The Skyscraper Condemnation Affiliates

There's only one place to go from Hooton station.

That's not true; there's a Network Rail depot, and a furniture shop, and an engineering works.  And there's the village of Hooton itself, a mile or so away, straddling the New Chester Road.  For the purposes of this blog, however, there's only one place to go, and that's the former railway line turned country park.

I descended the ramps down to the foot of the road bridge where the park begins.  For decades this was a track bed, heading along the coast of the Wirral, but the villages it passed through en route were either too small or too far from the station to justify keeping it open.  

Now it's a linear park stretching along the side of the Wirral, a long strip of path surrounded by trees, great for walkers and cyclists and horses.  I've been along it many times over the years, in different moods, in different weathers.  Today it was cold and wet.  January at its finest.  The skies never turned any colour other than gunmetal and the atmosphere clung to me, damp, perhaps rain, perhaps mist, perhaps something in between.

The section alongside the station pushes the railway theming, with fake-historic signage and a bench made out of a gantry.  You can see the tracks through the fence, bright yellow Merseyrail trains trundling past every few minutes, a shaft of brightness out of nowhere.  Then the path turns and I'm moving away from the railway tracks and into quieter, more distant territory.

It wasn't yet eleven am and so I was mainly accompanied by songbirds.  Robins and sparrows dropped onto the path ahead of me, holding their nerve for a while as I approached before flapping onto a high branch.  It felt good to be out and about, breaking out of the claustrophobia of Christmas and New Year.  I'm a total homebody during the festive period; I close the door on December 23rd and try not to leave the house until at least January 2nd.  I'm hibernating with too much food and drink and tv and it's the one time of the year I'm not judged for it.

Still, it was good to feel that fresh air, to hear nothing but nature, to be adrift.  The chill of the icy rain woke me up.  A man approached with his dog, a friendly black lab that leapt towards me excitedly until being called back, and then I was alone again.

At this time of year the Wirral Way is not exactly scenic.  Nowhere is.  One problem with living in the UK is that while we get the cold and the rain and the dying off of nature during winter, we don't get that lovely white snow to cover it up and make it look pretty.  Instead all we have is varying shades of brown; brown trees, brown leaves, brown mud.  Nothing is ever healthy looking,  Everywhere is grimy.  No wonder we lose our minds when we spot a snowdrop.

Coming towards me was a young woman, gripping her wrist, power walking and monitoring her vital signs and steps the whole time.  She was wearing tight black lycra and her long hair was pulled back in the tightest of pony tails; any more of a yank and she'd have passed for a Scouse girl looking for a fight.  Her general physique and absolute devotion to the stats on her wrist showed that she wasn't one of these New Year's Resolution nobodies, trying to burn off the Christmas ham with a bit of half-hearted jogging; no, she knew what she was doing.  She pushed on the path, right down the centre, and I stepped aside to let her pass, sucking in my beer so I didn't disgust her too much.

This was where it got very lonely indeed; I didn't see another person for a long time.  I was fine with it though.  It was time with me and without obligation.  I was walking around noticing things, paying attention to my surroundings.  I wasn't trying to get somewhere.  The Wirral Way never feels entirely isolated anyway.  Perhaps its the single route, the lack of side quests, the straight down the middle purity of it.  It is, and feels, man-made, like it could be taken back into use at any time.

It never will be, of course.  Firstly because we don't build railways in this country, not unless you've had fifty years of begging and pleading and don't inconvenience anyone and also can get London involved somewhere.  Secondly, even though the places along the route are larger and more populous than they were when the line closed, it's still not enough to make it worthwhile as a rail line.  Heswall is the largest town on the Wirral without a Merseyrail connection, but the Hooton-West Kirby line runs by the river, far from the busy centre.  The residents of Heswall would also never countenance something as common as a train in their town, especially one that went to Liverpool; the Borderlands Line station out on the edge is bad enough, and nobody uses it because they all have 4x4s that need ramming down country lanes.  The problem with public transport is the public tend to use it.

The will-they-won't-they rain gauge shifted to "will" with a heavy shower that actually made me zip up my coat.  For some reason, I never do my coat up, ever, unless I can't argue otherwise.  It's a psychological block with me.  This time I did it and immediately felt claustrophobic; I even tried the hood but that was too awful to tolerate.  How do people manage hoods?  Flapping around your ears, falling over your eyes, being irritating on every level.  I'd rather get wet to be honest.

Hadlow Road is a preserved station on the Wirral Way; a fancy plaque on the wall says they've tried to keep it as if it was 1952 (Only travellers and staff are missing, it says, like it's an M R James).  It's been beautifully done and there were plaques all over the walls congratulating the volunteers on their service.

The coffee shop was takeaway only on a Tuesday, but I was surprised to see that the preserved booking hall was open.  You assume this sort of thing will be locked away unless there's a stern looking volunteer breathing down your neck but I was able to wander in and have a poke around.

The station master's office included a stuffed cat on a chair and a Christmas stocking persisting with festivities into mid-January.  It was interesting to peer through the glass at the display, preserved as if the ticket man had nipped out for a moment.

Had to be done.

What was Bovril's advertising budget like in the old days?  You can't go to a single preserved railway or living history museum without seeing a big tin sign for beef extract on the wall.  It's even more weird when you consider that you don't see ads for it at all these days, not even when there was that craze for "bone broth" (i.e. Bovril) a few years back.  Mind you, you don't get adverts for anything real any more, only betting sites and insurance and maybe the odd car.  There was a time when you'd get commercials for biscuits and shirts and Hamlets, stuff you could actually buy, not a website with a quirky name to get to the top of the SEO rankings.  And those ads would have a jingle you could hum, and the stuff would be about fifty pee, and you'd have enough money left to get a tram home.  Oh no, this blog is turning into a Facebook group.

