Day 19 – Pennine Crossing
Bradford to Blackpool
I've stayed in all kinds of accommodation on this journey so far – fancy hotels, tatty seaside guest houses, soul-less city 'travel lodges' - but few have been quite as foul as the hotel I stayed in last night. This was a large, imposing pub with rooms upstairs that may have been busy with commercial travellers in the 1930's but which today appear seldom-used. They were gloomy and depressing, the early 70’s wallpaper and nylon carpets faded and revoltingly stained, yet that isn't the worst of it.
It was the penetrating smell.
The whole building had the aroma of an un-emptied ash tray and clearly hadn’t been decorated (or possibly even cleaned) since the ban on smoking in public buildings was enacted, and almost certainly not for the previous five decades. If it hadn’t been absolutely raining torrents last night then I would have turned on my heel and found somewhere better - a motorway underpass, perhaps. Instead, I wake up feeling depressed, grubby and like I'd spent the night in a spittoon.
If anything, breakfast is even worse.
It's appearance was... well, it resembled an autopsy carried out by a drunken tree surgeon which, bearing in mind it was entirely vegetarian, really was some achievement. It was astonishing bad, and quite visibly so. But the chef who served me looked, if anything, even more dangerous so I decided to give it go. I picked up my knife and fork, cautiously slid the budget hash brown to one side of my plate on its snail-like slick of oil and grimly tackled the rest, taking care to rinse regularly with copious amounts of dark, strong tea.
The rushing noise I can now hear in my ears is not the sound of the busy Bradford traffic outside, it's the sound of my blood groaning under the calorific load of all that grease. Or perhaps it's my arteries straining under the weight of cholesterol they are having to pump around.
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| Bradford city centre |
All of which explains why I am at Bradford's new bus interchange quite a lot earlier than I expected to be. Frankly, I need to put some distance between myself and last night's hotel and I certainly need the fresh air.
I arrive to find my Keighley and District bus waiting for me and I leap smartly aboard. To my surprise, this modest single decker has comfortable leather coach seats, an unexpected touch of luxury which presumably means there is competition from other operators on this route.
Such comfort has not always been a given. The first motor buses ran on solid tyres, and had rudimentary suspension and hard wooden seats to boot. They were also noisy, thanks to their chain-driven transmission system. The arrival of the London General Omnibus Company's own B Type bus in 1910 changed all that, though.
The 'General' was actually an amalgamation of three companies which had come together to form by far the largest, and therefore most profitable, bus operator in the country. The new company had a real mixed bag of vehicles though and they soon realised that efficiencies could be had by standardising the fleet. So they took all the best features from their various Wolseleys, Straker-Squires, De Dions and Milnes-Daimlers and asked another member of their amalgamation, Vanguard, which had its own bus works in Walthamstow, to have a go at combining them all into one design.
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| B Type off to war |
I settle into my leather seat and watch as Bradford slowly unfolds. This appears to be a city of slightly faded grandeur, of stately Victorian buildings, of theatres, grandiose pubs and palatial hotels. Yet travel just a few metres out of the city centre and it seems that much of Bradford is mouldering away. There are empty shops everywhere, once proud buildings with trees growing out of their stonework and abandoned houses. It's a depressing sight.
My road out of the city also passes through Bradford’s more affluent outer suburbs, including Saltaire with its mill just below it in the dale. This is a similar 'model community' to that established by George Cadbury at Bourneville in the Midlands, which only goes to show what money can achieve when its put to good use.
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| Keighley |
The road runs up the south side of Airedale to Keighley, a busy, sooty little town with its houses scattered over the valley floor and surrounding hills. Like many British towns and cities, Keighley was crudely remodelled in the 1960s and lost many of its historic buildings. It managed to cling to some of its heritage, though, including its attractive cast iron and glass canopies over its pavements.
Keighley was also home to Ezra Laycock, a village postman and local coal merchant who developed a profitable side-line carrying people and parcels as well as coal. Overhearing a group of businessmen talking about a new invention called a motor bus then plying the streets of London, Ezra decided he had to have one and promptly set off for London. He searched all over London but he somehow failed to spot a single bus. Some kind soul then recommended that he go to Brighton, where after yet more searching he finally spotted one. The result was an order for a Milnes-Daimler single decker but fitted with the larger engine from the double deck model to cope with the steep Pennine hills he'd have to travel over.
