Bubbles

I'm back!

Yes, after months of silence I've finally returned to the blogging fold.  I mean, I've not been completely silent, as anyone who follows my Twitter feed will know, and I've been continuing to churn out my usual nonsense at the Coronation Street Blog.  And some kind souls dropped a couple of quid in my Ko-Fi, even though I was providing no content at all (though now that I think about it that may have been a subtle hint).  But I haven't had the chance to go out on the trains, for the simple reason that it's all been a bit mad at home.  I have spent the past three months having endless stilted conversations with workmen, trying to be jolly while being totally terrified, sitting in a room while they act all working class elsewhere in the house.  For someone with major social anxieties it's not been fun.  (Also, and I cannot stress this enough, when it comes to workmen, porn lies).

I finally managed to carve out a single day on the trains to myself, even though this week is also extremely hectic.  Heading to the Midlands seemed like a bit too much - I still needed to get back to deal with a plasterer that afternoon - so instead I went somewhere that wasn't even open last time I went out on the rails: Warrington West.

Opened on the 15th December, Warrington West is the newest addition to the Northern map.  It's two platforms on the Liverpool-Manchester line, and at track level it's pretty standard: grey lift towers, steps, shiny new tarmac beneath your feet.  It already felt well used.  I was one of half a dozen passengers to get off the train, and there were people on the platform waiting for the faster service behind it. 

Up above there's a ticket office, which was a pleasant surprise.  A lot of new stations are built without them, a machine on the platform taking up the slack, but this had a proper building and everything.  As to the building itself... erm.

I'm glad they went for something different.  I'm glad it's not one of those off the shelf Network Rail designs that look like they arrived on the back of a truck.  I'm not sure I actually like it, though.  I'm guessing the curved roof is meant to evoke the hangers of Burtonwood airbase, the largest American air base during World War II which was nearby, but it's not especially pleasant.  Inside it's cold and empty, too much space for too few facilities - barely a bench - and then you're out the other side and...

Let's be glad it got built at all, shall we?  Let's be glad that there was an investment in rail.  Let's focus on the positives.  Like my mug under a station sign.

Admit it: you missed me.

Across the way was the real reason the station was built - an extensive car park.  Warrington West is less than a mile from Sankey for Penketh station, a halt that's existed since 1874 but has the misfortune to have been left behind by geography.  When Sankey opened it was serving a few small villages in Lancashire and that was fine; Warrington was a town several miles distant.  Time and urban creep brought it closer and closer, but Sankey was still on a back road without much in the way of facilities.  Warrington West, on the other hand, is smack bang in the middle of the new suburb of Chapelford, with a handy bus to the massive Omega development beside the M62 - a series of distribution centres the size of a space station.

Sankey station is still there, but its services have been reduced to nothing; just two trains a day.  You need an actual Act of Parliament to close a railway station - an expensive and complicated procedure - so it's easier to leave it there and have the most token of services.  One day they'll finally shut it and Sankey's Grade II listed building will become a coffee shop or a private house.  For now it remains as a 19th century relic.

I headed away from the station and into Chapelford.  As a tribute to Burtonwood's status as a US Air Force base, the streets have all been named after places in America - Boston Boulevard, Chicago Place, Minnesota Drive.  The contrast of big American placenames with piddling little English houses was stark.  The worst example was this one:

Sunset Boulevard is Hollywood glamour, it's intrigue and excitement, it's Gloria Swanson descending the stairs in an elaborate dress.  It is not a rainy backwater in Warrington lined with "executive" homes.  I was the only person about.  These suburbs were built for motorists and even though there were kindly pedestrian signs showing me walking routes, nobody was using them.  The only people I saw were white delivery vans dropping off internet purchases on doorsteps. 

Chapelford is still relatively new so perhaps it's unfair to judge it on a damp February wander.  But I didn't detect any hint of life or soul as I walked round.  It was a dormitory.  People here worked somewhere else, then drove home and went to bed.  It lacked energy.

