round the rails we go

Green Park

2026-08-10T13:04:51.022+01:00

I never want to hear Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" again. No, I'll rephrase that: I don't need to hear Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" again. I'm done. I've heard every single variation on it, every version, a different chord arrangement, done fast, done slow; I've heard it. I don't need to hear it again. And I certainly don't need to hear it played on an acoustic guitar on a train in Italy at nine in the morning.

(Here are some other songs I do not ever need to hear again: Robbie Williams' "Angels", Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline", literally anything by Billy Joel. I know you're probably adding "Don't Look Back In Anger" to that list but I have a very fond memory of spontaneously singing that with a coach of students in 1995 as we headed back from a night out at Manhattan's, Southport, and so I can never really hate it).

The point is I was not in the mood for a metro busker, though, if I'm honest, I never am. She strolled up and down the train, warbling "Hallelujah", trying to catch our eye so we'd be guilted into handing over a couple of coins. Trapping someone on a train - on a train that is an going a relatively long way without stopping at a station to let you escape - and forcing them to hear Leonard Cohen is surely a violation of the Geneva Convention. What was worse was I wasn't even getting off at the next station: that was Famagosta, which I'd already collected. I gritted my teeth and wished I had my headphones until we finally reached Romolo station.

The streets around the station were still in rush hour mode, the bus exchange disgorging commuters, the traffic carrying the slight anxiety of drivers who were that little bit behind time. The pedestrian crossing held the cars and I could feel their tension, the revving of engines as I walked by, the need to move on.

A thin boulevard of shops and then I was in a park again. Paths wound beneath trees and alongside grass that still hadn't turned yellow from the sun. New apartments had been slotted in alongside, built on top of industrial units.

I crossed another road and was then in a different park, this one named, somewhat, incongruously, for Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout Movement. I was a cub and a scout until my early teens - not especially because I wanted to, mainly because my parents thought if I didn't have some kind of enforced social activity I'd have spent my entire childhood in my room alone reading (and they were right) - so I did a little three fingered salute to the man who started it all. I wasn't a very good Scout, but I ended up a patrol leader because after a certain point every boy of a certain age became a patrol leader; I still have trouble with a reef knot, I've never been able to do that one where the rabbit goes round the tree and in his hole, and anything more complicated than that is basically an Indian rope trick to me.

There was a tree near the exit to the park, and someone had hung a small white circle of paper on it, like a Christmas tree covered in wishes in a shopping centre. On it was written E ALLORA Ti TENGO LE MANi SULLE ORECCHiE E ALLONTANiAMO i RUMORi DEL MONDE - "AND THEN I HOLD MY HANDS ON YOUR EARS AND WE MOVE AWAY THE NOISES OF THE WORLD". I'm not sure what that means, or why it's all caps except for the "i", but it's a sweet sentiment.

The park emptied me out onto another canalside. Porto Genova was a district of workshops and factories but, like other areas of its type in cities across the world, in recent years it's been colonised by bars and clubs and transformed into a fashionable district for young people to hang out in.

At this time of the morning it was recovering from the night before. The pavement was being hosed down, the seats were being set out, the shutters remained tightly fixed on every third establishment. Small hole in the wall places had opened to dispense pastries and coffee to passers by but it was an area still yawning.

Why don't we have more vending machines in the UK? The rest of the world loves them, and they're convenient and always available. In Britain you usually find them inside a store, which kind of renders them pointless; if a store is open you don't need a machine. Of course we'd never have tobacco dispensers on street corners - won't somebody think of the children - but it'd be nice to know at three in the morning that you could still get a packet of Wotsits and a bottle of Coke Zero if the mood took you.

I crossed the Navigli Grande via an iron bridge, named the Ponte Enrico Molteni after the bassist for the band Tre Allegri Ragazzi Morti. He lives nearby and this was seen as a fitting tribute to him; he's not dead, though, which always worries me. Naming anything after someone who's still alive - unless they're a king or a president - runs the risk of them doing something dodgy in later life which will result in a hasty rebrand. Wait until they're dead - in fact, give it five years to be sure - and then slap the nameplate on it. (I should add, for legal reasons, that to my knowledge Ragazzi Morti is a model citizen and the renaming of the bridge is a worthy tribute to a gentleman and hero. His music's not bad, either - sort of like mid-90s American indie, the stuff they did after Grunge while we were all in on Britpop).

I do think that, if Enrico lives nearby, he should nip round with a bolt cutter and get rid of all the padlocks that have been attached to the railings on his bridge. Can we stop this? It's not original and it's not romantic and it's plain annoying. I'm sick of going to scenic bridges and seafronts and seeing a mess of cheap Yales with Debbie and Garry scrawled on it in permanent marker. They won't be there forever, because the council has to come round every few months to cut them down or the fence will collapse. Bury a time capsule or something instead, you basics.

Incidentally, look at how clear that water is! It certainly puts the Leeds and Liverpool to shame. Not a single shopping trolley or bloated corpse to be seen. The local gangsters couldn't chuck a "shooter" in there to dispose of the evidence, everyone would see it.

The Via Casale takes you away from the canal, back into the city. It was more touristy here, with restaurant menus in multiple languages. There were clusters of young travellers wheeling their suitcases over the cobbles, kicked out of their Air B&Bs, looking for some breakfast.

At the top is the Piazzale Stazione Genova, home to the Porto Genova railway station... or at least the building. Milan is in the process of rationalising its rail network, creating larger more modern hubs and redirecting tracks and services in the process. Part of this rationalisation meant that the services that previously went to Porto Genova were redirected to the much larger Rogoredo station; the opening of the M4 line meant that people in the area could access them via the Metro with a couple of changes.

The station closed in December last year and as yet there doesn't seem to be a plan for what to do with it. The booking hall is still open, though the ticket office is closed, as is the access to the platforms; there doesn't seem to be a reason for it, unless Italian railways are determined to provide access to Photo-Me booths. Even the KFC which occupies the café space has closed its door into the station building.