Ezra was so excited about his new purchase that he took 18 of his family and friends to London to collect it. The return journey back to Yorkshire took them four days, at that time the longest bus journey ever attempted in Britain. Affectionately dubbed 'The Monster', the bus was a huge success and more soon followed. Laycock's would eventually become a sizeable rural bus operator, the name only disappearing in 1972 when the company was bought by another operator.
At Keighley I transfer to another K&D bus to take me higher up the dale to Skipton. The scenery is now noticeably greener with buttercup-filled meadows carpeting the broad valley floor under a huge widening sky as the road climbs onto the tops and leaves the confines of the dale behind.
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| Skipton bus station |
The town of Skipton sits high in the Pennines against a backdrop of grey hills yet it shares one obvious similarity with busy Hemel Hempstead. Like Hemel, this has always been something of a place to pass through. Skipton sits on the intersection of the busy A65 linking Leeds to the Lake District and the equally busy A59 York to Liverpool road, and is also a major stop on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. This, and the area’s previous abundance of sheep, helped to cement Skipton’s role as a marketplace and today it retains much of that purposeful air of a market town. It’s a busy little place, brushed clean by the fresh heathery breeze blowing off the nearby hills.
It's time to switch to the Ribble Valley Express, something that sounds straight out of an old cowboy film, albeit one based in Lancashire. From here its westward, downhill all the way to Preston. Not northward, you'll notice. I'll get to that.
It's soon obvious why they call this bus an express. We are positively barrelling along, our driver throwing his bus boisterously at each and every corner through a similarly boisterous grassy upland, with only the occasional mill chimney poking out above the trees to remind us that we are still in a land that, despite the fine views, was once more famous for its industry than for its farming. Crikey. Are we meant to be going this fast? The countryside is practically a blur, with the moorland skyline little more than a pencil sketch of farms huddled under trees and miles of dry stone walls snaking over the horizon.
We slow and enter Lancashire at Barnoldswick, a small town filled with purple slated terraces swirled around a huge mill chimney, with the massive Pendle Hill looming just beyond the rooftops. We barely have time to enjoy the view before we are arriving in Clitheroe.
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| Clitheroe |
Now, I'd somehow grown up with the notion that Clitheroe might be a place of stone, muck and smoke so I'm surprised to instead find an attractive town of narrow streets and with a romantically-ruined castle perched high above it. Wedged picturesquely between Pendle Hill and the Forest of Bowland - a misnomer, possibly, given its windy moorland tops are mostly tree-less, but it’s an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty nonetheless – Clitheroe is a smashing little place, and in fact the whole area a complete revelation. So many views, so many trees and meadows, so many hills and uplands, and I had no idea that any of this was here. This might possibly be Britain’s best kept secret.
And speaking of secrets, the town played an odd role in the history of wartime aviation as it was near here that the Rover Motor Company set up a top secret factory to develop Frank Whittle’s revolutionary new jet engine - so secret, in fact, that apparently they didn't even tell Frank Whittle about it. Although Rover was meant to be working closely with Whittle's company Power Jets on developing Whittle's design, it was an open secret that neither side saw eye to eye. So at one point, Rover was secretly carrying out its own development of Whittle's engine well out of the way of what they probably saw as its meddling designer. The town's association with one of the most important inventions of the 20th century is commemorated in a street name - Whittle Close – but it seems little else.
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| Forest of Bowland. Where's the trees? |
A little to the north east of here is the village of Dunsop Bridge, and a little to the north of that is the Whitendale Hanging Stones high on the Bowland moors. I mention this because there are some who believe that these mark the exact geographic centre of Great Britain. As we have already seen, geographers can get terribly excited about such things and locals with an eye on the tourist pound even moreso. Not everyone agrees that the true centre of Britain is a series of wind-carved rocks above Clitheroe, however, of which more later...
Onwards again, down the long valley of the Ribble to Whalley Bridge where the valley suddenly broadens and the fast level run into Preston begins.