I crossed back over the railway line.  I could've got the next train back to Liverpool from Warrington West, but I wanted to get a bit of exercise, so I thought I'd walk into Warrington and get the train back from Central.  At the railway line Sunset Boulevard turned into Burtonwood Road, then I travelled back in time.

Chapelford became Sankey and immediately I was in a world of slightly-run down semis and terraces.  Some of them had been elaborately renovated - the owners clearly following Phil & Kirstie's instructions that if you can't afford where you want to live, buy as close as you can and do it up - while others had gone to seed with mossy driveways and faded paintwork. 

There are two types of New Town.  One is the entirely new construction - your Milton Keynes, your Skelmersdale, your Cumbernauld.  Yes, there are going to be older communities in it - we are a tiny island and you can't really go too far without hitting a village - but the town centre and the facilities will be all new.

The other type is like Warrington.  Warrington was a quiet, perfectly ordinary town for centuries.  It had a bridge over the Mersey, it had a couple of stations.  When the Industrial Revolution happened it got factories and chemical plants but there was nothing to mark it out as especially different from dozens of other towns across the north-west.  In the Sixties, however, someone in Government looked at it on a map.  Warrington is halfway between Liverpool and Manchester.  It has the West Coast Main Line passing through it.  It has the M6 going down one side, and the M62 to the north, and the M56 to the south.  They slapped NEW TOWN on Warrington and it doubled in size.

It's left the town feeling disjointed.  Each new suburb was grafted on to the side.  It didn't grow organically, it didn't spread.  Going from Chapelford to Sankey felt like a border crossing; I'd gone from one part of town to the other and I doubted they ever talked. 

I followed roads lined with trees, cul-de-sacs hidden from view behind signs saying leading to...  There was a Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints church, crowned with an incongruously American-style of spire, and I remembered reading once that Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses do incredibly well in New Towns. There are a lot of lonely people, away from their families, disconnected from their communities, and then a church literally knocks on the door and offers to be your friend. 

At the end of the road I entered the Sankey Valley Park.  It's a long strip of green running from north to south through Warrington, following the Sankey river and canal, and it's a refreshing example of New Town optimism.  They constructed a slice of open space for the enjoyment of everyone, instead of lining the waterways with expensive apartments.

It was a moment of calm and pause.  There was the odd dog walker, and a lad on a bike, but otherwise I had it to myself.  But it was another barrier.  As with the railway line, as with the dual carriageway, the Sankey Valley Park felt like a demilitarised zone to be crossed, a no-man's land between sectors.  It was an impression reinforced by the townscape when I walked out the otherside only a few minutes later.

Now it was tiny straight terraces with the brutalist hulk of the Warrington Hospital looming in the distance.  It was a whole different universe, never mind a different town.  I walked up to the ring road, with a bus stop filled with sad-faced patients, and a petrol station/general store/post office.  It ducked back under the railway line with a constant stream of noisy traffic at my side.

I hate walking down main roads - it's so dull, and the carcinogens pumped out of all those cars mean I may as well stay at home and neck a load of fags - so I took a chance and ducked down a side alley.  I came out in another world again.  Warrington is a foam bath, bubbles clinging to one another, connected but separate. 

I'd arrived at Regency Square, a development that made me quite furious.  You hear the name Regency Square and you think of elegant Georgian terraces; fine houses grouped around open space giving you air and space to breathe.  This Regency Square was four roads surrounded by houses, but in the centre were more houses.  There wasn't a spot to promenade.  Instead the homes at the centre turned their back on one another, with the middle being given over to parking.

I understand why it's laid out like that; of course I do.  Land is precious and modern developers wanting to extract the maximum amount of cash don't want to build a park that won't have any return.  That's fine.  Don't call it Regency Square though.  You're writing a cheque you can't cash.

In fairness, there was a brief burst of green space on the northern edge, between two apartment blocks.  Hedges formed a perimeter square around a patch of paving slabs.  No statue, no fountain, not even a playground; just grey squares of concrete laid in amongst some gravel.  Enjoy!

