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! 

A Walk In The Woods

From Hooton, Robert and I walked onto the old railway line that forms the Wirral Way. There is still the odd remnant of the old line at Hooton - the platforms are there, and there's an old waiting room, grown over with ivy. The station really was a behemoth in its day, with goods facilities to add to the mix as well. Unlike Rock Ferry, which is a shadow of its former self, Hooton still manages a brave aura of importance, a sense of place.

The Wirral Way curves south from the station, then heads due west. I had no idea how far we were going to walk, only the vaguest notion that it was a nice warm day, I had good company, and there was nothing else to do of a Sunday afternoon. The path was well maintained - it forms part of the National Cycle Route, and is popular with horses too - but the foliage either side of us was a disappointment: weeds and stinging nettles. There's maintaining the natural landscape, and there's letting it go to pot.

As we walked, we chatted idly. Robert has recently come back from a holiday in Scotland, and he told me about his misadventures there. I'm afraid that after clambering up and down mountains and glens, the almost flat landscapes around the Wirral Way were a bit of a come down. He spent a lot of time moaning about the lack of bracing vistas and inspiring views.

Normally I'd have told him to shut up and pushed him into a bank of stingers. In this case, he had a point. The path follows the track of the old railway exactly, and so it tends to be at a lower level than the surrounding landscape: it's also surrounded by high trees and hedgerows. The net effect is that you feel like a bit of a Borrower, stumbling around at the bottom of the vegetation.

It also quickly became clear why the railway failed. We had absolutely no idea where we were once we left Hooton. According to the map, we were passing to the south of Willaston, a large Cheshire village; but there was no sign of it at all. The railway builders had followed the path of least resistance, with the cheapest land and the simplest routes, so as a result the line passes close to a fair few settlements - but not close enough.

The first sign of civilisation was when we emerged at the preserved station at Hadlow Road. I came here back in the early days of the blog; when the line closed, the council kept the station as it was as a tourist attraction. When I had visited before, though, the ticket office had been closed, and we took the opportunity to have a poke around inside.

It's easy to romanticise old railways. Easy to forget that the service on this line was infrequent, and in noisy, filthy steam trains. Looking around the ticket office, with its bare wooden floors and charming anachronisms, you can forget that it would have been freezing cold, and there were only bare wooden benches to sit on. There was an undeniable power to it though, a whole mix of whistles and Bernard Cribbins and the smell of ash. Nostalgia for something which was dead long before I was even born. Another of those strange ideas that goes through the male psyche like words in a stick of rock.

We pressed on down the path, our conversation having turned, as it usually does, distinctly x-rated. I won't go into it here, as this is a public website: all I'll say is that Robert has a dirty mind.

Once again I gave thanks that I'm a man as I nipped into the bushes for a pee, and then we were passing under the Chester road through a dark concrete tunnel that the local teenagers had "decorated". If you believe the graffiti there, everyone in Willaston is inbred, Liverpool FC will last for ever, and a boy called John sucks cocks. I don't know where Frank Muir used to find his witty graffiti for the books he used to produce every Christmas: all I ever see is crudely drawn penises and insults. What's worse is text speak has crept onto the walls as well - there was actually an LOL up there, which is depressing for a hundred reasons.

A sense of magic began to infuse the path then, as we descended into a cutting. We were suddenly walking between high rock walls, slick with moisture and moss. I loved it. It was like being underground, or in a secret cave. I've always loved caves, and alcoves, and niches: it comes from reading too much Enid Blyton as a child, when middle-class children couldn't nip to the shops for a pint of milk without encountering smugglers hidden in a labyrinth of potholes. My absolute favourite was The Valley of Adventure, where four well-scrubbed youths and a parrot are isolated in the middle of a Mittel-European country and have to hide out in a cave behind a waterfall. I loved that idea. Maybe not the parrot though.

I expect that's where my love of underground railways comes from, too - the world of secret trains, of exciting hidden places. Either that or it's something deeply psychologically disturbing it's probably best not to dwell on.

At Neston, the line is broken by people, as the town has grown over the old railway line. There's still a Station Road, but now it's been subsumed by suburbia. Of course, as soon as we hit a population centre, it began to rain, and Robert and I must have looked a sight: wet, sweaty, slightly dirty from the mud.

We were at a metaphorical crossroads now. I'd done this section of the Wirral Way before, last year, so there wasn't really any need for me to do it again. On top of that, if we carried on, there'd be a while before we would find a way out again, and it was starting to rain. Neston had buses and trains that could take us somewhere dry.

Never underestimate cheapness. Yes, we could have left the track at that point, but we both had Saveaways, the Merseyside only ticket, and we were still in Cheshire. We'd have had to pay for a bus out of there, at least to the county line.

We walked on.