Preston was granted city status in 2002, becoming England's 50th city in the 50th year of Queen Elizabeth II's reign. It has a long and surprising history. For example, the last major battle on English soil was fought here in 1715. Preston was the first English town outside London to be lit by gas. Charles Dickens' based his Coketown, the bleak smoky setting for his novel 'Hard Times', on Preston after he made a visit here in January 1854. The term ‘teetotalism’ is believed to have been first coined at a meeting of the Preston Temperance Society. Britain's very first motorway opened here in 1958, with Britain's first traffic cones being used during its construction. Preston was also home to Britain's very first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet.
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| Preston Indoor Market |
None of which really adequately explains why Preston's city centre is quite so grim. I get off the bus and wander off in search of a sandwich and find myself in a shopping centre which even by sixties architectural standards is impressively dismal – acres of sour concrete, miles of stained and grimy walkways, gloomy shops, a clammy subterranean market. It feels like a city which has fought it’s very own War of the Worlds against the concrete mixer and the dapper 60’s architect, and lost.
Yet just a few steps beyond all this brutal concrete I find what were once honest and pleasingly old-fashioned shopping streets, though a little world weary today. The mighty Town Hall has to be one of the most impressive civic buildings in the realm, and the massive Market Hall with its towering canopy of Victorian cast iron is, to my mind, one of Britain’s great unappreciated gems, even if some of the wares on sale on the market stalls below it are a little less impressive.
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| Preston bus station |
Preston has clearly been so knocked about by developers and architects over the years so it’s probably not surprising that people viewed proposals for a new major development called Tithebarn with deep suspicion. At the centre of this controversial proposal was the demolition of one of Preston’s most celebrated and most unloved structures, its bus station.
Wedged beneath a concrete multi-storey car park, the sheer scale of Preston's bus station – it can handle more than 70 buses at one time – gives it a sort of heroic stature. The pedestrian areas inside are a wilderness of cracked tile and peeling paint, though. None of the information screens seem to work, not even the clock, so finding the right bus probably owes as much to good luck as personal persistence. Access is via underground tunnels too grim to describe. There are many who would joyfully tear it all down, and I can understand why. Yet such an act would be a tragedy. Despite its unloved appearance and its soiled, flaking decrepitude, this is a transport interchange which could, with just a little care, be one of the very best. It's badly neglected, yes, but it is spacious and well-organised and has every facility a traveller could desire. And the car park above it doesn't look half as bad as some multi-stories I've seen. Keep it, I say, but give it a wash.
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| Passenger information, Preston |
I said Preston was the site of the last battle on English soil, but that’s not strictly true. In June 2007, Preston became the centre of a war every bit as savage as the English Civil War only this time it was between Preston Bus, the former council-owned bus company, and Stagecoach, a company with a somewhat war-like reputation. Stagecoach had originally offered to buy Preston Bus but were rebuffed, so they expressed their disappointment by introducing their own services in direct competition on some of Preston’s most lucrative routes. It was a tactic intended to hurt Preston Bus, and it did. A price war broke out and things turned ugly.
Passengers began complaining about fleets of buses which would turn up at bus stops within minutes of one another, and of 'bus bouncers' and spies from the two companies lurking at stops around the city. They even began filming one another. One former Stagecoach worker claimed he had spent weeks filming Preston buses and that his colleagues would see when Preston Bus services got to a particular stop and then radio back to base to get one of their own buses in front or behind it. Accusations of bus stop blocking - where drivers either deliberately block in their rivals or prevent them from using a bus stop - were also made. Eggs were hurled. The war eventually came to a head when the local Traffic Commissioner ordered a public inquiry and demanded that both firms clean up their act or else.
The outcome, of course, was wholly predictable. Out-competed on its most lucrative routes, Preston Bus couldn’t sustain its financial losses and in January 2009 sold out to Stagecoach for a reported £6.4m.
That wasn’t the end of the story, however. Enter, unexpectedly, the Office of Fair Trading who had seen what had happened here and elsewhere and was concerned what impact the Stagecoach deal might have on competition in the city. The OFT spoke to passengers, travel groups and rival operators, then the Competition Commission conducted an investigation which concluded that Stagecoach’s acquisition of Preston Bus had reduced competition and was therefore potentially harmful to passengers interests. The only way to safeguard passenger interests was, they said, to restore competition and they ordered Stagecoach to sell Preston Bus. A little more than a year later, they did just that, for half what they had originally paid.
