The Leicester Square

I've always had a sneaking fondness for Leicester, mainly on the grounds that it makes itself very difficult to pronounce.  I imagine them deciding to be called Lester, then realising Americans could probably say that, so they shoved in a whole invisible syllable ice so that British people could feel superior every time a foreigner asked for directions.  "Lie-chester?  Never heard of it.  Oh, you mean Leicester?"

The closest I'd ever been to visiting, however, was a rather miserable day in the gooch period between Christmas and New Year, when the trains were their customary hilarious self and I'd been forced to work my way back up north via a change from the Midland Main Line.  All I remembered of the city was that it felt like I was in a canyon between high walls, but I was in a foul mood and wanted to get home so it wasn't exactly fair.  Now I was properly in the city and ready to take it all in.

What I discovered was another of those gems that people don't talk about, for some reason.  I'm not saying Leicester is the new Milan or Monte Carlo, but it was a good, interesting place to visit with plenty of attractions and good buildings.

Its most famous resident now is Richard III, or to give him his full title, Richard III Who Was Found In A Car Park.  Leicester's gone a bit overboard with the Richard III tie ins.  I know he's got his own Shakespeare play, so he's a bit more famous than, say, William II.  None the less, I can't help thinking that if your grave goes missing for six hundred years it might be because people can't be bothered looking for it.  Richard's had a re-evaluation in recent times, with the conclusion generally being that he wasn't a hunchback and wasn't evil and Shakespeare most likely smeared his reputation to kiss up to his Tudor masters.  His reputation has certainly been laundered enough to enable Leicester to build a King Richard III Visitor Centre without anyone muttering about the Princes In The Tower.

I decided to give the visitor centre a pass (eleven pound fifty) and instead headed to the Cathedral, where Dickie's tomb is a simple and attractive centrepiece.  There was a bit of a tussle over who got to keep his desiccated remains, with York arguing that Richard Of York perhaps belonged to them, and some people saying Westminster Abbey was where Kings should rest, and others quietly pointing out that Richard III died in 1485 and was therefore a Catholic so perhaps burying him on Protestant territory was a bit off?  

Leicester won, which is lucky for them, because I'm not sure I'd have bothered visiting the cathedral otherwise.  Perhaps it's because I'd just spent a day being overwhelmed by Lichfield Cathedral.  Perhaps it's because I've spent most of my life living in the shadow of not one, but two, awe-inspiring cathedrals.  Leicester Cathedral was a parish church that got elevated with its own diocese in the Twenties and never really got any more inspiring after that.

Incidentally, I've just realised that I wrote the Twenties assuming that everyone who reads it will know I meant the 1920s, even though I'm sat here writing it in the 2020s.  Time is cruel.

It's a nice enough church, don't get me wrong, but "cathedral" writes a cheque it can't quite cash.  Once I'd seen Richard III's remains and done a circuit of the walls barely five minutes had passed.  I took a seat and listened to the service that was being broadcast over the loudspeakers, to show willing and to eke out a bit more time, but then the woman leading the prayers asked us all to pray for the King to reign wisely over us and I went off the idea and left.

This is not to say that Leicester is short of architectural gems.  Wandering around I was struck by how diverse it was, as befits a city with thousands of years of history.  Wide Victorian shopping streets were alongside Medieval runs; routes would open out into civic squares or meet in expansive crossings.  Newer buildings had been inserted with varying degrees of success.  Personally I love the way the clock tower is backed by the huge Brutalist bulk of the Haymarket Shopping Centre, but I understand I'm probably in the minority about this.

I found myself turning corners and being struck by a new angle or building.  The Turkey Cafe, for example, which I stumbled across, and whose quirky insanity made me grin.

Or the City Hall, an absolutely astonishing piece of Art Deco beauty, which looks like a piece of Gotham dropped into the East Midlands.  It stopped me in my tracks, it was so elegant and charming, and I wondered why I'd not heard of it.  A building like that should be celebrated widely.

