This is an actual Bus Rapid Transit network, with four express services running around the city.  

The bus stops themselves incorporate dispense the tickets, so you can buy before you board, plus seating and a next bus indicator.

Obviously buses are rubbish, in the main.  However, part of the reason they're rubbish is they're easy to get rid of - how many "this stop is not in use" signs have you noticed? - plus they're slow and get caught up in traffic.  If you give them their own dedicated lanes and busways and modern vehicles that are easy to use and understand, people will be all over them.  I was wildly impressed (although a bit of reading up has shown me that they're not necessarily all they should be; bus lane provision has been spotty, meaning the vehicles get caught up in the traffic with everything else).

It's not the only bit of Bristol's transport planning that surprised me.  While I was reading up on the stations I discovered that there are actual local government plans for an underground railway service.  

Obviously this is all heavily caveated.  They're talking about it being possibly a mix of over- and underground services, so it might be a tram network with a couple of tunnels rather than a full metro.  The proposal came from Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees, who's now in the House of Lords and his position has been abolished entirely (there's a Metro Mayor for the West of England instead).  Funding was allocated to look into the proposals, with a suggestion of four lines, each of which costs one billion pounds.  That sounds like far too low an amount to me (Line 4 of the Milan Metro, which opened in 2024, cost €1.7 billion) and the amount will be rising every moment there aren't spades in the ground.

None the less, I'm thrilled by the optimism.  This is exactly what the regional mayors should be doing.  Not monkeying around with the odd station or new bendy buses; big, transformative projects that will comprehensively change the city.  Even Andy Burnham - perhaps the most powerful city leader in the country - only tentatively talks about an underground system for Manchester, even though Manchester should've got one about, oooh, a hundred years ago.  The idea that there is a city in the United Kingdom actually pushing for modern, transformative public transport is thrilling, and gives me a little bit of hope for the future.  I look forward to riding on the Bristol Tube one day.  I'll probably be in an oxygen tent by then but that's not the point.

I turned off Gipsy Patch Lane - nope, still not okay - and onto a fast road running between parkland.  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I started to spot rooftops appearing behind the trees, as a housing estate quietly surrounded me.  Unlike the corporation works I'd been walking by before now, this was very private, a network of cul-de-sacs hidden away.  It turned its back on the main roads, showing them blank walls.  It didn't feel welcoming at all; it viewed strangers with suspicion.

I negotiated another roundabout, and paused in the Tesco Express for a bottle of Coke; the staff were loudly complaining about a fellow worker and his laziness, shouting across the aisles.  Beyond that was another pub, though this one was extemely closed.  They clearly hadn't got the memo about Scotch Egg Fridays.

The road sloped down and there was the entrance to what was, in its own way, one of the most significant railway stations in the UK.  

Motorways were springing up all over the UK in the 1960s and 70s.  While they had ordinary, boring official numbers, they also often acquired other names in planning, names designed to capture the imagination of the locals and distract them from the six lanes of viaduct crashing through their neighbourhoods.  Linguists looked to America, because in the 1970s everyone wanted Britain to me more like thrusting, exciting, everyone driving everywhere America, and they alit on the term "parkway" - a term for a fast road that is usually scenic and surrounded by trees.  It might be a lie - if you've ever got a cab from JFK into Manhattan you will have travelled along a series of Parkways, and it's about as scenic as the bottom of a wheelie bin - but it sounds nice, particularly to naive British people who didn't know much about these new roads and heard the word "park" and thought of ducks and lakes and grass.  As such, the M32 motorway, which goes from the M4 into the centre of the city, was dubbed the "Bristol Parkway" and then, a few years later, when a new station was opened quite close to junction one, it was also called "Bristol Parkway," to let people know that it was conveniently located for that great motorway.

Something strange then happened.  People forgot that the M32 was called the Bristol Parkway at all, and instead associated the name with the station.  They thought that Parkway meant there was a place to park, because the new station had, in fact, been built with a large car park to enable commuting.  In a rare example of 1970s British Rail actually capitalising on some good publicity, they started using Parkway as a generic term meaning "we've got a large car park you know".  Hence Liverpool South Parkway, Tiverton Parkway, Oxford Parkway, and a load of other stations across the UK that don't have a big motorway next door.  It's a strange story of the British public being told a word means one thing and deciding, comprehensively, that it absolutely doesn't.  I still think Parkway is an incredibly boring thing to stick on the end of a railway station name, and I object to it every time I see it, but that's not Bristol Parkway's fault.

The station has proved so popular it's been repeatedly expanded over the years, with the latest rebuild coming in 2001 and looking very turn of the millennium.  A metal roof and plenty of circulation space, though not many actual seats, plus the obligatory branch of Costa.  There were originally two platforms - there's now four - and the car park has been upgraded to a multi-storey, with a further satellite car park up the road.  It's a roaring success, so I shouldn't be sniffy about it, but I have to admit I'm not a fan.

It might be that it felt a bit tired.  Twenty-five years is usually about the length of time railway companies can go without doing any maintenance to a station - "it's still new!" - and the building and public areas all felt cluttered and in need of a good scrub.  It needed to be stripped back of all the extras that had arrived over the years and restored to its clean lines.

I went down to the platform, where I learned that Bristol Parkway is Home of UWE Bristol, and got on a train to Temple Meads.  There were still a couple of stations left in the city for me to visit, on the south side, but I didn't like the look of those clouds, and I didn't have a coat.  Plus I fancied a pint.  You're a great city Bristol.  I hope to revisit you very soon.