I returned to the piazza outside to get to the Metro station, a set of stairs descending beneath the ground with an arched roof to deflect the sun.

The Milan Metro is definitely showing its age. (Aren't we all?) A lot of the paint is peeling, there are water stains, and the concrete is chipped. This does create opportunities for street art, however - see?

When life gives you lemons, turn them into a seated gorilla having a chat with Audrey II.

Sant' Agostino station is one of the deepest on the entire system, constructed to try and cause as little disruption to the buildings above as possible. As such it's a rare Milan Metro station with two tubes carrying the tracks, one on top of the other, meaning a network of escalators and stairs to take you to the mezzanine. (Isn't the graffiti on the train in the picture above wonderful, by the way? A charming addition to the boring livery, and definitely not incredibly irritating vandalism that reduces the quality of life of everyone who sees it).

S. Agostino station is not to be confused with S. Ambrosio station, which is one stop further on on the M2. I feel like they could've put a little more thought into the station names there, so that there weren't two stops with the same name five hundred metres apart. Still, at least they're close, so if you do get off at the wrong one it's not much of a walk.

There's an extensive plaza on top of the station, though it's pretty featureless and is no doubt mainly used for gatherings of revellers and diners. (In fact, look at it on Google Streetview and it's like a war zone as the binmen clear up after some kind of public protest/celebration). The presence of two "British" pubs, the Old Fox and the Nelson, made me wonder what state the square had been in the night before. It was the morning after England beat Mexico to get to the quarter finals of the World Cup, and I imagined it had been a scene of debauched indulgence and exultance. I was impressed that Milan's street cleaners had managed to tidy it up so quickly.

However, the Old Fox's Facebook page doesn't mention the World Cup at all, even though there were events for St George's Day and they boast of the best Fish and Chips in town. I wondered if they'd politely decided not to rub England's success in the faces of their Italian neighbours, a bit like when I picked up my GCSE results with my friends Mandy and Laura and had to keep quiet about my As because they were sobbing over how many they'd failed and all the resits they were going to have to do.

The Via Olona takes you past Milan's science museum, naturally named after Leonardo di Vinci, and home to the city's railway museum. A pavilion houses a lot of old engines which I'm sure are fascinating if you like that sort of thing but, as we've established, I don't. I did consider going for a look round if I managed to finish the Metro early, but I didn't, and besides, I'm not sure any transport museum can compete with Stockholm's Spårvägsmuseet. It remains the gold standard, as far as I'm concerned, mainly because it used the transport to tell the story of the city and its people, and didn't simply stick a massive steam train in front of you and expect you to coo over its bogies.

S. Ambrogio - yes, I did check to make sure I was writing about the correct station - was given a major uplift when it was chosen to be the interchange with the M4 line.

It's not immediately obvious that there are two lines here, however. The ticket hall remains in the standard M2 style, not upgraded in any way. The only way you'll find the M4 is following the signs down below.

Another four stations under my belt. I was going to carry on writing about more on the line, but I think we all need a break, don't you? And perhaps a lie down. Come back another time for Lanza and beyond. We can get through this together.

Green Land

2026-08-06T22:18:40.921+01:00

It's weird how hotel breakfasts cause you to eat the most random of foods. I started my travels round the M2 full of a combination of cocktail sausages, frittata, and fried peppers, a combination that I wouldn't eat under any circumstances back in the UK. Somehow if you put it in a breakfast buffet I work my way along the row of cloches and shove a heap of everything on my plate. (Although I did draw the line on the Thursday when I opened one up and found peas underneath. Peas are not a breakfast food).

The point is I was absolutely stuffed when I arrived at Piazzale Abbiategrasso station. I'd need the energy. The M2 is even longer than the M1, so long that I'd already planned on leaving one of its branches - the one to Gessate - until the next day. I'd need to really push myself if I was going to complete my objectives.

I headed south on the first train that I saw, unbothered about which terminus I ended up at; I was going to have to do the other one anyway. The Abbiategrasso train came first so they "won".

Yes I do look knackered.

It's a funny little stub of a branch, only having a single stop, mainly there to tie into the two tram routes that end here. I crossed over the road and onto a wide patch of grass, and from there into the Parco Chiesa Rossa.

I felt good and raring to go. Finishing off the M1 the day before had been the right thing to do, even if it left me crawling into my bed. I felt like Milan was absolutely within my bony fingers. And if it could just stay nice and cool, as it was right then at eight in the morning, that would be much appreciated too.

The shade was welcome for me and for the other joggers and walkers using the park at that time of the morning. There were already some old people taking up space on the benches, getting in their constitutionals, and a man filling his water bottles at the council fountain.

The Naviglio Pavese is one of Milan's few remaining canals, a connection from the city to the southern town of Pavia. There used to be a whole network of waterways all over the region carrying boats and working as irrigation tools, all feeding into a circular route around Milan's medieval centre that acted as a kind of massive roundabout for boats. It was built over and turned into a road in the twenties, as were most of the other canals.

Today the main remainders are in the south west of the region, though they're no longer used as canals. There have been proposals to reactivate them as leisure facilities; indeed, now and then politicians promise to open up the culverts they're hidden in and restore them as open waterways. Nothing's happened so far.

Crossing the river I ended up in a knot of residential towers and buildings. As I walked towards my next station, Famagosta, I began to slowly acquire fellow travellers, like the Pied Piper. They were all dressed far more sensibly than me, off to serious jobs in Milan, lugging laptop bags and wearing ties. (Why are people still wearing ties in 2026? Throw them away!)

Famagosta is another fantastic interchange; multi-storey car park, bus terminal and metro station, all right next door to a motorway junction. Park and ride seems so easy here. There doesn't seem to be any logical reason why you'd drive into the centre of town.

If you were hoping for a radically different architectural style on the M2, I'm sorry. The red and green lines were planned at the same time, though the M2 opened five years later, and so they share a great deal of the same design elements. It does feel like there's been a slight honing of the plan; the ticket halls feel tighter, and the green line feels easier to get round. Or perhaps I was so used to the layout by now it had become second nature.