I left the estate and entered an expanse of industrial units and trading parks.  They were doing works on the railway bridge so it was reduced to one lane; this meant that an HGV was forced to park on the pavement, leaving only the tiniest of gaps for me to squeeze through, but he put on his hazard lights so that was ok, apparently.  On the other side, a white Mercedes screeched to a halt on the double yellows beside me and the driver dashed across the road to the garage opposite.  He left the engine running, and part of me immediately wanted to steal it, but he looked like an extra from a Guy Ritchie film so I quietly continued on and spurned a life of TWOCing.

I was now on the fringes of the town centre, with the Golden Square shopping centre appearing on my right.  It gave huge prominence to Debenhams on its exterior signage, which didn't bode well for its future, while its "open til late" poster plugged a bowling alley and a Nando's.  I doubted the residents of Chapelford ever came into town unless they had to, driving out to the Gemini Retail Park (it has Britain's first IKEA you know) rather than paying for parking in the multi-storey here.

I wonder if Warrington West will change this, if a regular, fast railway service into town will get some people to abandon their cars.  After all, Warrington Central is only a short walk from Golden Square's entrance.  I doubt it.  I expect they'll stay in their bubble, and if they boarded a train, they'd go all the way to Manchester or Liverpool for their entertainment.  It's hard to change people.

Risk

"So. When are we going to visit Stanlow & Thornton?"

That's not an invitation you get every day. And frankly, how could I resist it? Robert Hampton, the man who has, against all logic, graduated from "reader of this blog" to "bloke I will happily have a number of pints with", was keen to go out on another tart with me. He suggested Stanlow and Thornton for a couple of reasons - it was obscure, it was difficult to get to - it was different.

Stanlow and Thornton - and its brother station, Ince and Elton - were always going to be difficult to get to. They're stuck on a branch line between Helsby, one of those strange spurs which hangs on purely because it's more bother than it's worth to get rid of it. If you want to close a train line, you have to get an Act of Parliament to approve it: as a result, it's cheaper and easier to just run a couple of barely used shuttles along it as a token effort. Stanlow & Thornton and Ince & Elton were serviced by four trains a day in each direction - two in the morning, two in the afternoon - and that was it.

So the idea of an extra pair of hands, so to speak, was most welcome. It also meant that if I got stranded in the middle of Stanlow Oil Refinery, I'd at least have someone to talk to.

We had to get there first, of course. I'd planned our day, a simple matter of changing trains here and there. But things got off to a bad start when my train from Lime Street failed to work. I'm not sure what was wrong with it. All I can say is that various members of staff flattened themselves against the floor, reached under the train, and pushed a button. Then they stood up, scratched their head, and went and stood in a group to discuss the button, while all the passengers sat embarrassed on the platform. There was a general feeling that we should be getting on the train, but since no-one else was doing it, no-one wanted to be the first: we all just pretended to be looking at our newspaper, or our iPod, or we feigned disinterest. Even as the train's scheduled departure time ticked past, we carried on waiting, our essential Britishness preventing us from doing anything that might be construed as "causing a fuss".

Finally the railwaymen admitted defeat, and we were herded to platform one to take a different train entirely. The net result was that we left Lime Street fifteen minutes late, which wouldn't bother me normally, but we had a tight connection at Warrington: we had to cross the town centre to get from Central to Bank Quay, and every moment of lateness raised the ugly spectre of having to run. Watching me run is not a pleasant experience, and as I am so unfit, I can usually do about fifty feet before I have to stop and suck on an oxygen tank.

We burst out of the tunnel into the sunlight at Edge Hill. It was a gorgeous day. Cornflower blue skies everywhere you looked, without a single cloud; I had to raise my hand to shield my eye from the naked sun. After West Allerton, I looked across the tracks, and saw a young boy raised on his dad's shoulders, waving frantically at the trains over the fence. He was only about three or four, but he was gleeful, unbridled joy. What is it about boys and trains? Why do they intrigue us so much?

