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.

Dockside

Hello.

Do you remember when I would sometimes post a couple of entries a week?  What a world that was.

Anyway, yes, I'm back.  I've been busy lately which has meant I didn't have time to fanny about on trams, but here I am, as round and tedious as ever.  Last week I finally got a bit of time to spare so I headed out to Manchester for a little light carousing on the Metrolink.  As a bonus I was accompanied by Robert, freshly splattered with suncream as protection from the unseasonally scorching weather. 

The stretch getting the attention this time was perhaps Manchester's most glamorous line, the orange 7 stretching up through Salford Quays to the showbiz world of MediaCityUK. After a delayed train to Victoria - it was the first day of the new timetables, and everything was predictably to cock - we got on a tram to Cornbrook.

If we'd been visiting this stop only a few years ago, there would have only been the opportunity for a platform sign and nothing else.  Though it opened in 1999, for the first sixteen years of its life there was no way to leave the stop - no stairs to the street, no lift.  It was purely for interchange between the Eccles and Altrincham lines.  As the local residential population grew, so did demand for a way up to the trams, so in 2005 the emergency exit was opened up to the public - allowing me to capture this sign shot at street level:

I know that Robert's presence meant I could get far more elegant, posed photographs, but if I stick to the selfie you can't see my beer gut.

Cornbrook is wedged on a viaduct between the river and a dual carriageway; it's easy to see why Metrolink didn't consider it a prime spot.  We edged our way down a back road beside railway arches and overgrowth on our way to the next stop, Pomona.

Google Maps quite clearly showed a road swinging across the canal towards the Quays.  What it didn't show was the complete lack of a pavement.  Can we stop doing this, please?  If there's a route for roads, there should be a route for pedestrians.  Maybe put it off to one side if there are safety concerns, behind a barrier, but always provide a way for people to walk.  It's so alienating to see cars speed by to a destination with no way for you to follow.

Instead we turned backwards, towards the city centre, through the canyons of apartments being built on Ellesmere Street.  Construction sites were everywhere, with parades of hi-vis workers crossing from one set of hoardings to the next.  Some of the balconies were filled, and I felt sorry for the owners trying to relax on a warm day like this, surrounded by brick dust and the clanging of machinery. 

We ducked down a cobbled side street - not anywhere near as common in Greater Manchester as you would believe - which took us to the back of the St George's Island development.  A few years ago, a series of glass apartment blocks sprung up on this narrow strip of land between the railway and the Bridgewater Canal, and I've always been fascinated by them as I've passed on the train.  Part of it is the instinctive draw of an island home, part of it is me never being entirely sure where they are.  That confusing Manchester geography came into play - a spot that seemed to be part of the city, yet also very separate from it.  Finally visiting it at least allowed me to put a marker on it in my head, but I'm still not positive I could find it again.

We passed under one of the arches, which lead to a small, badly-signposted footbridge over the river. 

From there we got a great view of the rapidly shifting world around the Irwell.  Look at this spot on Google Maps and you see expanses of deserted, abandoned docks.  Grass and scrub and patches of bare concrete.  Now those waterside views were being exploited to the full, towers of flats springing up on either side.

A cut down the back of another building site and we emerged on Ordsall Lane, where old and new Manchester were clashing.  The south side of the road, paralleling the water, was being turned into a 21st century city.  The odd old-world units that remained - a car wash, an industrial estate with a sandwich van - looked threatened.  They had an invisible £ sign hovering over their rooftops, ready to be exploited.

The north side, however, wasn't moneyed luxury apartments.  They were small terraced houses, semis with concreted fronts, cul-de-sacs.  Slum clearances in the sixties and seventies had left a warren of pocket-sized council houses full of people who would never be able to afford a balcony.  It was a weird, uneasy collision of classes; men in suit and tie sharing the pavement with noisy teenage mums.

I steered Robert into the back streets because I wanted to take a look at St Clement's Church or, more specifically, what used to be in front of St Clement's Church.  When they were planning Coronation Street, creator Tony Warren and designer Denis Parkin toured Salford looking for visual inspiration.  They found it in Archie Street, a little row of terraced houses capped by a corner shop at one end and a church at the other.  Archie Street appeared in the very first title sequence, before they had a proper outdoor set, and a photo of it was used for the end credits.  It was demolished in 1971, but the church remained (in fact Jerry Booth got married there).  We were basically stood on the real Coronation Street.

Dodging round the back of the church, where a man was quietly painting the railings, and down the back of the park.  A block of flats - these were flats, not apartments, because they were full of working-class people - had been surrounded by a perimeter wall for security.  Great for the residents; probably not so great for the newsagent at the foot of the block, who suddenly found himself open only to people with a pass to get through the gate. 

We ended up back on Ordsall Lane by a curiosity: Ordsall Hall.  You don't expect to stumble on a Tudor mansion in the middle of Salford.

Now owned by the city council and run as a museum, there's been a house on this site for nearly 800 years.  It seemed incongruous to us, but must've been even more so in the early part of the century; hemmed in by tight terraces, the air thick with grime from the factories, the boom of the docks echoing across the polite knot gardens. 