One interesting ("interesting") difference between the M1 and the M2 is that while the trains on the red line use the third rail, the green trains get their power from overhead lines.

The train rose up out of the tunnel and into the open air. The M2 is the only line that has overground sections and I don't like it. I didn't come all the way to Milan for surface railways. I have surface railways at home. I want tunnels and subterranean excitement. I want a Metro that sneaks along and drops you in a new, completely different place without you knowing how you got there. I don't want to see the next station in the distance.

This branch opened in 2011, another of those two-station extensions that Milan is so fond of. Being above ground, it's open and light, with a spacious ticket hall that was filled at that time of the day with busy young people.

This is not a busy young person.

The reason for all these people became clear when I got outside. This part of Lombardy has developed into a huge out of town development with offices, shops and residential towers all slotted in beside one another. It is, I have to say, astonishingly bland and forgettable. The district is still under construction and it's strange to walk round. It feels very American, very Milton Keynes, a leftover from that period in the 1970s when we were convinced that Los Angeles, with its miles of freeways and car parks and straight roads, was what we should be aiming for.

The central piazza was open and laid out with interesting paving, but I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to linger here, not even to eat their sandwiches at lunchtime. It was a void between the buildings. I took a couple of turns, knowing which direction I needed to go but not exactly how to get there, and followed a long ramp downwards. Halfway I realised it wasn't a pedestrian access at all, it was a service road, and I was descending behind the backs of the shops and the car parks and onto a strip of land between fire escapes.

Nothing about this said Italy. I could've been anywhere in Europe, the back of any mall or office complex. Thin grass had been laid out over the corners but desire paths crisscrossed them as people took the shortcut from their car to the McDonalds. A colossal Virgin Active gym was accompanied by a cinema, run by UCI, a brand that used to be familiar in the UK but was long ago merged into Odeon. They were boxy and unattractive.

I crossed in front a Carrefour so large it probably had its own weather system and skipped an exit from the nearby motorway. Pedestrians were meant to follow a carefully laid out route, but I had no need to wander deep into the car parks so I stuck to the verges. The buildings now were low 1980s business park chic, Dynasty-glass fronts done on the cheap.

All the pedestrians were going against me, walking from the station to their offices for the start of the day, formally dressed. It really could've been Bracknell or Swindon or any other lazy punchline town. It was generic and I was disappointed, as I always am when I travel hundreds of miles and encounter something that could be in England. Wow me with some exotica, Milan!

I climbed the stairs up to a long scifi tunnel. The Forum of the station name is an indoor sporting arena, the other side of the tracks; it was recently used as the host of the ice skating during the 2026 Winter Olympics. One end of the tunnel serves the arena, the other the business park.

It's naturally extremely like its brother at Milanofiori Nord. It's still another surface station though, so I'm not really bothered. Get me underground!

Red Sky At Night

2026-07-31T17:20:12.194+01:00

Spending the day up and down the M1 had exhausted me. I went back to my hotel and, after a shower, collapsed on the bed and napped. I'd wiped most of the red line away. The rest could wait for another time.

Except...

If I got up and went out, I could finish it off, and then the whole line was done in a single day. That'd be great, wouldn't it? I put on some clean clothes and went out into the city.

My hotel, the Nyx Milan, was across a piazza from Milano Centrale, but I decided not to use the underground to get to my next station, Lima. It was a simple walk across town and it had cooled down enough that it wasn't a nightmare going for a stroll. (Incidentally, I highly recommend looking for hipster hotels owned by large chains when you go to a strange city. The Nyx was full of bright colours and leopardprint and artwork like this:

They lowered the prices as a result, to try and attract the cool young things, but of course cool young things are staying in small boutique hotels or Air B&Bs. It meant that I got a very reasonably priced room in a fantastic location and all I had to do was try not to cringe myself inside out when I read the irritating copy on the menu).

The area round a large European rail terminal is rarely the high point of the city. There will be an impressive plaza out front, and some nice hotels, but if you go one street back you'll hit a dark underworld. Milan was no different. I was walking along roads built for a transient population. The restaurants were small and dirty, promising fast food and cheap prices and please don't look at how filthy the floor is. There were hostels, all with ridiculously grandiose names, the ones with two stars displaying them proudly like a child showing you it's done its poo in a potty this time. The other people on the street were either tourists like me, blithely strolling along to get somewhere prettier, or rough individuals with dark minds and pasts.

I was weirdly offended when a man in a doorway, stopping passers-by to offer them something in a whisper, looked right past me. Hey, I might look like a fat old man, but I might be cool! I might want some heroin! There's no harm in asking, is there?

Lima metro station is on the Corso Buenos Aires, one of the principal shopping districts of Milan. It specialises in the more down-to-earth purchases, unlike the madly expensive designer wear around the Duomo; this is where you or I would shop, where it's not eighteen hundred Euros for a plain white t-shirt.

Lima's position on a main shopping drag meant that its mezzanine retail outlets were in a healthier state than the slightly sad empty boxes I'd seen elsewhere on the line. There was even a bookstore, specialising in scientific texts and rarities.

The next station, Porto Venezia, is located in Milan's Gay District. See if you can spot how I knew this.

The rainbow decoration was actually put there by Netflix; they decorated the station for an advertising campaign in 2018 and the city liked it so much they left it there. It gave me the same warm, safe feeling I always get when I spot a rainbow flag out and about. This is where my people are; this is ok. If I'm in a strange place and I spot a bar with that flying over its door I know that's somewhere I can go. The rainbow flag isn't just a political statement, it's a signal.

I also love that the homos were the ones who made over a station. "The standardised look is fine, I guess, but couldn't we zhuzh it up a bit?"