Robert joined me at Liverpool South Parkway, fresh with excitement at the hi-tech toilets in the station (apparently they talk to you, which I find a bit freaky, personally). I ran through our itinerary: from Bank Quay, a train to Frodsham, then walk to Helsby; train to Ince & Elton, then walk to Stanlow & Thornton. However if, as seemed increasingly likely, we missed the train at Warrington, we'd just skip Frodsham and head straight for Helsby.

We sat in a muted silence, ticking off the minutes as we seemingly crawled on. Widnes was a welcome sight, and when we went straight through Sankey for Penketh without stopping, I almost cheered. I don't think anyone has ever leapt off a train at Warrington Central with as much enthusiasm as us.

Older readers may distantly recall Harold Bishop in Neighbours. When he first came into the soap, and was living with The Legend That Was Mrs Mangel, Harold used to exercise by speed walking up and down Ramsay Street, resulting in him wiggling his arse like Mick Jagger on uppers.

Well, Harold Bishop had nothing on Robert and I; we walked through Warrington at speeds hitherto unseen outside of an athletics stadium, our backsides whooshing from side to side as we tried to make it across town for the Llandudno train. Thanks to our heroic mincing, we made it to Bank Quay with a minute to spare, and we were able to squeeze ourselves onto a packed train headed for Frodsham.

Frodsham's an unmanned station, but it's still very proud of itself.

And who wouldn't be? Clearly magnificent floral displays like these should be rewarded.

Hmm. Okay.

Frodsham itself is a very pretty little market town. I'd never been there before, but I was pleasantly surprised by its wide open main road, dotted with local shops - there were hardly any chain stores, which, in these days of homogenised high streets, is a rarity. In fact I have only two complaints about Frodsham. The first is the lack of a decent railway station sign: just a bit of board on the side of a bridge, which isn't on. The second is that they've gone seriously overboard with the historic blue plaques. Commemorating a famous resident, or a notable event, or a significant landmark, fine. For example, Frodsham is the birthplace of Take That icon and disappointingly Tory Gary Barlow: if there'd been a blue plaque commemorating the composer of Do What U Like, I would have had no complaints. Sticking a historic marker on every other building and basically writing "THIS HOUSE IS OLD" on the side devalues the process. This is England. We've got thousands of old buildings. It's nothing special.

My plan to conceal my beer gut through carefully applied layers of clothing was dealt a fatal blow as we walked out of town on the way to Helsby. Blimey, it was warm. I had to shed my hoodie - another mile's walk and I strongly suspect my t-shirt would have gone the same way. Robert, being of the ginger persuasion, had wisely lathered himself with sun block before we left, but I hadn't, and I could feel my flesh lightly baking.

Helsby Hill loomed large in the distance, giving us something to aim for. As we got closer, we realised there were frankly insane people clambering over the top of it: we kept a good eye out, and my camera at the ready, in case any of them plummeted to their deaths and we could get £500 from You've Been Framed for the footage. Disappointingly, they all kept their footing.

Helsby itself was signalled by Helsby High School, which seems to be bigger than the town itself; it went on for miles, block after block of brick red building. It was even more strange given that Helsby seemed like the kind of place which was more at home for pensioners or, as a particularly hateful sign outside a caravan park put it, "recycled teenagers". I'd thought it would be a twin of Frodsham, so I was disappointed to see that it was more like a suburb with delusions of grandeur.

We'd made extremely good time walking between the two towns - so much so, that we had three quarters of an hour to kill. My normal course of action would be to immediately find a pub. However, we only spotted one open pub in the whole village, the Railway Inn, and it seemed to be a spit 'n' sawdust, hardened drinkers yelling at the footie on telly kind of place, which isn't my thing at all. I was tempted to go there anyway because there was a man sat outside with no shirt on, but Robert reasonably pointed out that if I sat there staring at him, we might get beaten up, so we trudged on. There was nowhere else to go in sight - no coffee shop, nothing. There was a balti place, (as Robert said, "There's always a balti place") which was closed, and a garage, and a One-Stop shop, and that was your lot. So we bought a couple of Cokes and went and sat on the station platform.