The 21st century also hasn't been too bad for the city.  Leicester is clearly in the process of a building boom with large apartment blocks springing up on the edges.  Industrial works are being replaced by angular shards of glass and cladding.  I found myself in St Peters Square, where the Highcross shopping centre has been extended to accommodate a glittering silver John Lewis and cinema and a new restaurant quarter.

Sadly, around half the units were vacant.  I'd cut through the Highcross to get here, and passed more empty shops than usual; a Body Shop sat next to an abandoned Paperchase, like a sort of once and future bankruptcy.  You could hear the owners thinking, hey, looks like the high street is dying; we'd best diversify into leisure and casual dining.  People will always want to eat and be entertained, and the only thing that could stop that would be a catastrophic cost of living crisis that means nobody has spare cash to fling around on a disappointing fajita.

Meanwhile Leicester's Market was in the middle of another redevelopment, with the stalls relocated to an adjacent square and the hall falling under the wrecking balls.  They've issued a lot of pleasing CGI images about its replacement, with wood panelled stalls and feature lighting, but it has a vague whiff of the Chester Market about it.  You'll be able to buy a bao bun or a pain au chocolat but there's nowhere to get foam cut or your shoe re-heeled.

I ducked down the side streets and ended up on the New Walk, a long pedestrian route that skims the city centre and connects it to the main Victoria Park.  It was very much a promenade, the kind of place you can imagine has been absolutely rammed on weekends since it opened, and even on a weekday afternoon was thronged with visitors.

The New Walk takes you to Leicester's Museum and Art Gallery, so I popped in for a look. I was surprised to find a dinosaur hall, but not as surprised as the toddler ahead of me, who took a full step back when he saw the Rutland Dinosaur, a Cetiosaurus discovered in 1968.  His mum reassured him that it wasn't alive and wasn't going to hurt him, but he clung to her nonetheless as they worked their way round the exhibits.

I'm afraid that was the limit to my visit to the museum, because I rounded a corner and found a hall full of overexcited primary school children in hi-vis vests and I immediately backed away.  It's marvellous that young children are being exposed to interactive, exciting education in this way, but sometimes I, a middle aged man, would like to have a quiet wander round the exhibits without dodging screaming eight year olds brandishing worksheets.

This is perhaps the point to address a very strange feeling I got from Leicester.  It was - and I can't explain this adequately - one of the most heterosexual cities I have ever visited.  Something about it, about the people I saw, the way they acted - somehow everything added up to overwhelming heteronormativity.  This is not to imply that, say, Nottingham, is drowning in lube and leather chaps; it was simply a vague feeling, a prickle on the back of your neck that you develop after years of homosexuality.  I didn't feel unsafe or threatened, I'd like to make that clear.  I'm saying that there was an instinctive wariness in me and I'm not sure where it came from.  Perhaps it was all the hats.  I have never seen so many men wearing fedoras in my life.  You wouldn't get a gay wearing one of those.

I paused for a pint in The Globe, one of Leicester's oldest pubs, which has been run by the same family for more than a century; I will report that the family is called the Everards and leave it at that.  I sat across from an adult son who was having a slightly awkward reunion with his dad, where they stared at their pints in silence for a little too long.  The Dad was drinking a Madri Top, and his son had to inform him that Madri is, in fact, a Shit Beer, a revelation that clearly disappointed his dad, who was trying to be up to date and modern.

Refreshed, I wandered across the ring road - it's the Midlands, of course there's a ring road - in search of a bit of railway history.  Leicester used to have two stations in its centre; Leicester London Road was the one I'd arrived at, now stripped of its suffix, but Leicester Central also existed over a mile away.  This was on the Great Central Railway to Marylebone, a latecomer in the railway business and one that was never as successful as the Midland Railway it often shadowed.  It was an obvious candidate for closure when (spit) Beeching turned up and so it carried its last passenger in the sixties.

