Go Like A Rocket

Nearly two years ago, I headed to Manchester Piccadilly to close off the Northern map.  It was a sad, significant day for me.  It finished off a big important part of my life.

Last week, I returned to Piccadilly to finish off a different part of my life.  This time it wasn't quite so significant.  But it was a lot happier.

I descended into the undercroft of the station to finally collect the tram stop.  It's the only tram stop on Metrolink that feels bigger than the network.  Down there, beneath the trains, you can almost imagine you're on an underground, the underground a city the size of Manchester should have. 

I wasn't alone this time.  While I'd finished off the Northern map by myself, and brooded, this time I'd brought along Robert and Paul to make it more of a celebration.  Together we were going to visit the last few stops on Metrolink that remained uncollected - all within the City Zone.  I'd started the Metrolink odyssey with Victoria, and New Islington was crossed off last August, so that left seven more: Piccadilly, Piccadilly Gardens, Market Street, Shudehill, Exchange Square, St Peter's Square, and Deansgate-Castlefield.  One down.

An all too brief tram ride later and we were at the next stop.  We braced ourselves for Piccadilly Gardens.  In recent months it's got a reputation as a sort of post-apocalyptic hell hole.  Listen to the news and the city's central square is only ever talked about as a location from The Walking Dead, with spice-addicted zombies crashing through the fountains and assaulting families.

Perhaps we arrived on a particularly good day, but all we saw was a sunny open space, filled with people hanging out and eating sandwiches.  It was warm and open and there wasn't a single drug addicted homeless person trying to eat a pigeon in sight.

We headed for the pub.  It was clear that just collecting the stations would be a quick job.  This has, I'm afraid, been the barrier to me really enjoying crossing off the stations on the Metrolink map.  There's no effort involved.  The longest walk between stops is about half an hour; miss a tram and there'll be another in a matter of minutes.  It's not really been a challenge.  When you've dragged yourself to Chathill on its single northbound train in the morning, then walked twenty miles, it's hard to get excited about places where you can see the next platform down the line. 

So, we decided to break up the day with visits to pubs.  This has coincided with one of my rare moments of abstention though, so while Robert and Paul drank pints of Strongbow, I had a glass of Coke.  This would be my first of many.

We then walked the southern edge of Piccadilly Gardens to Market Street stop. 

Paul filled me in on the history of the stop while we waited for our tram.  Originally it had been one way only, with a second stop, High Street, handling southbound trams.  This was because it had been squeezed in alongside the traffic on Market Street.  Eventually the road was pedestrianised, and the stop became bidirectional, with High Street getting demolished.  (Interestingly, on the other side of Piccadilly Gardens is the site of another former stop, Mosley Street, which was demolished in 2009 to alleviate congestion.  Ok, I'm using "interesting" in its broadest possible sense there). 

We boarded one of those trams that's been wrapped in advertising livery: great for the company, bad for the passengers, who ride a shady vehicle and peer out the window through a million dots.  It skirted the edge of the Arndale - and thank you, Manchester, for keeping the name "Arndale"; Luton's abandoned it, and it is much the poorer as a result - past the is-it-run-down-or-is-it-just-fashionable? buildings of the Northern Quarter until it finally came in at the Shudehill interchange.

The autumn sunlight was overwhelming here, so I finally conceded the selfie camera and got Robert to take a picture of me with the sign.  Look upon my hair, ye mighty, and despair.

Shudehill is a later addition to the network, opened in 2003 to connect with the new bus station at the site.  It's dominated by the glittering car park, still looking remarkably decent after fifteen years.

We headed down the hill, past the complex of Victorian buildings left empty by the Co-op since they moved to their big shiny testicle behind Victoria station, and emerged at Exchange Square.  This whole area is now a monument to commerce, with a Selfridges and a Marks and Spencer and a Harvey Nicks alongside the restaurants of the Corn Exchange and the cinema at the Printworks.  It's a regeneration project with a murky background, though; this is where the IRA detonated a bomb in 1996, leveling the area.  It's a bit like the Barbican in London - a scene of appalling destruction transformed into something much better.

The tram didn't arrive after the bomb, though.  The many new arms to the Metrolink network were all funneled into a single route across the city centre from Deansgate-Castlefield to Victoria; it was a terrible strain on services and meant that a single incident could paralyse the whole system.  The Second City Crossing laid down new tracks that provided a bypass and a way to spread the trams out - though it's only used by one line, the East Didsbury route, and Exchange Square was the only new stop opened, in 2015. 