I didn't actually go to any of the gay bars, by the way. I'm too old for all that now. Also, when you're an old married twat like me, you realise that the main appeal of a gay bar is meeting other homosexual gentlemen, and if you're not looking for that it's just a bar. There are bars everywhere. I realise this goes against all that stuff I put up there about them being havens but two things can be true at once; I like that the gay bars exist for me, I just don't necessarily need to use them. (This is, incidentally, one of a million reasons why the Lisbon in Liverpool is my favourite place to go; it's a pub first, a gay bar second, while still being massively homosexual).

The Porta Venezia was one of the traditional gates of Milan, a spot for defence and also custom checks. You can still see the outline of the city walls on maps of Milan, as a busy avenue has been built where it one stood, and in the original plans for the Metro there was going to be a circle line that followed it. I crossed over by the Tommy Hilfiger store - the retail establishments were about to take a massive swing upmarket - and onto the Corso Venezia.

That magnificent building is Milan's Natural History Museum. I realise this is deeply offensive to all of you reading this, but I didn't go to a single museum or historic building the whole time I was there. It was all metro, all the time. I'm so single minded about collecting stations everything else is irrelevant. My reasoning is that I can go back any time as a tourist, but this was my only chance to visit as an obsessive station nerd. That had to take priority.

Palestro, like all the stations in this post, was one of the originals, opening in 1964. The M1 hits all the main attractions of the city centre, sweeping through and out the other side, as though they were anxious they wouldn't get a second line and had to make sure it did a lot of work. (Although, strangely, it doesn't go to Centrale).

San Babila, however, is the crossover with one of the lines they did subsequently build: the M4. It means that what was once a simple station has been gifted an interchange, turning it into a hub.

The works for the new line gave the city an excuse to further pedestrianise large parts of the city centre, and the Piazza San Babila was almost doubled in size. I emerged into a clean, open square, surrounded by classy shops.

There was a large Lego store on the corner, with a bricky World Cup trophy in its window. I should note that, even though I was in Milan in the middle of the tournament, I barely knew it was on. Italy failed to qualify for the 2026 cup and the nation seemed to have taken a collective decision to pretend it wasn't happening. There weren't any rows of flag bunting outside bars, no winky tenuous tie ins in shops ("enjoy our football shaped sausage roll, not affiliated with any tournament currently running in North America"). The only places where it was represented were with global brands like Lego, where they had a corporate tie-in across the planet. It was quite lovely, actually. Next time there's a World Cup I might find a country who didn't get in and go there for the whole month.

I turned to find my next station and let out a tiny excited yelp. Venini Glass?

If you're a normal person, you might know Venini as a long-established, high-end producer of glassware. Based in Venice, they have stores in Milan, Genoa, Rome and Bologna, as well as in centres for luxurious living like Dubai and Hong Kong.

If you're not a normal person, if you are in fact a James Bond obsessive like me, then Venini means only one thing: the place where Hugo Drax makes the vials for his nerve gas, and which houses a museum of priceless glass antiquities that 007 absolutely destroys. This is in Moonraker, one of the finest pieces of cinema ever made. Snobs will tell you it's nonsense, but they are fools; Moonraker is two hours of pure pleasure. James Bond goes into SPACE! What's not to like?

I've only included this screengrab because it is fucking cool.

Of course that's the Venice store in the movie, not the one in front of me, but I was still thrilled. (Milan actually doesn't appear in any Bond films; the only mention of it is in For Your Eyes Only, set in Cortina, when doomed MI6 agent Ferrara says "I'll ring my office in Milan" for more information on Columbo. The Greek smuggler, not Peter Falk).

If the store had been open, I'd have obviously gone inside and recreated the fight scene by smashing up all the extremely expensive glassware while raising an ironic eyebrow, but alas, it was early evening, and it was closed. Shame.

I was heading for the Duomo, theoretically. Venini Glass had distracted me, and now I was walking along what turned out to be the wrong street. Being above the M4 it had been paved and benches and grass laid out to make it a pleasing place to wander. I saw a group of people eating together, and thought they'd brought a picnic, until I realised it was a soup kitchen and all the people eating were homeless. I'm quite thick sometimes.

I crossed over by San Bernardino alle Ossa, a church famous for having an ossuary; a chapel filled with skulls and bones. They're arranged in attractive displays and with artistic flourish, and I think if you are going to let yourself rot away, may as well do it in a charming nook in a historic church. Better than being buried forever to be forgotten. (I, personally, want to have an alkaline bath once I die, and then my soupy remains can be tipped into the sewers). The statue is of Pencho Slaveykov, a Bulgarian poet, and I cannot tell you how pleased I was that it was only his hand and knees and feet that had worn to a shine. In this day of "doing stuff for internet likes" I can quite conceive of people molesting him for TikTok views.

I paused in a Carrefour to get another bottle of water - they had a sign by the fridges, in three languages: if you need more cheese, please ask the cashier, which is an incredibly Italian thing to announce - and then back into the side streets in search of the Duomo.

There it was: I'd finally managed to locate one of the largest and most impressive cathedrals in Europe. Considering it is the literal centre of Milan, with streets radiating out of it, the fact that I'd failed to locate it was actually something of an achievement.

Just a pair of funny little guys, hanging out on the side of the cathedral. I followed the road then turned onto the piazza to take a look at it from the front.

I let out my second gasp of the evening. (Ok, I admit it; my gasp for Venini Glass was probably a little bit more excited). The Duomo, or to give it its full name, Cattedrale Metropolitana della Natività della Beata Vergine Maria, took six hundred years to build, only declared finished in 1965 (which means the Metro station with the same name opened a year before it was completed). It's an incredible piece of architecture, intricate and yet not overwhelming, every niche and tower decorated with some twist or statue.

The honey glow it had acquired from the late evening sun only added to its beauty. I'd be back in the piazza a few days later, when I collected the M3, but the memory I'll retain of the Duomo is that first glimpse. I stood and stared at it for a while, taking in the details, snapping photos, then I walked back through the crowds to the Metro station.