This is where having a railway expert with me came in handy. See, I'm a bit thick when it comes to the actual mechanics of railways. I have this naive assumption that Britain's railways are modern, gleaming examples of 21st Century magnificence. Actually, not even that: I just thought they were mechanically operated, and that things like signals and junctions and points were all operated by a computer somewhere in Crewe. I thought there was one huge room, with lots of flashing lights and moving screens and LEDs.

In line with this belief, I thought the signal box on the platform at Helsby was just a historic relic, preserved by a dedicated team of enthusiasts, possibly with some sort of listing. But no. Robert informed me that it was a working, active signal box, complete with a man inside yanking at levers. Presumably a man with a voluminous moustache and a pipe. It was an odd little technical anachronism, like finding out that your aeroplane is being powered by the pilot pedalling really hard.

Our train arrived and settled in for a long wait on the platform. We got on board and waited for it to take off, but it was in no hurry. There was something almost magical about the afternoon. The gorgeous weather, the silent platform, the idling train. The guard and the driver got off and chatted in the sun. The station cat picked its way through the flower beds. Time slowed.

The guard came down to us and checked we were on the right train. It seems that passengers on this route were the exception rather than the norm. We reassured him that, yes, we were headed for Ince & Elton, and then there was a sigh of hydraulics and the train took off.

It was at this point that Robert confessed to being nervous about the trip ahead. Stanlow & Thornton station is buried deep within the Stanlow Oil Refinery, and is accessible only via the private Oil Sites Road; technically, we'd be trespassing. He was just a little bit concerned that we might, you know, get shot in the chin for being a terrorist. The fact that I had a bomb-concealing backpack on didn't help.

Personally, I thought it added a frisson to the day, but I could see why he was concerned. I was more worried that we'd be prevented from getting to the station at all, which would be extremely frustrating. On top of that, our timings were going to be incredibly tight; according to Google Maps, it would take us thirty-eight minutes to walk from one station to the next; it gave us a margin of five minutes error or we'd miss the train and be stranded in the middle of Cheshire with no way out.

We got off at Ince & Elton, meaning that the train continued onwards completely empty, and took the customary photos. First a joint effort, squatting under a platform sign:

Then the more traditional Merseytart pose, under the station sign at the roadside:

Damn, I really need to lose some weight.

Then we were off! Careful studies of the map indicated that there were no footpaths alongside the railway; to get to Oil Sites Road meant we had to make a massive detour into Ince Village itself, then back out again, a frustrating diversion. Luck was with us again though, and we spotted a side path which meant we could slide down an embankment and join a cross road. It carved about fifteen minutes off the trip, and meant we were a lot more relaxed as we sauntered towards the entrance to the oil refinery.

There were massive signs to greet us. "RESTRICTED AREA". "PRIVATE ROAD". "NO PHOTOGRAPHY." "NO STOPPING". It didn't quite say "ACHTUNG!" but it may as well have. The sign also warned us of checkpoints ahead.

"What do you think?" said Robert.

"Ah, we won't get arrested," I replied. "At worse, we'll just get duffed up by a couple of burly men in the security hut."

I don't think he was reassured.

There was a footpath by the side of the road, so we took that and headed in. It was eerily quiet. You expected there to be a load of activity, people in boiler suits and hard hats marching around, men in golf buggies ferrying valuable components from one side of the refinery to the other, but there was no sign of human activity at all. Just the low regular hum of machinery. There were pipes everywhere, passing over and under and through one another in a complex spaghetti of industry.

I've passed the refinery hundreds of times on the M53, and from a distance it has a mechanical magnificence. The belching towers, the gantries, the burning flame on top; it's a Blade Runner city of metal and concrete, and peculiarly beautiful at night when it becomes pinpoints of light and fire. At street level, though, it was banal; blank surfaces, grey walls, insistently aggressive signs.

