Southern Shores

The northern part of the Overhead Railway is now a path through derelict docks, grimy industrial plants and a sealed off Freeport.  The southern part couldn't be more different.  It's gentrification writ large.

When it was demolished, Canning station was between war-damaged docks and an area of waste ground that used to be the Customs House.  Today, it would stand beside the Liverpool One bus station, the police HQ and the Hilton Hotel.  That's quite a change in fortunes.  It'd have been a great place for an interchange (even better if Merseytram had passed through as well, grumble grumble) and a magnet for tourists.  Not sure if the Hilton's residents would have been so keen to stare out at a railway station, but that would be their problem.

There were cobbles under my feet as I crossed the entrance to the Albert Dock and followed the Salthouse Dock.  I wondered if these were originals, or if they were "heritage" additions to the street scene, something for the tourists.

A Japanese family looked confused at the corner of Liver Street.  They were looking at the iron statue of a horse, The Great Escape, in the process of finally being relocated after being moved away from Church Street a few years ago.  I wasn't sure what was befuddling them; the size of the statue, the representation, or its location.  They gathered around its base and stared up, like pilgrims; I half expected them to drop to their knees.

The Baltic Fleet was pumping out an incredibly noxious smell; no doubt a by-product of its brewing process.  I covered my nose and pressed on to Wapping.  The old goods yard is now a car park and industrial units; I made a mental note to investigate further on another day.  In the meantime I was distracted by the only remaining piece of the Overhead Railway still in place.

The cast iron pillars set into Wapping's dock wall are the remnants of the viaduct supports.  Their sheer bulk is impressive.  I can only imagine that they were afraid it they removed them here the wall would come away as well.  The posts rose a lot higher than that, obviously.  It's nice to know there's still a trace of the LOR in the city, like the memory of a kiss.

The bases are inscribed with the name of the foundry - Francis Morton & Co, Liverpool.  I idly wondered where you could get a huge lump of iron smelted on Merseyside these days.

Further south, the main road swings away, towards Toxteth, and the dock road becomes a smaller, less important highway.  There are old buildings still, on the left, being repurposed into industrial units and cafes and even recording studios, but on the right, it's dockside homes.  Brick blocks of waterside apartments, tall enough for you to not be able to see any water from the road, surrounded by neat grass verges.

At one point I passed a building which pretended to be a shopfitting centre, but which I actually think is a rehearsal space for serial killers:

The little cul-de-sacs to my right all had names like "The Anchorage" and "Navigation Wharf", which seemed utterly twee to me.  They were such generic names for somewhere with a bit of water close by - not Liverpool specific at all.  I ducked down one of them, ready to sneer at the low aspirational living, but I was genuinely pleased by what I found.  The homes round the marina will never win an architectural award; you could stick these same buildings out in suburban Heswall or Ormskirk without any changes being made.  But their position on the water made them more interesting, especially with a low sea fog rolling across the city in the distance.  The cars around me were Fords, Vauxhalls, Toyotas - good honest cars driven by middle class succeeders.  The homes here weren't special, but if you were a couple in your thirties, no kids, you had  city centre living with a bit of a view for a much lower price than in the West Tower.

There's a danger that people view Liverpool's regeneration successes only though its big projects.  Liverpool One's great, but the apartments at One Park West are only for the top earners.  Same for the Beetham Tower, or the pinnacles round the Princes Dock.  These apartment blocks - less fashionable, less showy, but still turning empty land into successful homes - were providing the backbone to the regeneration.  These were the ones allowing moneyed couples to find a safe, pleasant home within walking distance of shops and bars and theatres.

It threw the aborted plans for Brunswick Dock, further along Sefton Street, into focus.  As an outsider, I'd thought that the council's rejection of the 51 storey tower a few years ago was parochialism at its worst.  "If someone wants to build it", I thought, "let them!"  Walking this way made me realise how wrong it would have been.  It'd have been like putting an Apollo rocket in the middle of a car park; a massively over-engineered and designed project in a space that didn't need it.  As time goes on, yes, I can see the southern docks slowly increasing in mass and population - but the tower would have thrown it completely off balance.

Instead, the Brunswick Dock is the same as it ever was - old dock buildings repurposed into small industrial and office units.  It was coming up to lunchtime, so I popped into the large Delifonseca to get a bottle of water and maybe a little snack.  This was a stupid move for someone who's dieting.  I was used to the little store on Stanley Street; I hadn't realised what a cornucopia of delights were waiting for me in the Dockside branch.  I eventually left without buying anything, in case I cracked and gorged on a lemon meringue  chocolate bar.