It was easy to be nostalgic because I was in Willaston now, which is a nostalgic place.  (The station was called Hadlow Road, by the way, because there was another Willaston station in Cheshire already, halfway between Crewe and Nantwich).  It is a stout little English village that has everything Americans love to coo over.

A village green with a giant tree stood at its centre, surrounded by Tudor-esque homes.  There were shops - a hairdresser, a cafe, a Spar - and other little businesses too: a garage, a dog grooming parlour, a physiotherapist.  There was a school and a surgery.  It was a lively, attractive place, with a noticeboard covered in community notices - litter picks, exercise classes, even an e-mail to contact if you were new to the village and wanted a welcome pack.

I wandered down the street for a while, past the shops and avoiding being splashed by the cars.  There was a lot of traffic, but at the same time, I doubt any of them would have traded them for a train from Hadlow Road; this didn't seem like that kind of place.  At the end of the road I could see an arresting sight, and I had to get closer to see what it actually was, instead of what I thought it was.

That is a tooth outside the village dental surgery.  But to me, it looked like a halter top filled with some saggy boobs.  I can't unsee it.  They really should've turned the sign the other way up, so the roots of the tooth pointed down.

I'm surprised someone didn't make them do just that, because as I wandered around, I began to notice the signs everywhere.  The small, politely hectoring signs from this committee or that, from one volunteer group or another.  It began to paint a picture of a clique at the centre of Willaston, the higher ups, who pushed Britain in Bloom and Cheshire's Best Kept Village.  I imagined them knocking on my door in September - "we've noticed you don't have a scarecrow on your front wall as part of the village's autumn festival; justify yourself."  I ducked past the allotments, and the playground, and the sports field, all of which were extremely well-kept and neat, with a vague feeling that I was being watched to make sure I didn't scuff up the pavement with my dirty shoes.

Past the tennis courts was a small pond, surrounded by a fence and with a noticeboard informing me who the maintenance committee were and telling me that the bridge was called "Founder's Bridge" as a tribute to the original caretakers of the pond.  By the time I saw a laminated sign saying there had been an increased incidence of dog fouling in the area and here was a phone number to call and grass people up I started suspecting that Willaston was trapped under the yoke of an elderly Stasi and that a revolution was needed.

I waled past the surprisingly ugly village church, a big red block without much to recommend it, and onto the high street again.  The rain had let up to permit pedestrians to linger again, and a group of women chatted across the way while their dogs sniffed at one another.  There was a red phone box, of course, though the phone was long gone and it didn't serve any purpose at all now, other than a canvas for the art of local teens; apparently "J*** S**** woz ere PS me brothers eyes touch" and I'm going to skip past the lack of an apostrophe and bring you the drawing which did actually make me let out a snort:

The bus shelter had been done up to commemorate its ninetieth birthday (1935-2025) with a clock and the words OMNIBUS SHELTER picked out along the top.  Was that historically accurate, I wondered?  Were people still writing "omnibus" on signs in 1935?  Or was it another bit of twee nostalgia for nostalgia's sake?

I was back at the village green.  The village's sole remaining pub, The Nags Head, wasn't yet open, but the smell of chip fat in the air said they were readying themselves for lunchtime.  Homes for pensioners were grouped here and, while it would be lovely to live in a village like this, I wondered if it was not a little isolated when you're old?  Once you'd visited all the shops what was there to do?  I suppose you could get an omnibus to the station, but the service wasn't exactly frequent.

I was walking out of Willaston now, back towards the station, on a road lined with old houses set back from the road and smaller infill semis built on their land in the Sixties and Seventies.  Cul-de-sacs had been squeezed in here and there.

I passed a motorhome specialist, and was shocked to see VW camper vans starting at £49,995.  Fifty grand to live like Scooby-Doo!  You wouldn't dare drive that to a remote beauty spot in case it got nicked.  Admittedly, they do seem to have all mod-cons - fridges and cookers and, I don't know, stained-glass roofs and hot tubs - but still.  Go and stay in a hotel where it's comfy and save yourself the money.

It was a largely uninspiring walk back to Hooton station, along a narrow pavement between bare hedgerows.  The real excitement was how much had changed by the station itself.  For years it was surrounded by a conglomeration of industrial units and workshops; the residential parts were a mile away in either direction.

That was changing, though, and a new development of houses had sprung up alongside the tracks, meaning that some people would actually be walking to the station for their commute for what must have been the first time in decades.  This site had actually been an armaments factory during the war, giving the main road into the development a strange name:

Roften comes from Royal Ordnance Factory Ten, the name of the wartime works: other streets are named Sentry Grove and Vickers Crescent.  Round the corner, the former Hooton Hotel - where I had occasionally waited for the BF to pick me up after work when the trains between Chester and Birkenhead were particularly nightmarish - has also been demolished in favour of some neat town houses.

I couldn't see a road sign for that development though, so I'm hoping the streets are named after the Hooton Hotel's legacy, with Sticky Carpets Lane and Disappointing Meal Grove.  I carried on round the corner, past the surprisingly full car park (£1.50 a day!) and back to the station.  It'd been a long time since I'd been to Hooton but I was pleased to explore it again.  It was familiar but different.  I hope the future stations have enough to keep me interested.

This entire trip was paid for out of donations to my Ko-fi.  Thank you for your generosity!