Stanlow & Thornton station is pretty much ignored by the rest of the site. There were plenty of direction boards pointing to Induction Centres and Entrance 3,4,5, but not one for the station. You can only find it if you know where to look. Luckily we did, and even more luckily, we got there with time to spare. In blatant defiance of the "no photography" sign, we got the tart pic, though if anyone from Shell is reading, it was Robert Hampton that took the picture, so go after him, not me. Ta.

As we walked up the stairs to the station footbridge, a CCTV camera turned and stared straight at us, then followed us as we passed over to the Ellesmere Port platform. Unnerved, we made a pantomime of checking out the train times on the abandoned station building, then stood politely waiting for the train, while the eye of the camera remained focussed on us.

And then, Kevin arrived. Trotting down the steps came Kevin the security man, uniformed, walkie-talkied, early forties and vaguely threatening, for all his patter. He introduced himself and asked what we were up to. It seemed that they had been following us ever since we stepped foot on the refinery, which is either a testament to their effective security procedures or a gross violation of our civil liberties - I can't decide which.

Strange though this website is, it sounds even stranger when you try to explain it to someone else. "Yeah, we're trying to visit every train station... and get a photo in front of the station sign... erm, yeah. That's it." I was seriously hoping he wouldn't ask "why?" because there's no answer to that, is there?

Fortunately Kevin the security guard was very relaxed. He kept saying they were monitoring us for "our" safety, which is a blatant lie, let's be honest, but he soon realised we weren't Al-Qaeda terrorists and were instead just a couple of geeks. I was really worried that he'd ask me to delete the picture of the Stanlow & Thornton sign. What would I do then? I'd have a hole in my map, never to be replaced.

The train arrived, and we said our goodbyes. Kevin whispered something into his radio which I guessed wasn't particularly complimentary, but still, he let us go so who cares? We settled back into our seats on the still empty train and allowed ourselves to breathe again. I then frankly took the piss by taking a snap of the refinery as we made our getaway, but I was feeling cocky.

After that, Ellesmere Port couldn't be anything but a let down. Unstaffed, ugly, populated by various over dressed slappers getting ready for a night on the razz in Liverpool, it was an unpromising end to the day's efforts. We collapsed into our seats, tired from all that walking in the heat, and settled in for the trip home. Inside I was quietly thrilled. The Ellesmere Port-Helsby branch was always going to be difficult to get. It's an unloved, unwanted remnant, a reminder that not everyone values trains and the network they run on. In fact, sometimes they're a pain in the arse for everyone involved. I'm glad it's there though, and I'm glad I can finally cross it off the map. I'm equally glad I never have to go back.

I'll leave you with a picture of Robert on the Merseyrail train home, slipping into a miasma of relief that his afternoon wasn't going to end with him being buggered in a prison cell somewhere.

Happiness.

No Kisses Until Wigan

Before I went there, I thought that Warrington's main claim to fame was that it was the first place in Britain to get an Ikea. I'm not being nasty here. I'd call that a pretty good accolade. I love Ikea's ludicrously attitude to naming their furnishings, their Tärka wardrobes and their Lakshmi sofas and their Ülrika CD holders. If I had an Ikea within spitting distance you wouldn't be able to have a cup of tea in this house without drinking it from a Carøla mug with your bum on a Bennybjørnannafridagnetha pouffe.

Still, it's not exactly everything you want from a town. It's not a centre for cultural improvement. And besides, Ikea's on the outskirts, squatting next to the M62 in its primary coloured magnificence like a six year old went wild with his Lego. The actual town centre was an unknown quantity to me. I doubted it would have the same Swedish minimalist elegance.

My first stop was therefore Warrington Central station, on the Liverpool to Manchester route. Actually the train I was on was headed for Scarborough, and I only managed to catch it at the last minute, earning a surly look from the woman collecting the tickets as I hurled myself on board. She also gave my Cheshire Day Ranger ticket a longer than usual once-over, as though she was hoping for a reason to chuck me off at Edge Hill. As it was, we chugged our way through Merseyside and then out to Warrington.