"Do you know where you're going?" Robert asked, perhaps knocked sideways by the constant shifts in architecture.  It was a little disorienting.  "Yes," I said, with about 80% confidence; as always, I knew there was a tram stop over there, it was just getting to it that was the problem. 

As I took us down a seeming dead end, he asked the question again.  "There's an alleyway there," I said, with false confidence; I'd seen people walking down it, so I assumed it didn't just lead to the bins.  I was half-relieved, half-smug when we turned the corner and almost fell on top of Exchange Quay tram stop, just as a tram was pulling up.

We went backwards again, trekking back down the line to reach Pomona.

Yes, that is a grey-and-teal Way Out sign still in place at Pomona.  Someone get the corporate identity bods out here, quick.

At the moment, Pomona is an incredibly quiet stop on the Eccles Line.  Like Cornbrook, it's surrounded by water and abandoned docks, but unlike Cornbrook, the developers haven't found it yet.  It will become a lot more important in 2020 though, when the Trafford Park line opens.  Pomona is the point where the new route branches off, and the stop was constructed ready for it.  For twenty years there's been a tiny little spur pointing out the front of the viaduct.  Only now is it finding any use.

I stood under the platform sign and took my usual selfie.  Pomona is so isolated - we'd already gone all round the houses to reach it - it didn't seem feasible to walk from here to another stop.  Instead we got a northbound tram back out of there.

Onboard, Robert asked, "Does that count?"  We hadn't left the platform.  We'd not gone down to street level.  We'd reached the platform and moved on.  "It's fine," I said, and immediately felt a pang of guilt.  Because I realised - no, it doesn't count.  Get the train or the tram there, leave the station, that's always been the rules.  Just popping onto the platform is cheating.  If you head down that slippery slope you may as well say that simply passing through the station counts - not even stopping, not even stepping off the train.  It's cheating.

It gnawed at me.  I realised I'd have to go back to Pomona.

But not that day.  We'd reached Salford Quays stop.  Of course, Salford Quays (the area) was the whole reason the Metrolink came this way in the first place.  The Docks at the end of the Manchester Ship Canal in the 1980s were devastated and desolate and therefore, prime real estate.  A little bit of building work had been done by the mid-90s, but it really needed the fillip only a good public transport route can bring.  So, just as the DLR brought the money to Canary Wharf, so the Metrolink brought prosperity to this region of the city.  A plaque at Salford Quays marks the opening.

You can tell you're in the earlier part of the Quays development as you wander around.  The architecture is solid but uninspired.  It was built when no-one was entirely sure if this area was going to take off, so they re-used plans from suburban business parks and plonked them down on the quayside.  There was space for cars, because nobody wanted to actually live here back then, and it was unambitious.  Even the leisure options were a little more basic: a Holiday Inn Express, a Frankie & Benny's, a Beefeater (Robert confessed he'd never been to a Beefeater; as someone who grew up considering the branch at the Warden Tavern was the height of dining sophistication, I was floored).

It still looked good, though, because everything looked good that day.  Stick a blue sky above a calm dock and any building caught in the middle looks fantastic. 

We'd taken the long route to Anchorage stop, crossing bridges and the watersports centre, because why wouldn't you?  Finally we ducked down behind a multi-storey car park, just where the bins were - obviously they smelt delightful on a warm day - and clambered up to the platform.

I'd collected Harbour City stop a long time ago so we headed straight into the glamorous showbiz capital of the north: MediaCityUK.  You've got the BBC on one side, the Corrie studios on the other, and the Lowry Theatre complex forming the third point of the triangle.  Surely I'd finally see someone famous?

Nope.  Not a one.  I don't know if all the proper celebs are ferried in and out, Ubered direct from the studio to Piccadilly so they don't have to fraternise with the northerners, but I didn't see a single well-known face.  And I looked quite hard.  It was lunchtime so Robert and I took up a spot outside a pub on the quay for burger and a beer.  I saw a lot of people with official looking lanyards wandering past, and the nearby tables were crammed full of media types, but none of them were even slightly well known.  Where was Naga Munchetty?  Whither Audrey Roberts?  Although now that I think about it I could've been surrounded by CBeebies presenters and not known about it, because apart from that Radzi boy with the hair who presents Blue Peter, I have no idea what's going on with kid's telly these days. 

With no legendary figures to distract me, I had to settle for talking to Robert, which went about as well as you'd expect.

Full of meat and booze, we tottered back towards the tram stop.  We took a slight detour to follow the Blue Peter Gold Badge Walk, created to celebrate the show's 60th anniversary and commemorating those talented individuals who'd received a Gold Badge.  There were the names you'd expect:

There were also names that frankly devalued the entire Gold Badge procedure:

There was just one more task, besides taking the tram back into town for a load more booze in the Village: the sign shot.  Unfortunately, just as I was taking it, some bloke shoved his face in shot and ruined it.

It's amazing what you can find down the docks.