Budding Rachel Rileys among you will have spotted that Exchange Square was the fifth of the seven tram stops we needed to collect, and it was still lunch time.  Boarding a tram we came up with another delaying tactic.  Paul suggested a brief side visit to the Museum of Science and Industry, so instead of getting off at St Peter's Square, we headed to Deansgate-Castlefield.

Once known as G-Mex, this is a great tram stop to look out over the resurgent city.  Skyscrapers were springing up in every direction.  Cranes scraped at clouds.  The stop itself still shone, the lustre of its recent rebuild to accommodate the new tracks still clinging to it.  (A rebuild, incidentally, partly paid for by European money, as we were told by a plaque on the platform).

We got into a bit of a debate about the station selfie.  There is a huge Deansgate-Castlefield sign along the viaduct wall; Robert thought that would be a better shot than the usual platform snap.  But after dozens of boring, same sign shots, I decided I wanted more of the same.  Metrolink couldn't win me over with a sudden bit of extravagant branding right at the end.  I would carry on with the dull, minimal sign shot.  That'd teach them to put up proper signs every where.

From there it was a brief walk to the collection of buildings that form MoSI.  I'd been here before, of course, a couple of times, but this time we were here to see a special guest star.

Stephenson's Rocket is normally housed in the Science Museum but it had been allowed to head back up north to the spot where it first blew people's minds in 1829.  The world's first steam engine won the Rainhill trials and formed the engine for the initial public rail service between Liverpool and Manchester, heading across Chat Moss (and William Huskisson's leg) on the 15th September 1830.

This was the engine that changed the planet.  Up until its invention, human beings hadn't travelled faster than a horse could carry them; now there was a regular speedy service between two major cities.  It was a little overwhelming, being stood so close to a piece of technology that so impacted the world.  From that one train came a billion advances.  Even the noisy children on a school trip hushed as they passed.

The back end of MoSI was also the Rocket's final destination in 1830.  The world's first intercity railway station is preserved as part of the museum (adopted Scouser pride forces me to acknowledge that even though the trains set off from Edge Hill in Liverpool, that station was radically reconstructed afterwards).  It's a plain building, more like an office block than anything else.  Railway architecture hadn't been established - there wasn't an aesthetic.

It used to be possible for the museum to run trains onto the mainline, but the construction of the Ordsall Chord connecting Victoria and Piccadilly sliced it off, leaving just a stub of track.  None the less, you can still look down to where trains once rode in from Liverpool, to an elevated platform abutting the station building.

Follow the stairs down and you reach the ticket hall.  It was a little disappointing, preserved but not really utilised, hardly speaking to you.  You should be thrilled by this travel back in time, not just admiring the woodworking skills.

We headed back up top and out of the museum to a nearby pub for lunch.  I had another fizzy soft drink.  It was as thrilling as the first.

That left just one tram stop to collect, but it was early, and warm, and the company was good.  We decided to head to the Village for a few more drinks.  Paul was more of an expert on Manchester than us, and he took us away from the roads and down onto the towpath to get there: we would take the canal to Canal Street.

Despite a year of travelling all over it, Manchester remains a mystery to me.  It's a shifting, elusive city.  Its geography eludes me - the relationship of one station to the next, the branches of the trams running into one another.  It's formless and packed.  There's no central point for me to grab hold of - no river, no cathedral, no high landmark to say there, that's it.  Going down onto the towpath added a new dimension of confusion.  We were on the real backways now.

The city whirled above us, around us, noisy and unknown.  Sometimes I'd catch a glimpse of something familiar - the back of the Hacienda, a hint of the Palace Theatre - but mostly it was dark and barren and hidden.  It was a new complex layer of Manchester's existence, one laced with death; the Pusher still hadn't been apprehended.  Signs warned you about the perils of wandering the towpaths while drunk.  I imagined wandering here after dark, cruising, taking a short cut, filled with beery bravado, and then the hands and the plummet and the silence.  It was a relief to finally spot the Princess Street bridge, covered in builders from the nearby apartments, and to rise up the lock and back into familiar territory.

We drank... a lot.  All soft drinks for me, my teeth quietly rotting in the corner, but cider and beer and gin for Paul and Robert.  We chatted and laughed and told filthy stories, then talked about trains for a bit, then usually ended up being filthy again.  And finally it was dark and we headed out to collect that last tram stop.