As the stop by the city's most famous attraction, as well as the interchange between two lines, Duomo is unsurprisingly one of its busiest stations. It also spreads further across the adjoining streets, with entrances dotted across different corners and roads. Inside, it got a makeover for the arrival of the M3 twenty five years after the M1 was built, and, combined with the neon glow of the new ticket barriers installed recently, it gives the ticket hall a wonderfully trippy air.

It's like Stanley Kubrick designed a metro station.

The hop to Cordusio was my shortest yet: the two stations are 340 metres apart. There's even a passageway connecting their mezzanines. Strict Merseytart Rules dictate that a train must be taken to or from the station, however, so even though it would've been quicker to walk, I rode there.

Piazza Cordusio is an oval crossing point at the foot of Via Dante, surrounded by shops and restaurants. Trams dinged their way past me to the nearby interchange. Opposite was an FAO Schwarz; I didn't even know they had branches, never mind one in Europe. A bit of digging taught me that the brand's gone under a couple of times, and is now owned by an anonymous corporation who've farmed the name out to department stores and the odd standalone. I also learned that the famous store on Fifth Avenue - which I've been to; I bought my brother a Star Wars toy from there (he was 19 at the time) - and which appeared in Big is long closed. It's now an Apple store, because joy is dead.

British cities are, in the main, Medieval, their streets evolving over centuries as a mishmash of closes and narrow lanes. An overly servile devotion to the wishes of landowners means that they rarely got replanned around new avenues and boulevards; Christopher Wren was famously thwarted in his scheme to redefine the City after the Great Fire. In Europe, however, the influence of, shall we say, dominant political leaders, means that comprehensive rebuilds of entire cities were possible. It means that a city like Milan can routinely offer up a long, impressive avenue that looks absolutely incredible on a summer's evening.

The Via Dante was built in the late 19th centuries and lined with mansion blocks. Each one was subject to strict specifications to ensure a conformity of style and shape, but a prize was offered to encourage architects to be brave with the decoration. Now it's a long pedestrian artery (although traffic used it until the 1990s) lined with restaurants. The street seating was filling up nicely and people perused the menus at their leisure. It was, admittedly, extremely touristy - one of the restaurants on offer was the Hard Rock Cafe - but that didn't stop it from being a wonderful place to saunter.

The terminus of Via Dante is the tower of the Castello Sforzesco, once the city's main defensive hub. The original plan was that the street would continue right through it - the castle had lost its purpose by the 19th century, and was seen as a blight to be demolished - but instead it was restored by the architect Luca Beltrami. He brought it back as a place of pride for the city, and converted the parade ground at the rear into an extensive parkland. I wandered around it towards the end of the week, and it's a beautiful spot to visit.

The fountain you can just about see there was lost to the construction of the Metro in the sixties; it wasn't restored until 1999.

(This post is really dragging on, isn't it? I should've made it two separate ones. I got bogged down in Moonraker. There's only three stations left though. We can make it through together.)

As a point where the M1 meets the M2, as well as the terminus for mainline railway services, Cadorna's got a larger and more impressively constructed ticket hall. The square outside has been covered with a glass roof, too, giving you a lovely place to loiter for your taxi.

It's a very Eighties-looking roof, which is odd, because it dates from the Millennium and the introduction of a direct line to Malpensa airport. I was finding this happening a lot, that the architectural style said a particular era to me and then it turned out to be a decade later. This roof screamed early Docklands Light Railway to me and here it was being Jubilee Line Extension vintage. It was as if Milan's transport authorities wanted to make sure it had got a good working out somewhere else before they'd approve its use here.

Darkness was really starting to creep in around the edges as I disappeared into the local streets. The theme here seemed to be "quiet wealth". The apartment blocks around me were heavy and ornate, discreetly exuding power and money. Through the glass entrance doors I glimpsed elegant courtyards and marble steps. Door buzzers were mounted on brass plates.

There were office blocks too, with subtle plaques confirming the presence of doctors or lawyers or architects. The kind of business that would have a walnut panelled waiting room and a receptionist who looked like she was doing this as a filler job between catwalks.

There were people walking about, women wrapped in shawls, men in casual suits, off for a meal at one of the restaurants tucked into a tree-lined avenue. A dad hauled his stroppy little girl along, whispering gently coaxing words, while she had a face like thunder.

The metro station was tucked underneath Piazza de Conciliazione, and I wondered how many times the people who lived round here actually used it. Still, the staff have to get here somehow, right?

Down the steps, down to the platform, the train filled with people off for a night out now, even though it was Sunday. The European mindset of the evening not beginning until nine pm at least.

Here it was then; the final stop for me on the M1: Pagano. Not the most auspicious of finish lines, if I'm honest.

Pagano's greatest asset is the large car park next door - something of a let down after the castles and cathedrals of its predecessors. Still, in the setting sun, even that acquired a certain charm.

One very hot sweaty day, but that was it: thirty eight stations crossed off, about a third of the entire network. I should have gone back down to get the train home but I decided on the scenic route.

Milan is crisscrossed with tram lines, mostly operated by ramshackle single cars that look like they haven't been updated for decades. I waited by the stop with a Spanish family, laden down with their shopping, for the number 10, which would take me right the way back to Milano Centrale.

Inside there was a warm wooden interior and a hard bench to sit on. It careened round the tracks, the driver seemingly believing that going as fast as possible between the stops was the key to getting about, with the pleasing ding of a bell whenever someone wanted a stop. The 10 tracked around the edge of the city centre, taking its time, and when I reached the terminus it had gone dark.

What a day. What a lot of journeys. What a lot of journeys still to come.

Red Heat

2026-07-25T13:20:24.604+01:00

I think of myself as a reasonable man of the world, one with a certain amount of cynicism and weariness about what goes on. Then something happens and I get a reminder that no, I am in fact a tiny naïf who probably shouldn't be allowed out on his own.