The station became a workshop and a car park; its clock tower was removed and it slowly declined.  However, the regeneration of the area turned it into an asset again and the building was extensively refurbished.  The road outside was turned into a public square and a hotel was opened opposite.  A new roof was put in and the whole place was turned into - well, I'm not really sure what it is, because I'm old.  The name on the door is Lane 7 which implies a bowling alley, but when I looked at their website it also offers "augmented darts" and beer pong and basically it seems to be a place to act like you're still a kid, but with beer. 

I looked through the doors, thinking I could at least have a pint, but a gaggle of astonishingly fashionable looking twentysomethings gave me a look like I was Mrs Havisham trying to gain access and so I backed away to where my kind belonged.

Ah, I had found my kin.

I was pleased by my visit to Leicester.  It had everything you need from an average city; history, charm and good looks.  I was glad that the West Midland Railways map had brought me here.  That same map would be taking me away the next morning, across the county, but that night I had a room in a Travelodge and a Wagamama takeaway to keep me happy.

Wide Open Spaces

For reasons far too dull to go into here, I was in Liverpool city centre in the early evening with time to kill. Can we talk about this hospitality gap we have in the UK, where there’s nowhere to go between the shops closing at five thirty and your dinner reservation at seven thirty? The default used to be to go to a pub, but I was in the University district, and students these days don’t drink because they’re all healthy and care about their bodies so there are hardly any pubs. It’s disgusting really. We have an entire generation of nineteen and twenty year olds who’ve never woken up in a stranger’s bed, their head pounding because of too much cheap lager, and had to sneak out before the other person wakes up. (Not that that ever happened to me of course). 

Anyway. I found myself wandering the University precinct, an area of the city centre that’s unfamiliar to me. If you’re not a student there’s no real reason to come up here, and so the various alleyways and pedestrianised walkways are a mystery. I’d been to the Student Union before, of course; I came here with the Edge Hill LGB Society (no T back in those days, though we added it the following year because we were not awful people). It was very early in my first year and was intended as a welcome to the area for new gay students, to let them mingle with other homos from the area, so I piled into a minibus with a load of people I didn’t know and we all headed into Liverpool pretending we were after comradely conversation and discussions of queer politics when we were actually all after a snog. None of us got one; the Edge Hill people stayed in one corner and the Liverpool people stayed in another and I ended up giggling with a gay guy and a lesbian. 

Where was I? Oh yes, on the nostalgia train.  I wandered into Blackwells, a once great bookshop that’s now a shadow of its former self. They had a 3 for 2 that looked interesting but it was close to closing time and the staff had an air of “I sincerely hope you’re not thinking of browsing because I need to get home” about them. I walked away from there, down a path full of revoltingly young and happy well educated people, and I ended up on the bit of land behind the Union. It’s been landscaped beyond all recognition but there are some things you can’t hide. Like this. 

Guarded by spikes to stop any, ahem, “adventurous” spirits venturing over the wall, that’s one of the vents above the main tracks into Lime Street. There’s a ridge of rock around Liverpool which meant when Victorian engineers tried to get trains close to the city centre they had to tunnel. Or rather, in those days, dig down into the ground to create a cutting they could roof over. Because of the steam trains they obviously had to make room for ventilation and so these voids exist along the length of the tunnel.  There’s another one right next to this one. 

This open expanse of hedges and paving isn’t so much a lovely space to relax and more of a practical solution. Those Victorian tunnel builders were still learning their craft, and so they dug a relatively shallow hole. It’s created a tender zone where you can't build.  In fact it's worse than that.  A sign on one of the voids warns that you need a permit to operate heavy vehicles in the area, purely to stop trucks from plummeting onto a Pendolino.

In an ideal world there'd be a station here so that all the students could get easy access to the railway.  The sheer volume of trains using these tracks make that difficult, though a suggestion pops up now and then to much head shaking from Network Rail.  