I must apologise for the extreme smugtwattery of my face in that shot. I took three pictures, but one turned out to be blurred, and the second had the Warrington Central sign erupting from the top of my skull like an antenna, so I had to go with the maximum git photo seen here. It does at least show the 80s style ticket office that Central's got. There's a bricked up doorway beneath the railway bridges, and, on the platform itself, what looks suspiciously like an old ticket window, but it looks like at some point a person at Rail House decided to spend some money on the station and the new ticket office was built. Either that or they were losing too much revenue from people going straight up to the Liverpool platform without bothering to cross to the Manchester one and buying a ticket. When I got there, a load of college students were larking around outside, waiting for their bus; I did a quick circuit of the block before coming back to take my photo. I invariably look a complete tit trying to take a picture of myself with the station sign - I didn't fancy an audience of braying teenagers.

From there, I turned left and headed into the town itself, not really having much of an idea where I was going. I actually got a pleasant surprise. I'd had impression that Warrington was a New Town, and so I'd lumped it in with other soulless holes like Skelmersdale and Milton (spit) Keynes. I'd seen the red brick estates around the Ikea. I figured the town centre would be a load of brutalist 1970s concrete buildings, a behemoth of a shopping centre, and hundreds of roundabouts.

A quick wander round soon showed me that while Warrington may have been designated a New Town in 1968, this was actually done with the aim of expanding a town which was already there, and had been for centuries. Consequently, the town centre had a pleasing mix of old and new, with Victorian buildings adapted for new shops, like the one above. Yes, it is an unfortunate name, isn't it? I wonder if anyone's ever explained to them that their fluffy pink gift shop is named after a harrowing Meryl Streep film about the Holocaust. Maybe they do know, and just don't care. Perhaps they're just big Meryl fans. At least they didn't call it Death Becomes Her.

There is still a large shopping centre, called Golden Square, which has clearly had some money spent on it in recent years to make it a bit more 21st Century. There's light pouring in from above, and while it doesn't quite stop it feeling like a shopping precinct, it's still not bad to wander round. It certainly made a change from the bitterly cold January wind and rain outside, which was making my ears glow. I had a look round, staring in shop windows, and finally exited into the town's old Market Square, complete with a wrought iron canopy and surrounded by coffee shops and old-fashioned pubs. Warrington seems to have quite a few shopping centres, in addition to Golden Square; I saw signs for The Courtyard and the amusingly named Cockhedge Shopping Centre.

At any rate, I'd spent long enough eyeing up the displays in Waterstones, so I headed away from the pedestrianised zone for the town's other station, Warrington Bank Quay. The route was through the town's "Cultural Quarter", and was heralded by a very impressive looking stately home. Very nice, I thought; very impressive, right in the middle of town. I wondered if it had once been the home of some Duke of Warrington or something. When I looked closer, though, I realised that the imposing building behind the golden gates was actually the Town Hall.

Now I worked in Local Government for six years, and at no point did I ever work in a building that looked like that. When I worked in Chester, my office overlooked McDonald's loading bay, and about four o'clock I used to have to bellow down the phone to be heard over the McLorry backing into place to make a delivery; in Crewe, I was stuck in a 1970s tower block which had all the charm of chewing gum on your shoe. Not once did I get to work in a place that had its own driveway. I feel cheated.

I went further into the Cultural Quarter, the rather grand name for the Victorian streets that stretch between the Town Hall and the station. At its centre is Palmyra Square, a pleasing enough patch of green, which just reminds me of Largo's home (also called Palmyra) in Thunderball. I should probably get some kind of Bond aversion therapy, something to stop all these little triggers going off in my head and stopping me from perceiving the world through normal eyes.