I passed Brunswick Merseyrail station, built on a former goods yard of the same name, and trekked past the many car showrooms that take up this part of the city.  A large ugly gas holder rose up behind a Citroen showroom, incongruous next to the newest, shiny saloons.  Lunchtime meant that the office workers started wandering out of the dockside estates in search of coffee and food; the Subway seemed to be doing very well out of it.

Herculaneum Dock was the end of the line, at least for a while.  When the Overhead Railway was first built, this was where it terminated; a later extension veered away from the old station, so it was turned into a carriage storage area.

The extension is actually the most fascinating part of the old railway.  The land along the docks is flat and regular, as you'd expect, but right behind it is the high sandstone ridge of the Dingle.  If the line was going to go anywhere other than along the coast, it had to somehow get past this ridge.  The solution?  A tunnel.  An overhead railway that went underground - it's a delightful contradiction.

I turned left at Jack Jones House (why I am not a firebrand socialist, part XVIII: I thought it was strange the Unite union had named its HQ after a lounge singer) and into the car park of Greens Health club.  Up above me was the portal to the tunnel, now bricked up but still proudly showing the Overhead Railway's name and date.

I'd have got closer, but a sign in the car park had an unnerving effect on me:

And I'm not just talking about that awful font.

Eyeing the cliff face suspiciously, I headed back to the road.  I just had the former Dingle station to visit now.  I thought I'd have had to go almost all the way down to the Garden Festival Park before doubling back on myself, but I happened to spot a tiny "public footpath" sign, so I ducked down the side of a luxury development to follow it.  I was carefully segregated from the apartment blocks and their fountains by a heavy metal fence - walkers were strictly barred from stepping foot onto their hallowed ground.  It was a bit of a pleasing irony to then find myself confronted by a mural dedicated to the struggle of the working man:

It was painted by the artist Alan Murray, as part of the City of Culture celebrations and commemorates the Trade Union movement.  (Note the Overhead Railway at the top!)  I love the idea that the young professionals in the nearby flats are waking up between John Lewis sheets, opening their hand made curtains, and staring at a portrait of Yosser Hughes:

The path lead to the Herculaneum Steps, the old dock workers' route down from Dingle.  They were deeply grooved with the footsteps of the men, as though they were made of putty, not stone.  The only person I encountered on them wasn't a gnarly faced man of toil, but a young black guy dressed in lycra, jogging down the steps with his iPod on full blast.

I made a slight detour at the top of the steps.  It is a truth universally acknowledged that Bread was a load of shite.  It's a terrible, terrible programme, with thieving dole scum Scousers shouting at one another and conning "de bizzies", in between Carla Lane's trademark soliloquies about the loneliness of existence and vegan farming.  It still turns up on UK Gold, and I'll try and watch it just for the sights of 80s Liverpool, but the truly awful writing usually drives me away in a few minutes.  (Though I always had a soft spot for Billy Boswell).

Still, it was a regular feature of a Sunday night when I was growing up, so I couldn't pass up the opportunity to visit Elswick Street, where it was filmed.  It's changed since then - the street's been designated a "Home Zone", so there are tubs of plants and traffic calming measures.  And it seemed a lot shorter than it did onscreen.

I was trying to work out which of the houses was Ma Boswell's when a door flung open, and a woman in a dressing gown and pink pyjamas walked out (it was the middle of the day, remember).  She strolled across the street and let herself in at another house.  Perhaps it was a more realistic show than I thought.

I crossed the battle-scarred streets to head for Park Road.  It felt like a lull in the middle of a bombardment; there was hardly anyone about, but there was a strange tension in the air.  The abandoned buildings and spaces of empty land added to the feeling of a momentary pause in the war.  There were Sixties blocks interspersed with older terraces; a combination of bomb damage and slum clearance, I guessed.

I can't quite take Dingle seriously.  I mean, Toxteth as a place of urban blight and sadness, fine, but Dingle? That's not a real place name - it's a home for the faerie folk.  It's even worse when people call it The Dingle, like it's a woodland grotto.

So while I wasn't going to check out the local estate agencies for available lets in the area, I thought it was a pretty decent inner city district.  It had its problems, fine, but it wasn't frightening or intimidating.  It got better as I reached Park Road, with some nicely done new apartment blocks, and the 17th Century "Ancient Chapel of Toxteth".

Opposite the chapel, for many years, stood the terminus of the Overground Railway - Dingle station.  An island platform had been carved into the rock, with a crossover at the far end and a couple of sidings.  Passengers came down a ramp from the ticket office and were soon whisked off into the city.

Today, it's a car repair workshop.  The tunnel still exists underground, and is used by the owners, but on the surface all you get is this rather ugly red construction.