It did make me think though.  Nearly five years ago I followed the routes of the Waterloo and Victoria tunnels, two disused freight tunnels that pass under the city.  They solved the ventilation problem by creating towers to suck the smoke up and out and distribute it over the heads of poor people.  The shafts are still there, though in 2017 two of them were inaccessible, hidden behind the fences round the former Archbishop Blanch school and basically a building site.

Now that's developing into a new district, Paddington Village; there's a college, a multi-storey car park, an office block and a Novotel opening soon, with work underway on more to come.  It occurred to me that the ventilation towers might be more accessible now.  I walked up to Grove Street and there it was.

A round circle of brick in the middle of a plaza, right outside the entrance to the Royal College of Physicians and surrounded by fancy seating and planting.  There was no sign to tell you what it was.  It was simply a mysterious cylinder, plonked outside all the gleaming new buildings, a historic artefact breaking through.

Its sibling hadn't fared as well.  As with the University Precinct, the tall buildings of Paddington Village have to avoid the tunnels underneath the site.  The foundations for multiple storied hotels would slice straight through them and, even though they've been out of use for decades, nobody really wants to give up completely and fill them in.  The result is another wide open plaza, but with steps and ramps built in to process the changes in levels over the site.  The second ventilation shaft has seemingly ended up buried inside the landscaping and now barely pokes above ground, surrounded by planting.

I turned round and looked out as the sun came down.  One advantage of Liverpool facing west is it gets awesome sunsets and suddenly, briefly, I was looking down over a golden city, its buildings glowing, its towers and crowns on fire.  I trotted down the steps and returned to ground level.  There had to be a pub round here somewhere.

Heritage

There are many things wrong with Britain.  Brexit.  The Tories.  James Corden.  But the thing that annoys me most, the streak that runs through this country like a poisoned vein, the thing that is in its own way responsible for a lot of the other ills, is nostalgia.  Nostalgia for the past, nostalgia for your own personal past, nostalgia for a time that existed only in the imagination.  

Look, I get it: Britain is old.  And we've got a lot of history.  Every now and then someone on Twitter will post a really interesting story with "why didn't we learn this in history class?!?!" and my answer is, where do you fit it in?  I did History until I was 14 (I dropped it for Geography at GCSE, got an A, don't mind me) and I know full well that I have massive gaps in my knowledge of this country.  Everything between William the Conqueror and the Hundred Years War.  Most of my knowledge of the Georgian period I get from The Madness of King George and Blackadder III.  Teaching concentrates on the big hitters - the Romans, Magna Carta, the feudal system (those damn crop rotations) and the Peasant's Revolt, the Tudors and Stuarts and the English Civil War, the Victorians, the Second World War.  You've got to somehow cram two thousand years of history into the heads of bored children - go for the interesting stuff; they can learn about William IV or the Anglo-Dutch War in their own time if they're that bothered.

It's World War II: Electric Boogaloo that's got its greatest grip on the country's brain, probably because Churchill came up with Our Finest Hour and gave it a natty tagline.  I stepped out of my hotel in Blaenau Ffestiniog and found a town square made up to look like the 1940s.  There were sandbags and tape on the windows.  There was jitterbug music playing.  There were people who were far too young to have been in the war - far too young to have been in the Falklands War - wearing khaki and with their hair in rollers and dancing around.

Yes, it was a great period for this country, in terms of us helping to save the continent from Fascism.  Absolutely.  But it was also bloody miserable.  People who lived through the war had rationing and doodlebugs and relatives being killed and blackouts and way too much Gracie Fields.  It wasn't a six year party.  And here they were turning it into a theme park, a fun morning for all the family, get yourself a genuine wartime cake from the stall on the right (not actually genuine because it wasn't made with powdered eggs and you didn't have to save up three months of coupons to be able to make it but anyway).