St Peter's Square twinkled.  The new tram lines had forced the whole district to be rebuilt.  New office blocks with ground floor restaurants took up one side, and the Cenotaph was moved to a different spot out the way.  The library acquired an awful new glass entrance that detracted from its fine circular form.  The Town Hall frowned down at us.  Manchester is a modern city, probably Britain's second, and it rushes forward all the time. 

There was something strangely magical about it, that black-blue sky with the yellow tram slicing beneath.  The whole Metrolink journey has been a chore at times, never quite grabbing my attention, never quite getting me excited.  Now and then though the whirr of the city with its fast, efficient public transport network snakes into my soul.  Trams are great, trams are wonderful, and the Metrolink is the best tram network in Britain.  I've seen it all now.  I love it.

Which leaves one important question.  What do I do now?

If You're Gonna Do It, Do It Right (Right)

A couple of months ago, I collected the MediaCity line with Robert.  At Pomona stop, we simply jumped off the tram, hung around the platform and then got on the next train out.  At the time, Robert queried, "does that count?"

Of course, it didn't.  The rule of this blog has always been that you exit the station.  If at all possible, you walk on to the next one, but if that's not possible then at the very least you pass through the ticket barriers and out into the street.  It's been there right since the very first post, back in 2007, when there was still hope in the world.

Pomona, therefore, had to be collected properly.  I headed back there on a sweltering hot Monday and disembarked to find a full platform.  This was a bit of a shock, as Pomona is in what experts call "the middle of nowhere".  There were half a dozen revenue protection officers ready to check the hordes of people who disembarked the tram.  And when I say "hordes" I mean "me".  I eventually found the ticket on my phone (incidentally, in all my Metrolink travels, this is the first time I've had my ticket checked) and left the stop.

Now all I needed was a sign at ground level to prove I'd actually been there.  Not that I'm saying you wouldn't believe me; if I said I'd been to Pomona again and passed through the ticket barriers I'm sure you'd accept it, because you are kind and decent people.  This was more for my completest, slightly manic frame of mind.

But as usual, Metrolink had let me down.  Not a single piece of signage with the name on it.  It's like they don't want you to know there's a tram stop there.  I was resigning myself to going back up to the platform to make an idiot of myself in front of the ticket inspectors when I spotted something unusual.

It's a cast iron post, right in the middle of the cobbles, with Metrolink Pomona Strand inscribed round the top.  I presume it's some sort of commemorative icon, perhaps to mark the opening of the branch, but there's nothing to indicate that (there's a plaque further down the line Tony Blair unveiled).  And the use of Pomona Strand (the street the stop is on) - was that the original name of the stop?

Whatever it is, it was a sign for the Metrolink right outside the stop, so it counts.

Job done.

The question was, what to do next?  I could have just boarded another tram, but that seemed like a dull idea.  Pomona's status as the spot where the new Trafford Park line branched off gave me an obvious idea - I'd walk along the route of the new line, collecting its stops before they've even been built.

Right now, of course, there's not much to see apart from a lot of building works.  The viaduct points hopefully westward, shrouded in scaffolding and tenting, ready to be extended...

...while on the ground, the landing point for the new tram ramp is coming together.

The works sent me down onto the canal towpath, not one of those scenic canal paths that Pru and Tim pass on their narrowboats, but one with overgrown bushes and a smell of urine.  The kind of canal path where people get pushed into the water, or stabbed.  I was glad to rise up onto a cobbled street, where a sign informed me Pomona Strand was private property and there was no right of way.  I wasn't feeling too welcome.

The tram line will pass under the Trafford Bridge, but I was forced up to street level, to negotiate the traffic swinging off the roundabout.  A giant LED screen flashed up adverts as I waited - girls in bikinis on holiday, laughing families, a six storey high bottle of fizzy drink.  Over the road, and back down to canalside level for the first stop: Wharfside.

This will eventually be an incredibly busy stop, as it's the closest one to Old Trafford.  For now it's just a couple of lumps of concrete as the foundations for the platform go into place.

I carried on along Trafford Wharf Road, passing office workers out for a lunchtime walk with their sandwiches.  It's still in that halfway point between "thriving city district" and "industrial park"; there's office blocks, yes, but there are also workshops, and the Imperial War Museum sits right opposite a large grain silo.