I leave Preston aboard the 68 to Blackpool but this proves to be a tiresome affair. Its late afternoon and the roads out of the town are clogged by traffic lights and parked cars, with the driver having to stop repeatedly for oncoming traffic. We inch our way forward in irritable jerks and lurches, out of Preston and onto the flat coastal plain running down to the sea and towards tonight's overnight halt in Blackpool. We could almost be in a Dutch landscape painting, with green fields as flat as billiard tables dotted with placid cows every few yards. Apart from the vast acres of caravan sites between the cows, that is.
We run through Lytham, a near clone of some of the south coast towns I travelled through earlier on my journey – sort of Bognor with a Lancashire accent. It’s quaint and spotless and it’s obviously somewhere people retire to. There’s even a fish and chip restaurant called ‘Seniors’.
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| Blackpool |
To our left is the vast expanse of the sea; you can see for miles and miles, which is a pity really as there’s actually nothing to see apart from open water. Inland it is all twee housing estates and monkey puzzle trees until we get to Lytham St Anne’s where there is yet more South Coast cloning, only this time there is a pier, too. Then its onto the seafront past tall villas and apartment blocks, an abandoned holiday camp on one side, sand dunes and a glimpse of the sea on the other. Ahead is the monstrous Pepsi Max rollercoaster on Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach, with the more modest Blackpool Tower just behind. We have arrived in Blackpool.
I have to admit I'm not really a Blackpool person. It's all rather noisy for my tastes, but I've a job to do. I'm here to ride on the oldest tram system in Britain and to stay in a typical Blackpool guest house. I'll probably buy a stick of rock, too. And eat fish and chips on the beach, and buy a 'My wife went to Blackpool and all I got was this crappy t-shirt' t-shirt, and a 'Kiss Me Quick – Squeeze Me Slowly' hat. Might even ride on a donkey, a roller coaster maybe.
Or maybe not.
Evening in Blackpool and it is raining in that irritating, summery sort of way so fish and chips on the beach is out. Fortunately, I soon find the next best thing – a fish and chip restaurant overlooking the promenade. I make my way optimistically inside and find a table near a large extended family busily having their supper. There appears to be at least four generations all quietly helping each other to vinegar and buttered bread in a well-practiced and businesslike manner.
“Aw’right, love. What can a get ya...?”
The name tag on her pinny says Mavis. She wields a pencil stub in the way a surgeon wields a scalpel and she has a damp cloth tucked conveniently in the front of her pinny. I like her immediately.
“Oh, cod and chips, please,” I reply. We begin to explore the menu.
“Would you like mushy peas, love?”
“Oh, yes,” I reply. She nods approvingly.
“Pickled onions?”
“Yes please.” She gives a conspiratorial wink.
“Do you want your bread white or brown?”
“Oh, brown I think.”
Quite right too, her expression seems to say.
“Tea or coffee?”
“Pot of tea, please.”
Mavis finishes her scribbling with a ‘Right, love..”, gives the table an expert wipe with her cloth, summons up a knife and fork as if out of thin air and she is gone, leaving a faint hint of perfume and disinfectant behind her.
Afterwards, as I make my way along the drying promenade, I am struck by the similarities between Blackpool and another seaside town I’d already passed through, Bournemouth – though I doubt whether the gentile residents of Bournemouth’s would necessarily welcome the comparison. Both have piers, of course. Like Bournemouth, Blackpool was also a seaside hamlet until the 18th century when it was discovered by well-to-do fashionistas. And, like its southern cousin, its popularity quickly spread.
In Blackpool’s case, this was largely the result of Thomas Clifton and Sir Henry Hoghton’s efforts. In 1781, they built a tollroad connecting Blackpool to the outside world and within a year, the town was welcoming a regular stagecoach from Manchester, and from Halifax a year later. However, the town’s real growth began when the railways reached Blackpool in 1840 and the Georgian fondness for a seaside holiday could at last be embraced by the masses.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
NEXT: Blackpool – Kirkby Stephen - where I avoid being beaten up by Hell's Angels in Blackpool, give myself a severe case of the willies by walking into Morecambe Bay and take a spectacular ride across the Lake District on a bus service that has its own book.
Map courtesy of those awfully nice people at Google
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