I wasn't in the mood.  I wasn't in the mood to ride the nostalgia pony.  I'm sure everyone on the town council thought it was just a bit of fun, and the tourists probably loved it, but I found it annoying and wanted to get away from it.  I wandered round the town itself.  The brief impression I'd got the night before - that this was a town at the end of the world - felt even more true on a Sunday morning.  The narrow streets were deserted.  The shops were closed.  Above us, raw, grey rock loomed, making every view sinister.

I'd pretty much done the whole village in half an hour, so I wound my way back to the station square, where (unsurprisingly) Vera Lynn was playing, and bought a ticket for the Ffestiniog Railway.  It shares its location with the National Rail station, the two tracks laying alongside one another.  But while the Conwy Valley Line platform is perfunctory and ordinary, the Ffestiniog Railway is full on nostalgia.  Red and cream paint and wooden overhangs, ironwork and men in starched uniforms.  I sighed deeply and plunged in.

The Ffestiniog was built as a narrow gauge railway in the 19th century to carry slate from the mountains down to the docks at Porthmadog.  It soon attracted attention as a tourist attraction, with special passenger trains slotted in between the working trains, but after the war it was declared surplus to requirements and closed permanently.  A band of volunteers immediately sprang up to restore it, carefully bringing its trains and tracks back to life, even digging a new tunnel after the Central Electricity Board flooded the old route of the railway with a reservoir, and now it's one of Wales's biggest tourist attractions.  They even bought the West Highland Railway from Caernarvon, the two lines dovetailing at Porthmadog.  

I bought my ticket and loitered on the platform.  Regular readers will know I'm not really a fan of heritage railways.  The most interesting thing about a steam train is seeing it in full flight, and the problem with actually riding one is you can't see the engine unless you're willing to lean out of the window on a dangerous curve and risk being decapitated by a signal post.  It's nostalgia again, the conviction that steam trains were somehow better and more romantic as they belched out smoke and noise and embers that set fire to the washing of homes that backed onto the line.

The difference between the Ffestiniog Railway and other heritage routes, however, is that it serves an actual purpose as a link across Wales.  The regular railway ends at Blaenau Ffestiniog, so getting from, say, Conwy to Barmouth by train means going out to Chester, changing, heading south, then back through the middle of Wales to work your way up again.  A distance of 40 miles as the crow flies becomes a 150 mile round trip.  Time your journey right, however, and the Ffestiniog Railway lets you cut the corner off Wales.  It's still a faff, but it's an important enough link to get marked on the official rail maps, unlike any other of the heritage routes in the country.

As I stood on the platform I realised I hadn't taken a picture of me in front of the station sign.  I didn't fancy venturing out of the station now I'd bought a ticket in case they didn't let me back in so I'm afraid a platform sign will have to do you.  It's definitely there, you just have to squint a bit.  Complaints to the usual address, where they will be ignored.

A train chugged into the station, tiny but noisy, and we all lined up to respectfully take our pictures.  After a good deal of shunting and shifting it returned with some carriages and the scrum for seats began.

I picked a wooden carriage, rather than one of the sumptuous ones.  I thought I was getting a more "authentic" experience, plus there was a better chance that I'd not have to share a seat.  I installed myself at the back.  In front of me were two compartments, with upholstered bench seats stretching the width of the carriage.  An elderly couple took the very front one, then in the middle, a noisy Brummie family with teen children and a tiny spaniel.  They clattered in as the conductor came to inspect our tickets.  Obviously I couldn't find mine - it had stuck to the back of my phone - but he said "I trust you," and locked the door to the compartment.  There was a triumphant toot of the engine and then we were away, furiously barrelling out of the station and round the back of the town.

"It goes to Porthmadog, apparently," Dad read off the leaflet.

"What's that?" asked the Son.  Dad ignored him, and told them there'd be an hour's wait at the terminus until the train back.  The Son looked stricken.  "Will there be a shop?"  Meanwhile Mum lifted the dog - Oscar - up above the wooden side so he could get a better view.