Fortunately the rain was only a shower, enough to get us mildly damp but not soak us. The path was a lot busier at this point as there were walkers out with their dogs, families out for a stroll, and bikers. Lots of bikers. Lots of nice families out cycling together. I never went cycling with my family when I was younger - me and my brother had BMXs, and we'd race around the estate on them or try and do wheelies, but my Dad never cycled, and it would have been a cold day in hell before you got my mum on one of them. I didn't think we were missing much. We used to go on walks as a family, where you can all talk to one another - it's hard to bond as a unit when you're whizzing along at fifteen miles an hour in a straight line.

Soon we were at Parkgate, home of the Famous Parkgate Ice Creams. I don't have a sweet tooth, at all: I mean, I like ice-cream, and I'll happily have the odd Magnum or Cornetto, but I wouldn't go out of my way for it. I'm far more a Cornish Pasty kind of guy. So Robert volunteered to find out why the ice cream was so famous, and bought himself a twin cone. For some reason, he then decided to perform oral sex on it:

Yes, folks, he is single and available. Just in case you want to find out what it's like to be a ball of toffee ice cream.

Once he'd eaten his ice cream, and sucked the sticky liquid off his fingers (steady...), we returned to the Wirral Way. We inadvertently ended up on the bridleway, which sounds fine, until you realise it's (a) soft and moist and (b) littered with horse muck. I mean, everywhere. Can't horse riders take a plastic bag out with them, like dog walkers? Though the quantities we saw would mean you'd probably have to cart a bin bag around with you.

Fortunately we were able to get back on the path in time to cross the border into Wirral, and with it, Merseyside. A plan was forming, as the afternoon was getting on and we were increasingly tired. We'd walk to Heswall, then go to the bus station in the town for a (Saveaway-funded) bus home. It wasn't that far, and in the meantime, we could admire the scenery: finally we were properly above ground, and we could see the Welsh mountains across the estuary.

I'm at a loss to explain what happened next. For some reason, we managed to walk past Heswall altogether, something which passed us by until we realised we were stood in the middle of nowhere with fields all around us. I can't explain how my normally fantastic sense of direction let me down. It must have been Robert's fault. Yeah, that's it.

We could have turned around, walked back, but that's an incredibly depressing prospect, so we decided we'd carry on to the next village, Thurstaston, and see if we could get a bus there. Robert was immensely disappointed that this would mean we wouldn't get to visit the not-funny-at-all Gayton, but there was no alternative. We was tempted to make a detour for this:

I mean, The Dungeon? What? We decided not to bother looking in the end, as the reality could never be as interesting as the Orc-manned torture chamber we had in our heads, and Thurstaston couldn't be too far away - could it?

It depends what you mean by Thurstaston, I suppose. We stumbled upon the old railway platform there, still preserved: the line was only single track, so this would have served up and down trains. More interestingly, behind the platform was a proper visitor centre, with a cafe, toilets, and exhibition space.

Inside were the usual rag-tag elements that the name "visitor centre" implies: a few stuffed animals in a diorama about the nature of the Wirral Way, a model ship, a few informative plaques. There was a brief history of the line's railway past, too. Once we'd spent a respectable amount of time cooing over the exhibits, and tried to work the hi-tech public transport kiosk (which could only tell us that yes, the Wirral had buses), we ventured into the village.

You know how I said the railway bosses had built the line some distance from the village they served? Well, take what I said about Willaston, and times it by a thousand for Thurstaston.

There was an astonishing distance between the village and the railway station. With planning like this, it's no wonder that Doctor Beeching decided to give the axe to the route. It's a shame it went, but there's no way it would survive, not in today's economy: there are vast lengths of route without anyone nearby - fine in an intercity railway, not so good on a little local one. Robert suggested that it might have been nice as a preserved railway, a steam train running between West Kirby and Hooton. That might have worked, but sadly, the line's now been built over in places, so it's never going to happen. Instead it's being slowly reclaimed by the earth: the only wheels that'll pass over it now are bicycle wheels.

As for us, we'd walked nearly ten miles in an afternoon, which isn't bad for two slightly podgy men with little or no athletic aptitude. There's now only a little strip between Thurstaston and West Kirby that I haven't walked, so I'll have to do that for completion's sake. In the meantime, we decided to celebrate the end of the walk as men always do:

Marvellous.

Unexpected Historical Tarting

This, chaps, is the moment when this website takes over my life. Read it and weep.

It's a pleasant Sunday and the BF suggests we go out somewhere. "Where do you want to go?" he asks.

This is where I suggested.

It violated every part of the MerseyTart ethos. We drove there! There are no trains! It's not even on Merseyside! And yet, and yet...

Hadlow Road used to be part of the Hooton to West Kirby railway that I mentioned in my last post - the one that was lifted in the Sixties. Most of it was turned into a long linear park, the Wirral Way, but here at Hadlow Road, they preserved the station as it was in the 50s. It was very pretty, though sadly the ticket office was locked up; we squinted through the windows and could see a genuine Railway Children-esque waiting room, complete with fireplace.

There was also a signal box. Can't get excited about signal boxes I'm afraid. I'm taking that as a positive sign that I'm not a real trainspotter. Still, at least now I have pics of me on here that don't just give you an intimate interior view of my nostrils!

This is not establishing a precedent. I need to stay focused!