I know it's hard to make a garage look attractive, but really, couldn't they have tried just a little bit harder?

Walking back into town, I thought about the Overhead Railway, and its sad demise.  I never like to see any railway close.  But I couldn't see a place for it in today's Liverpool.  At the southern section, only Dingle has the kind of population to justify it, as seen by the hundreds of buses that run down Park Road (every three minutes!).  Along Sefton Street you might get a few more passengers but I couldn't see it being an effective alternative to the Merseyrail line alongside or, indeed, a car.

And the other side of the city centre?  There's nothing there.  Perhaps when (if) Liverpool Waters is built, there'd be a possible need for it, but a tram route would probably do just as well.  You just wouldn't build an elevated railway these days.  I thought that if it had survived beyond the fifties, the LOR probably would have been demolished anyway in the Seventies, when the city was on its knees.

The Liverpool Overhead Railway was a wonderful thing in its day, but this is the 21st Century.  It's gone, but not forgotten.

Islands In The Stream

An island platform when you have no idea where you're going is such a tantalising thing. One platform, two routes, and each is equally open to you. That's how I started today, at Bidston on the Wirral Line. I had decided that today was just going to be a day of MerseyTarting, but I didn't know which way to go. At Bidston, there's one island platform: trains to Liverpool one way, trains to West Kirby the other.

I decided I would just take the first train that came along. What was the first train that came along? One to Wrexham. Yes, even though this service is a frequent as a pleasant smell in a sewage works, a Wrexham train turned up before anything else. This train forms part of the Borderlands Line. How do I know this? ALF Alert!

The Borderlands Line is so called because it goes from England to Wales. This is rather disappointing, as a name like that sounds like it should be in East Germany, a hotbed of spies and skullduggery, with people being shot up against barbed wire fences for listening to 99 Luftballoons. It does have a couple of stations on the Merseyrail map, at Upton and Heswall, but I'm afraid that if I visit them I'll end up in a Stasi cellar somewhere being tortured with Men of Harlech.

The ALF, incidentally, depicts Bidston Observatory, which is on a hill not far from the station. This was once home to an Oceanographic Laboratory but is now seemingly destined to be (yawn) luxury flats. How imaginative.

Bidston station itself is thoroughly odd. As you can see, it's not exactly state of the art; but within a few hundred yards are a Tesco the size of Bridlington, a large retail park, and a junction of the M53. You could have a great big park and ride here, with a decent bus interchange, and links into the retail units, but they don't seem to have bothered. It just sort of sits in the middle of a field, difficult to get to, with pedestrian crossings taking you across big dual carriageways into nothing. It could be a proper transport interchange.

Anyway, a Liverpool train turned up, so off I went to Liverpool Central to change to the Northern Line. I was careful not to leave the station, hence the lack of pics of it - that's for another day. Instead, I went to the Northern Line's island platform and boarded the first train I saw - one to Kirkby.

I had a vague plan in my mind. I didn't intend going out to Kirkby, but I had seen on the map that Rice Lane and Walton were quite close to one another. I figured I would go out to Rice Lane, then walk to Walton and get the train back again. Simple enough. So here's Rice Lane collected:


The station itself was utterly unmemorable; just crammed beneath a bridge. I trotted out the exit, then turned left, with a vague idea that Walton was somewhere that way. It was. In fact, I could see it down the road, about twenty yards away! How ridiculous is that? There can be no possible good reason for having two stations that close to one another. It must be a hangover from the days of privatised railways, when stations were inefficiently placed purely to satisfy shareholders instead of passengers (any satirical tone detected in that sentence was entirely deliberate).

There's the sign anyway. A bit up the nose, but there you go. I was concerned about taking too many pics as the prison is just over the road, and I didn't want a load of burly men to suddenly wrestle me to the ground because they thought I was planning a mass break out.

Incidentally, regular readers may recall that I wondered what the ALF at Walton would be (http://merseytart.blogspot.com/2007/07/its-pronounced-baytch.html). Sadly, they don't have one at all, which is missing a trick, surely. I think I may write to Merseytravel and suggest something sawn off shotgun related.

Back into Liverpool I went, with a swift change at Moorfields for a train to Hunts Cross to take me further south. The train took me through Liverpool Central, and then through old, rocky tunnels with occasional gaps of sunlight to carry me to one of the newest stations on the network: Brunswick. This was built as a regenerative tool for the local rebuilt docks and office villages, and was opened in 1998. I've always had a sneaking fondness for this station for two reasons: (1), it has a large sandstone wall outside which is nicely ostentations and modern- viz:

The second reason is it has a connection to that most wondrously named of Liverpool districts: Dingle. Knotty Ash and Tuebrook come close, yes, but how can you say "I live in Dingle" and not smile? Actually, how can you say, "I live in Dingle" and manage to resist the urge to dress like a gnome? It's lovely.