The train clung to the edge of the mountain, letting us peer down into back gardens.  We poured down the hillside, following roads and rivers, sliding under bridges.  The railway was designed to use gravity as much as possible to help it down to the coast and it felt it, a slightly giddy air of falling as the train moved along.

Slow into the first station and the driver went to fetch his token to proceed.  The Brummies looked confused.  "Is that it?"  They moved to open the door to the carriage, but then the train jerked into life again, and we continued on our way.  The reservoir appeared with its squat brick control room.  There was a waterfall, almost comically beautiful, like it had been laid on by Disney, but I could see that the upper reaches of the reservoir were dry as the summer heat took hold.  Some hikers by the water paused and waved at the train, and then we disappeared into a tunnel.  Historic looking green shades illuminated us, though the bulbs underneath were modern LED; I expect they have received some furious letters from passengers protesting about the inauthenticity.

The route became lusher, harsh mountainsides giving way to thick woodlands barely a foot from our carriage.  Light filtered down through the foliage.  Mum turned to the Son.  "Sean.  Will you take a picture of me and the dog?"

At Dduallt - a name so Welsh it comes with a free daffodil - the line spiralled, turning a tight curve.  Instead of a simple right hand turn it instead did a 270 degree twist until you passed underneath the line you'd come in on.  I'd wondered, as we'd ridden along the line, why they hadn't simply converted it to standard gauge and made it an extension of the Conwy Valley Line rather than closing it completely.  Mad feats of engineering like this made me understand why.

We passed through Campbell's Platform, a private halt, without stopping, and got a glimpse of a castle on the horizon.  Or was it another power station?  It was hard to tell.  The trees twisted then thinned as a frothing white stream.  The valley was astonishingly steep, almost vertical, and the cars below looked tiny and insignificant.  The Brummies broke out the crisps.  They seemed confused by the concept of intermediate stations; I think they had it in their head that this was like a theme park ride, a very long rollercoaster on its way to Porthmadog.  Another tunnel, another lake - smaller, but natural - then we were pulling into Tanybwlch station between a rock face and a wall.

The bearded guard strode the platform, calling out the name, as we paused.  It was a rare strip of double track so this was where trains heading north could cross trains heading south.  Oscar the dog let out an impressive fart that made Mum giggle as the other train pulled in.  It was the David Lloyd George, red and shiny, far more impressive than our pootling little truck.  The engineers began refilling its engine with water as a woman walked along the platform with a box of Magnums, selling them through the window.  

We set off again through more woodland.  Below us in the valley were hikers on a path and I wished I was down there instead of up here.  After a while a train journey becomes a blur, just a load of magnificent scenery and a slowly numbing arse.  I pulled a peanut butter KitKat Chunky out of my bag and chewed on it as yet another impossibly scenic river rolled beneath us.  The Dad leaned out the window to take a picture, and revealed a good few inches of unnecessary buttock cleavage.

For a while we sped along at a breakneck pace, passing tiny sidings and the odd cottage.  We were moving out of the mountains now, into more tame farmland, as a herd of sheep appeared, grazing on wild grass.  The trees looked domesticated and maintained.  There were the outskirts of a village, then a level crossing, and the Son exclaimed "we're here!".  He was quite wrong of course; this was Penrhyn station.  His sister, incidentally, had been virtually mute the entire trip; the reason became clear when she began rooting around in her mum's handbag for travel sickness pills.  Meanwhile the two old people at the front finally broke their silence to admire the flowers on the platform. 

We were above the rooftops, lodged in the mountain still, but compared with the isolated Blaenau this felt almost suburban.  We moved on down the line, smoke steaming past our noses and filling our lungs, and then we were at Minffordd.  I broke into a grin.  This was familiar territory; I'd been to this station before, in 2012, when I'd worked my way along the Cambrian lines.  I'd got off there and walked to Porthmadog, but this time I rode the train, past the noisy clatter of a quarry and the works for the railway.  Acres of sidings and steel.  The volunteers paused to wave at us as we approached; some of them were barely teenagers.  Another generation of railway nerds.  We paused before the sweep across the Cob at the entrance to the bay and the Son looked around him forlornly.  "Is this it?"