This is where the second stop on the line will be: handy for the museum, and also handy for ITV Studios.  The tv people objected to the construction of the line as they thought the rumbling of the trams would disrupt filming.  You'd think Audrey Roberts would be keen on a stop handy for work, but there you go.  You can see their point though - the recent set extension means it rubs right up against the perimeter wall, with the new Weatherfield Police Station clearly visible from the street.

The line veers away before it passes the front gates though, meaning Gail will be able to sleep without being too disturbed, and up Wharfside Way to the Village Circle roundabout.  Here was where following the route of the line started to get difficult.  Constructing a tram link is a major job, and it means significant disruption.  Metrolink have concentrated on keeping cars flowing, which means if you're a pedestrian, you're sort of shoved to one side.  To cross the roundabout I found myself being sent back and forth, over all sorts of temporary pavements, just to reach the far side.

That'll be the site of Village tram stop.  The name "village" implies bucolic living - countryside and duck ponds and tea rooms.  It couldn't be further from the reality.  Trafford village was a planned community for factory workers, laid out on numbered avenues.  It never really took off.  Unlike say, Port Sunlight, the homes were cheap and squalid, and built right at the centre of the industrial park, meaning pollution was everywhere.  Most of the homes were demolished in slum clearances.  Now "the Village" is a strip of shops for the local tradesmen - a chippy, a Greggs, a newsagent - and St Anthony's church, which somehow clings on.

Past torn up streets and one-way systems.  Signs warned motorists of disruption for months.  I dodged through fences and across traffic lights, still blinking in sequence even though the roads they guarded were closed to traffic. 

I began to wonder who would be using the Trafford Park line.  At its start and finish - the city centre and the shopping mall - yes, I could see users, but here in the middle was just acres and acres of sparse industry.  There were no residents, and hardly any pedestrians.  In my whole walk I saw a single other person on foot, a portly man who launched himself out of a row of trade units and crossed the road without looking.  I suppose people need to get to work, but so many of the factories had parking and easy road access, I couldn't see many giving up their drive for the tram.

Parkway Circle was even larger, and in an even bigger state than Village Circle.  The trams will one day sweep across the centre of the roundabout to a park and ride, but until then it was a lot of churned up tarmac and men in hi-vis outfits.  I did, at least, get my first glimpse of actual tracks, installed in the road surface already.

After what seemed like an hour of walking, I managed to get round the roundabout and onto the bridge over the canal.  The tram line will cross here on a new bridge.  Hopefully they'll upgrade the footpath at the same time, because right now it's just a wedge of pavement next to choking fumes.

There aren't actually any slow moving trains within Trafford Park any more; there used to be a freight railway which ran throughout the estate, but it was mostly lifted in the late 90s.  There's still the odd bit of rail but there are no actual trains.  The only trains now are the ones that use the massive freight terminal

I headed under the flyover and walked into the outskirts of the Trafford Centre complex.  There was a bland Holiday Inn, then the site of the next stop: Event City.  The attraction that gives it its name is a series of large white boxes, ready to host whatever corporate beano is required - "from yoga retreats to triathletes", the posters promised. 

Excitingly, there were more rails here and then, as I approached the Barton Square section of the shopping centre, I actually walked across tramlines laid into the tarmac. 

I was now approaching the terminus of the new line and - let's be honest - the main reason it was going to be built: the Trafford Centre.  Sorry, the intu Trafford Centre, as it has been optimistically rebranded; there isn't a single person alive who calls it this.

I'd never actually been to the Trafford Centre.  Opening in 1998, it's the second largest shopping centre in Britain (after the MetroCentre in Gateshead) and it had a reputation in the North West as the hub of everything worth buying.  People talked about it in excited tones; entire days out were planned to get the most of it.  I'd not avoided it, I'd just never got round to going.  They are, let's be honest, not that interested in people who don't have cars.  Pedestrians can't load their arms with shopping, and there's only so much you can carry on the bus.  You need a car to be able to take proper advantage of the shopping opportunities.

Which is, of course, why it's taken them twenty years to send a tram line this way.  Some claim that there should've been a tram line here on opening, but the developers backed out of paying for it; I certainly can't believe you'd get away with building such a huge shopping centre without some kind of fixed rail link today. 

I wiped away the worst of the sweat and entered the centre where tram passengers will be deposited: by Selfridges.  Immediately there was the sweet needles of ice cold air conditioning, a cool breeze sweeping over me and chilling me delightfully.  After an hour of walking in the midday sun, it was unbelievably welcome, and I wandered through the store in something of a daze.  Finally I emerged on the far side, in the mall itself, and an enormous grin spread across my face.