I was on the M1 headed across the city, and a man was stood beside me with his suitcase. He had neat, trimmed nails, apart from the little finger on his right hand, which I realised was a coke fingernail. I was scandalised. Was it 1976? Was I at Studio 54? This man was on public transport, where people could see him, with a clear indicator that he was a gentleman who used illicit substances. If I had been wearing pearls, I would absolutely have clutched them.

Reeling, I staggered off the train at the end of the line at Sesto 1º Maggio FS. I'd gone from Rho Fieramilano right to the opposite end of the M1; with two branches closed off, it was time to do the rest. The station was in something of a state. It's connected to a mainline station and that station has been completely demolished for a comprehensive rebuild. (The mainline station is called Sesto S. Giovanni, after the town itself; the metro station is named after the square outside).

This is part of a huge regeneration project currently underway. On the other side of the tracks there was once the Falck steelworks, which closed in the 1990s. After decades work is finally in progress to turn it into a new district planned by, of course, Foster & Partners. You can''t arrive at some manky old station for your new shiny development so the whole thing had to be reconstructed, this time by Renzo Piano, because there are only about six architecture firms in the whole world.

As with a lot of Italian public works projects, it's running late, to the extent that nobody seems very sure when it will be finished. Still, next to the M1 northern extension it's positively leaping ahead. That consists of two stations, one at Sesto Restello and a new terminus at Cinsello-Bettola. Approved in the early 2010s, the original idea was to have it up and running by the Milan Expo in 2015. Works didn't actually begin until 2014, so the opening date was put off for a bit. It now has a projected opening date of 2029, after multiple problems with the contractors lead to it having to be re-tendered - even though large portions of the stations were complete. You can see Cinsello-Bettola quite clearly on Google Earth, quietly rotting while it waits for new workmen to turn up.

The Milanese authorities have recently approved an eleven station extension of the M5, which should interchange at Cinsello-Bettola, so presumably the works will soon begin again. Let's hope they planned ahead when building what they did. so that a second line can be easily incorporated, otherwise they'll have to knock the whole thing down and start again.

The area around the station was a chaotic mess, not helped by the obvious difference in economies between Sesto and the rest of Milan. As in the UK, the closure of the steelworks hit the city hard, knocking wages and raising unemployment. The depression in living costs made the city attractive for immigrants, and quietly it shifted from being a staunchly trade union town to one that elected a right wing mayor.

Other industries have departed Sesto. Campari was once made in the town, and while the headquarters remains, the factory is now a museum. Being from Luton, I of course have a close personal relationship with Campari, as it's the drink that put us on the map - not necessarily the intent of the advert, but there you go.

I was disappointed to go to the Campari website and find an entire section about the brand's advertising history and its association with cinema and not a single mention of Lorraine Chase being wafted in from paradise. They try to be all sophisticated these days - Salma Hayek did an ad for them - but in Britain, if you ordered a Campari, at least one person in the bar will say "Luton Airport!". They probably won't pronounce the Ts, mind.

I've never actually had a Campari. It comes under the same category as Cinzano (another great advert of course) and Martini Rosso: drinks you wouldn't dream of ordering in a pub because you'll get called a poof. What you need is someone to have a sophisticated drinks cabinet from which you can sample various different aperitifs, but I don't have friends like that. You're lucky if you get milk in your tea with most of them.

I carried on, past the Campari factory and the Bar Campari, over a grid that went straight down to the M1; there was a slight breeze, but I didn't do the full Marilyn. Unlike in Milan, the shops in Sesto didn't seem keen to open for Sunday trading, not even the Carrefour. It left the streets feeling sleepy and empty.

A more pertinent explanation for the lack of activity was that it was midday and roasting hot and only mad dogs and Englishmen would be out in it. I imagined people peering over their balconies, watching me walk by and wondering what was wrong with me, then realising "aha. Inglese!"

I'd reached the centre of the town, as far as it seemed; a busy gyratory with shops surrounding it. I crossed the various arms with a large, slightly irate family, who didn't seem to want to be going anywhere and were complaining about it the whole time.

The Metro can sometimes be a cold, dark place to descend into. Passageways under the roads branch and branch again, leaving you disoriented, while corners conceal who knows what. The repeated audio messages to be aware of pickpockets don't help with the atmosphere. Every time I took the steps a part of me wondered what I would find, though I experienced no problems with crime or safety at all; a couple of beggars, the odd person pushing through the ticket barriers, the low level criminality you get in any big city.

Sesto Marelli was my third station in the city of Sesto, and another one that was a terminus for a while - in this case, between 1964 and 1986.

Though you wouldn't know to look at it today, Marelli had to be comprehensively rebuilt twenty years after the rest of the line following an arson attack in 1982. The "Offensive Proletarian Revolutionary Movement" set fire to the padded seats on a train that terminated here; it quickly spread and the entire station went up. This was when Sesto S. Giovanni was at its most lefty. It took only five months to have it up and running again.

It does remind you that Milan's commitment to a unified, standardised look for its stations, while great from a budgetary perspective, is a bit disappointing if you're an architecture fan. If there was an arson attack on a British railway station it would be rebuilt in a then contemporary style, and now it would be so gloriously 1980s you wouldn't be able to pass through without getting a whiff of hairspray.

I came out of the station onto another long, straight, road (wow it's almost as if the Romans were big around here or something). I was crossing from the city of Sesto into the city of Milan, and large signs warned me about a congestion charge coming into effect. The border was marked by a gleaming glass building, as though Milan wanted to underline how modern it was next to its rube neighbours, while beyond apartment blocks alternated with low stores and industrial blocks.

There was barely any shade. I clung to the right hand side of the street, where the walls and fences cast a small, half metre of darkness that could keep me cool. When I reached a car park, lined with trees, I was practically giddy; I walked under the branches, enjoying the respite, past a Mondo Mini Market which I imagine sold nothing but the bloodiest hunks of meat chopped by a man with a machete and a grunt.

From here on, the stations appeared with startling regularity, every half a kilometre or so. I'd barely have gathered my thoughts about the last one before the red M appeared on the horizon again.