Then we moved across the water, barely above the surface, and into Porthmadog station.  I unfolded myself from my seat.  I could barely feel anything below the waist - I hoped my legs wouldn't collapse as I climbed out.  The teenagers disembarked and looked around them with barely disguised disgust.  This was it, kids; enjoy your one hour until you have to do the whole thing again in reverse.  Hope you can at least find something in the gift shop.

Porthmadog remained as charming as I remembered it, a little touristy perhaps, but that's the problem with being beautiful; you attract admirers.  Blaenau Ffestiniog didn't seem to attract overwhelming quantities of tourists, put it that way.  I was glad I'd finally ridden the Ffestiniog Railway, but also glad I'd never have to do it again.  Nostalgia can be exhausting.

Fire Walk With Me

I have a gas fire in my living room.  It was operated by remote control, but that stopped working about five years ago, and ever since then we've been all "we really should get that fixed."  Well, a week or so ago, we finally got a man out to look at it, and he said "oh dear GOD, what was installed here, this is all ILLEGAL, you have no chimney liner, you're lucky you weren't GASSED."  Which was quite an afternoon, let me tell you.

So we ended up in Saltney looking at replacement fires and, as is my wont, I ended up looking at railway stations.  Saltney is a small town on the very edge of Chester.  It bleeds across the border from Wales into England; the English side is classier looking, but the Welsh side has an Asda, so who's the real winner?  (When I worked for Chester Council I used to get people who'd bought properties in Saltney phoning up to register with us and they were almost inevitably horrified when I informed them they were on the Welsh side).

The appropriately named Boundary Lane is the actual border between the two countries, but it's easier to refer to the railway line as a marker post.  The Chester to Shrewsbury line shadows the border on its way up from Wrexham and at Saltney it's a handy demarcation point.  The line then progresses to Saltney Junction, where it joins up with the North Wales Line and proceeds into Chester station.

As a town on the edge of a conurbation, where a large river prevents easy road access to the city centre, you'd expect Saltney to have its own commuter railway station.  And it did, for nearly a hundred and twenty years, from 1846 to 1960, when the passenger station was closed.  The goods yard was shut up seven years later, and since then, the only way to get from Saltney to the centre of Chester is via road across the congested Grosvenor Bridge. 

What's left on the site of the railway station is a business park that has, in a kind of twisted logic, been named after the railways.  The Sidings features four buildings; Great Western House (the former carriage repair shop), plus Mallard House, Pullman House and Scotsman House.  It's as if they built a housing estate on top of Hyde Park then named all the roads after the trees that were chopped down to build it.

Obviously, the world of Britain in the 1960s was a very different place.  Trains were big annoying steam things that were a hundred years old; you had to follow their lines and their timetables and buy a ticket.  They didn't have the freedom of the car.  Now, as you edge through a traffic-choked Curzon Park to the Chester ring road and hope and pray you can find a space and then pay an exorbitant sum of money for the privilege, the idea of a fast train into town seems very appealing.

Strangely, there's never been much of an idea to reopen Saltney station.  I did find a twelve year old report suggesting that opening a station at Lache, a mile or so to the south, might be an idea; that would enable a park and ride facility, and would be close to the Chester Business Park and a proposed bypass.  The fact that the only mention I can find of this station is in a twelve year old document should give you a clue about how active a proposal it actually is, though I really hope it gets built, because then Chester will have a station to the north called Bache and a station to the south called Lache and that kind of thing amuses me.

So there you go: Saltney.  It used to have a station, now it has a small business park.  As for the fire, we've decided to get an electric stove.  The good thing about electric stoves is they don't murder you while you sleep.