Now that the wife has gone – though admittedly, only to train with that wild, smiling beast Nicki, Mr DD has done a bit of travelling. As well as going to see a little bit of posh on Monday, Tuesday was taken with a trip to the North West, centred on Manchester. So here’s what I did.
Pendelino from Euston. Not been on one of these to date and many of my more travelled friends have complained about their uncomfortable journeys. Humbug! They are extremely pleasing trains with nice seats and a smooth, quiet ride. I don’t think anything can beat the old HST style coaches for comfort, but these are a good, modern effort towards that end.
Metrolink to Bury. I’ve done this journey a few times before and like it for its ‘London-ness’ in that it feels like a journey to Chingford. But with better connections at the other end. At Bowker Vale, some mong threw a firework into the nearly empty car. Driver unimpressed and he did call police, but what can you do about this? Similar happened on a school trip I took in 1984 to Paris (on Bastille Day). Note to Metrolink – sort out your bloody ticket machines. Some supercomputers need less effort to make them work.
Bury to Bolton. Bus round the long way to Bolton as I realised that I’d never seen the North country (as opposed to say, Liverpool or Manchester city) than by any means of transport than by train, and hadn’t a clue as to what the anonymous wee towns between the big ones are like. I almost went to Rawtenstall, but I noticed there was only one route there and back, whereas Bolton was nearer to Manchester (I aimed to be on the 1915 back to London) and there were about six routes. So it was a 480 Rossendale bus. What strikes me about this semi-urban-ness is how raw it still looks. The countryside between is nice, but the towns with their little red brick houses and tree-less roads bring to mind the feeling you get after an LSD trip or a really serious hangover when coming home blasted on a Sunday morning. Perhaps I’m just seeing it through Southern-wanker eyes, but there seems to be an ‘unfinished’ element about the urban North. Prescott would like to demolish all this. Why? Those houses would fetch a small fortune in the South, being described as “bijou” and “compact”. My earlier comment may sound like a bit of a sleight, but I rather like these places, and can see why southerners piss off from Fulham or Southend and the freaking mad rat-race we’ve got ourselves into down here. What’s needed in these small towns is more prettification: more trees, flowers etc, costing almost nothing. Then we need a rebalancing of the economy so that the South isn’t the centre of the universe and houses like ours, which are nothing special, and pretty damn poky, don’t go for the price of some African countries’ GDPs. Bolton could be the new Guildford, since the only difference lies in the preponderance of millionaires in Guildford.
The countryside round abouts, what little I saw of it, seemed much like countryside anywhere else – perhaps I imagined huge slag-heaps and infertile, blighted fields. I should laugh at my own ignorance, and my naivete proves, if nothing else, that I need to go out more.
The real jewel in the crown of my trip was Bolton. I’ve read that it contains the second most deprived ward in the UK and so imagined it to be like Deptford with all the good bits taken out. A sort of grey brutalist-Modernist pound-shop city with abandoned shopping centres and Morlock-esque people dressed in scuzzy, beer-stained trackies. The usual pound-shops there were, but the city centre is a gem of a place with a real sense of civic pride, a good collection of old (the refurb’d market hall) and the new. I was pleasantly amused by the stone baby heffalumps at the southern end of the town centre. I liked the Russian-sounding bell (perhaps emanating from the town hall, I only heard one chime). I like the size, which gives the sense of being a self-contained town, but near another larger one, so it has nearly everything you need within walking distance but without all the problems of scale you get living in a large city. .
Bolon Market Hall
I really, really like the singy songy accent, which lies somewhere between East Lancs and Manc-proper and easier on the lugs than rough Manchester. I’m not sure about job prospects here, whether the housing is any good, whether it’s a scarier place to be than Romford on a Saturday night, but in the daytime, in the centre, it’s a place I’d be very content to be. One of those places from which you expect little, and when your expectations are well exceeded, feels quite warmly towards afterwards. Nearly Guildford, then. As I would like Guildford too were it not full of pretentious bastards.
Bolton Town Centre
I’ll just mention briefly the train journey back to Mancunia. Behind me, on the Trans-Pennine Express, were two Indian lads with mongphones. Now, the public playing of MP3 phones on any form of public transport should be punishable by having one’s nether regions shaved with sandpaper impregnated with iron filings and hydrochloric acid, but these guys I had to admire – quietly - for their inventiveness. One fellow would fire up a Punjabi vocoder classic (does anyone actually sing any more? Pitch shifters are everywhere in music now!) Then his mate would play the same tune. They were obviously trying to synchronise tracks, but alas (and I’ve tried doing the same and thus realise how hard it is) couldn’t do it quite right. So the one version of the tune was about one quarter of a second behind the other, causing a Doppler-ish echo. One was waving his blower around his head, and although I’ll be a much happier man when someone invents a Bluetooth jamming device for these blots on humanity, I just had to grin.
The rest of the trip consisted of doing the various tram routes. I didn’t really have time for proper exploration, but I can say now that Altrincham and Eccles have been seen. I wish I had been given enough time to blunder round Eccles, which looked OK too, but alas, time was against me and after a whistle stop pick-up-some-food shopping at Morrisons, I took the tram back to Piccadilly, the Pendelino, and home.
Metrolink trams as the sun goes down
My overall impression is that Manchester, a city I haven’t been massively predisposed to, at least compared to its rival, Liverpool, is on the up and looking sharp, disposing with, at long last, its down-at-heel vibe which always seem to suggest barely suppressed violence and dysfunction lurking under the surface. I always had the impression that it was jealous of London. If city could claim to have a soul, well, at long last, this place has realised that it can do things differently and at least as equally well as the capital. Small things I noticed: pink bulbs have replaced the orange sodium streetlights in the centre. Big deal, you cry, but these orange babies do make a place look murky, even sinister, at night. I can’t imagine today the sense of brooding depression I might have felt a few years ago wandering just off Oxford Road with the somewhat austere buildings (which still are austere and long may they remain so) lit by a brown light-fog, rain tap-tap-tapping on your shoulder and a Smiths tune playing in your head. To me, the appearance of the place is as radical as the one, which changed the London docks during the late 80s. Redevelopment for its own sake can be a double-edged sword and as you can see by the diminishing quantity of East End locals (who have now moved to Essex and beyond), it’s sometimes done without any thought for the indigenous population. But central Manchester is looking well, content with itself, and is destined to rise even further. London and Manchester will always be friendly rivals, but there is something to be said for being a second city (remember the Avis rent-a-car advert’s slogan: “Avis – we try harder”. London may arrogantly think it has it all – and it is a world city there is no doubt – but that doesn’t mean its brasher Northern sister isn’t capable of knocking it down with a better way of doing things. One thing that Manchester has that London does not is city centre living. Now, if only London could pull that feat off, it would feel like an entirely different place. And its true: Mancs really are friendlier, with three people in a space of a few hours getting into conversation with me without my prompting. This happens extremely rarely in the South.
As John Shuttleworth says: Manchester – long may it rain.
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