Villa S.Giovanni made me feel about eight hundred years old. There was a photo booth in the ticket hall, and it advertised its wares with the slogan Foto Vintage! I realised that the concept of using a photo booth was like having a man with a big moustache making you stand still for five minutes while he hid under a blanket and fired a bolt of gunpowder. It was being sold as a trip back in time rather than anything practical.

Fortunately there was a far friendlier and more modern machine for me. These vending machines were scattered all along the M1, and they were an absolute god send for me. A couple of taps, the ding of my phone against the bar, and I had an ice cold drink in my hands. The BF and I share a credit card when we're abroad and he messaged me to query all the tiny amounts that were showing up on it, worried that it was one of those hacks where they take a few pence to test the water then hit you for five grand. I explained no, it was just that whenever I saw one of these, I bought myself another cooler. (Coke Zero, more often than not: number 32).

The system showing its age a bit there. The Metro is sixty-odd years old now, crafted largely out of concrete, and it's of a vintage where I imagine there are discussions about refurbishment throughout. The M2 was undergoing work as I was there, and they recently announced that the whole Cologno branch will close for a month so that work can be carried out on the concrete viaducts that carry it.

I had a precotto for dessert in a restaurant once. Like a set custard. Lovely.

More hot, steaming walking. My t-shirt was wet through; I looked like I'd been for a swim. Which wouldn't have been so bad if there were sweaty Italians as well, but apparently nobody else in Milan felt the heat, and they all wafted around in light separates looking refreshed and wholesome. Meanwhile, here I was, Jabba the Hutt, sidling up behind them on the train and leaving drips on the seats.

The street opened out into a wide triangle of parking and there was no escape from the merciless sun. I was sweating so much I was dehydrated; I'd drunk about eight litres of liquid over the course of the red line, and I hadn't so much as thought about urinating. When I finally got back to the hotel and forced some pee out it was thick and green. Every bit of water I poured into myself immediately came straight back out my sweat glands.

There was a plaque at Gorla commemorating a man named Renato Briano. Usually, in the UK, this is a tribute to a loyal railworker, or a victim of a terrible accident. Briano, on the other hand, was assassinated by members of the Red Brigades in 1980, which was a bit of a shock to discover. It's easy to forget that Europe in the 1970s was plagued by bombs and terrorists and assassinations on a large scale; that anarchists were detonating shopping centres and shooting politicians across the entire continent. The 21st century is nothing special for having terrorist attacks, it's just a different source.

Swipe my phone, through the barriers, steps, platform, train, platform, steps, through the barriers, back up to street level, and here was Turro.

I was seriously flagging now. I'd been out since 8am, remember, and the day had only got warmer and more brutal. I paused under some trees by the side of the road and guzzled an entire bottle of water in an extremely undignified fashion, until I spotted two teenage boys walk round the corner and approach me. I attempted to gain a look of decency so they wouldn't spot my flaws and beat me up, or worse, laugh.

None of the Viale Monza had been what you'd call exclusive. It was, essentially, a dual carriageway for getting traffic out of the city and off to the nearby regions. The homes and shops had been working class, functional, but now I was reaching the inner city. The graffiti became more frequent and more prominent, the litter ramped up, and the stores felt that little bit darker and less hospitable.

The presence of railway bridges didn't help. Nothing good happens under a railway bridge. They're noisy, dark spots for people to lurk in. I welcomed the brief moment of shade as I passed under, but couldn't help noticing the young woman seemingly hanging out there for no real reason. She was wearing a crop top and tight shorts and had a fan pointed at her face, and maybe she was just enjoying the respite from the sun too, but equally there was a chance she wasn't.

A second railway bridge - there are extensive depots round here, plus the approaches to Milano Centrale - and then another commemorative plaque: this time to the victims of a fire in a private cinema in 1983. A pair of neo-Nazis burned it down to demonstrate their superiority over the "unworthy," killing five patrons and a sixth person who was trying to help. The fact that it was a pornographic cinema lead to a level of stigmatisation of the victims, and the totem was put there forty years later in an attempt to mark that, yeah, they didn't actually deserve to die for watching a mucky movie.

The cinema is now an evangelical church. Personally I think a film showing pornos probably has a net better influence on society than organised religion but that might just be me.

What is there to say about Rovereto that couldn't equally apply to any of the other stations on the Viale Monza?

Pass.

Pasteur station is currently subject to discussion about getting a name change. People are concerned that commemorating the works of a great man who prevented the unnecessary death and illness of millions gives out the impression that pasteurized milk is something to be supported. It's going to be renamed RFK, and then everyone can drink poisoned milk and love it.

(It's not really, that was my feeble attempt at satire, but give it time.)

This was going to be my last stretch of the M1 for the time being, I decided. I needed to go somewhere there was air conditioning and lie down. Yes, there were still a load of stations to go, but they could wait. I'd get to Loreto and then go back to the hotel.

It was important to me to get to the Piazzale Loreto because that was a pivotal spot in Italy's World War II history. At the western end is the Monumento ai Martiri P.le Loreto - the Monument to the Martyrs of Loreto.

In 1944, during the occupation of Northern Italy, a German military truck was blown up, allegedly by the Italian Resistance. No Germans were killed - in fact the only casualties were six Milanese citizens - and subsequent investigations have suggested it was a deliberate false flag so they could crack down on the partisans. They did so in an extremely brutal fashion, taking fifteen resistance men from a prison and shooting them in the Piazzale Loreto at dawn on the 10th August 1944.

The bodies were left in the sun all day, guarded by the SS to ensure they weren't moved. Fascists were encouraged to defile them while passers by were forced to look at them. They were an example of what happened to resisters. (The leader of the shooting, by the way, then collaborated with the CIA and got a series of good jobs in the government of West Germany; he wasn't tried for the murders until 1999). The brutality actually had the opposite effect, scarring the minds of the people of Milan, and inciting further resistance.