I'd known that the Trafford Centre had lofty ideals.  It wasn't just a shopping centre, it was an experience, and they'd spent a considerable amount of money constructing it.  What I hadn't realised was quite how naff it was.

There is a certain kind of person who keeps their television in a cabinet.  You don't get them so much now TVs are a centimetre thick and can hang on the wall, but when they were bulky and deep, the cabinets were common.  People had a room that'd been designed to look a particular way, and a glass and plastic cube didn't fit in with the design.  From the outside it's designed to look like a Chippendale; dark wood and brass hinges, concealing the electronics inside.  Look closer though and you realise that the design of the cabinet is modern too; it's not just a box, it's got a special shelf so you can pull the TV out, and there's a cable tidy space, and a spot for your satellite box.  It's as modern as the bunch of electronics you're trying to conceal, and probably not as well made, and to be honest it's just a load of faff because every time you want to watch EastEnders you have to open it all up again.  It's pointless kitsch.

The Trafford Centre was designed by and for people who kept their televisions in cabinets.  It's a temple to shopping and commerce and naked, unbridled, consumerism, but that's all a bit vulgar.  So they've designed it to look like a Venetian palace.  It's covered in marble and frescos; there are ornate pillars and statues. 

Everything is designed as though it is a classy, elegant place of beauty while at the same time being a place where you can buy trainers and computer games and perfume and anything else you could possibly want.  It's for people who really like spending money as a hobby but want to pretend they don't.  It's for people who think the Arndale is common because it's got strip lights and white walls. 

It's not all Venetian.  There are two avenues of restaurants.  One is New Orleans themed, one is Chinese themed, and they lead up to the food court and cinema.  The food court is just...  I mean, let's be kind and say it's "ocean liner" themed, and not based around a certain ship which sank in 1912 and was the subject of a very popular film around the time the centre opened, because that would just be too tacky.

I headed for the "Grand Hall" at the rear, where a large set of steps and a chandelier guided me down to a Costa Coffee and a Five Guys.  I got an iced drink and sat down. 

The weird part is, it's simultaneously over the top and not over the top enough.  This is, after all, just a shopping centre; it doesn't need all the gubbins.  MetroCentre manages without it.  So does Meadowhall.  They're just long avenues with shops and that's fine for me.  The shops are the main attraction.

At the Trafford Centre, they've spent a huge amount of money to try and make the shopping centre something more.  But they haven't gone far enough.  As I walked around, I was reminded of Las Vegas.  I went there years ago, and I stayed in a hotel that was King Arthur themed.  I had breakfast in a pyramid.  I had dinner under the Eiffel Tower.  You could take a gondola ride in a recreated Venetian canal, or watch a volcano erupt (three times a night).  It was huge and ludicrous and over the top. 

The Trafford Centre is big and awful, but it's not big and awful enough.  It's not a massive ridiculous experience.  It's a shopping mall with a bit of marble.  It's a few decorative touches.  It's a cabinet around a telly.

I took the footbridge across to Barton Square, an extension opened in 2006.  This was to have been the homeware quarter - a district of high end furniture retailers.  It was a flop, and after an attempt to make it more of a tourist attraction with a Lego experience and an aquarium, the owners have admitted defeat.  It's going to be turned into a giant Primark.

It was a reminder that the Trafford Centre was the last gasp of this kind of retail experience.  A decade later, Liverpool One revitalised a city centre and redefined what a shopping mall should look like.  Since then, the big developments - the Westfields in London, for example - have been in the middle of town, not isolated on the edge of the city.  Right now in 2018 you can order anything you like and have it delivered to your door.  If you're going to get up and go shopping, you want it to be somewhere a bit interesting and lively.  You want to go into town.

The Trafford Centre is still incredibly popular, of course, and it's always handy to have loads of free parking and plenty of shops close to one another.  I did wonder, though: once the Trafford Park line is built, how many people will drive here to catch their tram into Manchester, or MediaCity, or Old Trafford?  How many people will use this as one enormous, fake Baroque park and ride? 

I headed back to New Orleans, past the car that belonged to the mother of the centre's first owner ("as a lasting tribute for all her support inspiration and guidance") and into the Wetherspoon's.  I know we should be boycotting them because they are owned by an absolutely horrible man, but the app that lets you order your drinks without going to the bar?  Absolute genius.

The Trafford Park line is due to open in 2020.  I've seen where it's going.  I don't think I'll need to go back.