I have however gone off Brunswick a bit as it has the most boring ALF I have seen yet.


What's wrong with Brunswick for Dingle, eh? Eh? I'm outraged. Especially since there are plans to demolish that business park and build an enormous tower on the site instead. A Business Park is most definitely not an Attractive Local Feature, and I'm shocked that they can pretend otherwise.

Since it was a lovely day, and since I hate to go back on myself, I wandered along the riverside to get to my next destination. The road here is wide, and empty, and all along it are brick 90s style developments, interspersed with car showrooms and odd retail units. It's all a bit random, and doesn't look like much thought has gone into the planning - it looks like the council were just glad that anyone wanted to build something round here, and so weren't too picky about what they threw up. The route also has two sad reminders of Things We Have Lost.

This is a genuine piece of transport history; under that arch was the terminus to the Liverpool Overhead Railway, an elevated railway that once ran from its station here at Dingle past the Liver Building and all the way past the docks. Sadly, this is one of the few remaining signs of the system. It was heavily bombed in the war, and then the iron supports were found to have corroded to such an extent that repairing it would have cost a fortune. The "Docker's Umbrella" was closed in 1956 and replaced with a (gah) bus service; the rest was sold for scrap. That makes me genuinely upset, that such a useful, innovative transport system was allowed to die through lack of motivation and investment. If it were still here today, it would be a tourist attraction in its own right.


This was the entrance to the International Garden Festival that was held in 1984. This was a wizard wheeze by the Tory Government at the time: rather than help a city by giving it jobs and assistance, bung a few flowers in and that will sort it out. To be fair, this massive site was a success back then, turning a landfill site into a thing of beauty - I can still remember seeing items about it on the news - but unfortunately, it was all temporary, and there was no money provided to keep the thing going. It fell into disrepair and ruin. Bits of it were moved off elsewhere (the "Yellow Submarine" from one of the gardens is now at the airport, and I believe the giant Blue Peter ship is now outside the Police HQ) while the large Festival Hall was turned into "Pleasure Island". I visited it years ago, and it was a mess - a bowling alley crammed into a derelict site. Unsurprisingly it went bust.

There are plans now on the table, which are apparently going to move forward, to build (guess what?) luxury apartments on the site, with much of the gardens restored as a new public park. Does any developer ever build bog-standard apartments, instead of luxury ones? And what happened to flats? Whatever they build, it would certainly be welcome for the site to at least be opened up, instead of CCTV and razor wired up.

Anyway, I turned away from there and went somewhere a lot nicer: Lark Lane. This is a boho district of the city, and I love it - lots of little cafes and restaurants, with big Victorian villas leading up to Sefton Park. One of my friends used to live near here with his (now thankfully ex-) fiance, and I was so jealous; I wanted to live that magic life of waking up on a Sunday morning and wandering down to one of the lazy cafes with wooden floors for a quiet coffee and the papers. Perfect living.

Once I was done wishing I was living in an advert for a building society, I turned back to get the train into Liverpool from St Michael's station. This was another place I had fond memories of from visiting Mike, and I wasn't disappointed: the little country station building and feel were all present and correct. It's tucked down a back road, surrounded by trees, and is quite lovely - please, go and visit it. Nice stations should be encouraged wherever possible.

I turned back into Liverpool, but disembarked briefly at Moorfields for a quick tart of the Old Hall Street entrance to the station, which has its own ticket office (and even a shop). Sadly, the whole thing was in shadow, so I couldn't get a decent shot of the main entrance - but I spotted this sly little entrance round the side, and I was in there!

Have it!

And the final train home to Birkenhead Park brought a wonderful surprise. Regular readers (plural?) will remember that last time I visited, they were fiddling with the ALF boards so I couldn't get a picture. At the time, I bemoaned the inappropriateness of telling visitors to Birkenhead Park that this was the station for the Docks. Well, they have listened - the reason they were fiddling was they were installing this:

Yes!!! And what's even better, they've left the orginal as well:










Two ALFs for the price of one! I was too excited, really. In fact I was so excited I threw caution to the wind. It had always slightly bothered me that my first tart had been represented by the platform sign, rather than the exterior. Well, I was so buoyed by the Double ALF Experience, I dashed out across the road and took this:

Who cares if I look slightly disturbed? Who cares if the local scallies looked like they were about to rip the camera out of my hand and shove it into an orifice of their choosing? Birkenhead Park is properly tarted and I'm so pleased. That's another five stations off the list, and I had a nice wander around. The project's moving along!