It was just gone ten a.m, and the town museum was still closed, sadly, meaning I missed out on Warrington's recreation of a local street scene; but the library was open, so I went in to finger the spines (and, incidentally, dry off a bit from the rain). I had to push my way in past a gaggle of scallies, one of whom was boasting that he had managed to avoid his knife being discovered by the police through the method of wearing two pairs of trackie bottoms. I was horrified. He wasn't just admitting to owning two shell suits, he was also saying he wore them. Truly nightmarish.

I had another terrible moment as I passed Parr Hall, the town's chief performance venue. You know that repressed memory therapy, where people lie back on a couch and discover that they were beaten black and blue as a child but just blocked it out? I experienced something similar then. I had been to the town centre before, about six or seven years ago, to hear a band at the Parr Hall. The whole evening was so dreadful I'd actually erased it from my memory until now.

You see, I was there to see Steeleye Span, Britain's premier "folk/rock" band, and if you've never heard of them, lucky you (I urge you to check out that YouTube link so you can fully appreciate their awfulness). I must make clear, I wasn't seeing them voluntarily. They are The Bf's favourite band, ever; he has all their albums, on vinyl and CD, and countless videos and DVDs of them in action. He dragged me along to their performance through a canny mix of blackmail, guilt and promises that it wouldn't be that bad.

It was. Imagine your Auntie Gloria, pissed on the sherry at your cousin's wedding, turning to the karaoke machine and playing a load of 15th century folk songs while your Uncle Roger does Guitar Hero in the background. That is Steeleye Span. And the crowd were worse: middle aged buffoons who cheered at every swish of the lead singer's skirts as she danced another reel around the stage, while a man with a moustache fiddled behind her (with a violin, thankfully). They burst into Gaudete - a song which summons up the truly glorious sound of a monastery choir on a wet Thursday during the Black Death - and the man next to me closed his eyes, nodded his head and whispered, "Yes," in a reverential tone. I couldn't wait to be away from these repellent humanoids, and let me tell you, the Bf suffered afterwards for forcing me to sit through it. I took him home and made him watch Casino Royale - not the 2006 classic, but the insane 1967 version of the first Bond novel which should only be seen through a haze of marijuana and LSD. That showed him.

I let out a strained scream of terror at this reawakened nightmare, then turned and fled the scene, rushing towards the steaming towers of the quite spectacularly ugly Unilever factory. Warrington became a major centre for textiles and chemicals thanks to its 1-2 punch of the Mersey and the railways, and that legacy is still clear from the vast blue buildings of the works, looming over Warrington Bank Quay station.

Warrington Bank Quay itself has had some money chucked at it in recent years by Virgin, who manage the station. Their efforts have meant there's a coffee shop in the ticket hall and the girls behind the counter have bright red uniforms, like Happy Shopper versions of the stewardesses in that Virgin Airways commercial. The money hasn't, however, extended to paying for a station sign anywhere, so I had to stand in the middle of the road to get a pic with the station building itself behind me.

At that point, incidentally, I was listening to Britney Spears singing Outrageous. I had my iPod on shuffle! Don't judge me!

One sign that Virgin had invested in was this one:

God, I hate corporate tweeness. I hate any soulless institution that likes to go all giggly and funny and try and nudge you into smiling as it sticks its hand in your wallet. The worst offenders are Innocent smoothies - every inch of their packaging is trying to be cute; they're about two minutes away from putting a smiley face in the "o". I'd happily thrust whoever designed that packaging into a thresher. The same for this sign - it was created as a publicity stunt, with daft pictorial images of people kissing, just to hype the refurbishment of the station, and it certainly got it in the papers. But that was a year ago. What's so special about Warrington, anyway? Does this mean I can go for the full Frenchie at Wigan North Western, and perhaps a hand shandy in the layby outside Lime Street, because they've not got signs telling me I can't? Can we have a sensible "no waiting" sign installed now, please Mr Branson? Thank you.

So that was Warrington: a surprisingly nice town, even if they do frown on hot liplock action. It could be completely cowed, sitting, as it does, halfway between Liverpool and Manchester, but to me it felt like it was holding its own, a decent community and worth a visit on its own. Just don't mention the Span or I might have to scream.