The Piazza Loreto then became home to another display of corpses eight months later. On April 27th, 1945, Benito Mussolini was caught trying to escape Italy at Giulino di Mezzegra near Lake Como. He and his entourage were executed and their bodies sent to Milan. In an act of vengeance, the bodies were strung up for the public to abuse at the same spot the martyrs had been murdered: the corner of Viale Andrea Doria and Corso Buenos Aires on Piazza Loreto. There's no statue to mark that, as you'd expect, and the spot has been subsequently redeveloped. In fact, what's there now is... a McDonalds.

If I'd have been in a better state, I'd have gone in and had a special Anti-Fascist Big Mac with a side of Fuck You Mussolini Fries. Instead I headed straight for Loreto station, one of the most important on the network as the interchange between the M1 and M2.

Loreto's had a slight makeover compared to its brethren on the M1; it's lost the rubber floor and acquired a zig-zag light feature that brings a welcome dash of colour to the ceiling.

I descended to the M2, the lower of the levels, for my train home. The rest of the line could wait. I needed a shower.

Red Rover

2026-07-22T20:32:26.043+01:00

QT8 is a very strange name for a metro station. You don't get many stations that are abbreviations. You instinctively want to run it together to form words: cutie-eight. And now I'm thinking of when John Gardner introduced an assistant to Major Boothroyd in his Bond novels and nicknamed her Q'ute. Those early Gardner novels were weird. They uncomfortably straddled Ian Fleming seriousness with Roger Moore insanity - I'll just say one breasted woman eaten by giant snakes. If you know, you know.

QT8 actually stands for Quartiere Triennale Ottava. It was a district constructed as part of the eighth Milanese Triennial, an art and architecture festival that has run every three years (on and off) for a century. The idea, lead by a planner named Pierre Bottoni, was to build an "ideal" district - a showcase development of the future. They drew ideas from all over the world, particularly the English Garden City movement, and built a district on the edge of the city that was full of greenery, with smaller blocks of apartments and a break from the rigid street plans found elsewhere in Milan. The buildings were also prefabs, to accommodate the post-war need for homes.

I came out of the station behind a gaggle of excitable Sri Lankans lugging cricket equipment. I personally thought one of the advantages of moving to Continental Europe would be never having to deal with cricket, the world's most boring sport. It's like moving to London and still playing American Football; you don't have to do that now, you can play a proper sport that isn't eight parts ridiculous. Cricket takes entire weeks and no sport should ever last that long. This is why the Olympics is so great; the entire Games last a fortnight and there are a million different events you can flick between to satiate your limited attention span. I guess you can drink a keg of beer at a cricket ground and nobody minds, but these gentlemen seemed to have only athletic equipment.

I'd left the station outside the Church of Santa Maria Nascente, an unusual circular building. I was hoping to hear the strains of a Latin Mass floating outside but there was nothing. Being in Italy on a Sunday morning had filled me with aspirations of seeing parades of black clad widows headed to church but there was nothing of the sort; like many cities Milan is deeply secular these days.

The greenery around the wide avenues was welcome. I'd gone only one stop from Lotto but it felt like an entirely different city. There's a man-made hill here, Monte Stella, constructed out of the rubble left over from the war (Milan is weirdly flat, with very few even mild hillocks, and there's not a massive river in the centre either; it makes you wonder why people set up a city here in the first place). Monte Stella is the green heart of QT8, with the homes circling it and its slopes given to all kinds of leisure activities - this was no doubt where my cricketing companions were headed.

I paused to refill my water bottle at one of the free water fountains that are scattered throughout the city. The spigots are shaped like a fish, and have a neat little trick; if you block the flow with your thumb, it shoots out a hole in the top of the head, making it easier to drink from directly. These fountains would be literal life savers over the next few days, popping up on street corners and in piazzas to allow me to rehydrate and wipe away some of the sweat. And once again - this is free for everyone.

I was sauntering now, strolling under the canopies, enjoying the morning. Joggers went by, somehow looking more refreshed than me even though they'd been actually running. A school named after Martin Luther King appeared to my right, I Have A Dream painted across its front, while a random fence post had been topped by a tin of Tennents Lager, an unexpected bit of Scottish litter in the middle of Lombardy.

I crossed a hefty road junction and found my way towards Lampugnano station. It was constructed as a park and ride, with a hefty multi-storey attached, and at its base is a bus station which is home to FlixBus and a lot of other long-distance coach services. (Where the hell did FlixBus come from, by the way? I swear I'd never heard of them a decade ago and now not a single contestant on Race Across The World can go anywhere on the continent with it being on a bright green single decker).

The net result of this is that ATM don't really expect anyone to walk up to Lampugnano; they're all interchanging between various means of transport. It meant I was dodging moving vehicles and crossing bus lanes to try and reach the station.

When I got there though, I had a surprise: a station building! Every stop so far had been a hole in the ground - this was the first time the Metro had an actual street presence. I dashed over, avoiding the homeless man asleep on the bench and the various people idling about - possibly for a bus, possibly for more nefarious reasons - and took my photo.

The presence of an above-ground ticket hall didn't induce a sudden rush of architectural magnificence, however. It was a concrete box with a little bit of natural light.

It reminded me of some of the stations towards the end of the Green Line on Stockholm's Tunnelbana, the ones built in the fifties to serve brand new estates on the edge of the city. Lampugnano was opened in 1980, however, so instead of it feeling like an architect embracing a modern construction method to make a statement, it smacked of "this is cheap".

I'm personally not a fan of trains - as I've always said, I like railway stations, not railways - but I know some of you are so here you go: a video of an M1 train arriving. Please don't ask me what class it is because I have no idea. (Equally, please don't tell me).

One hop on and I was at the next station: Uruguay, or, as my brain pronounces it thanks to Homer Simpson, U R Gay. Which would make standing under it and taking a picture kind of a burn if I wasn't, you know, gay as a window.

I rose up into a wide stretch of parkland between two roads, surrounded by apartment blocks and well-used. Children yelped in the playgrounds. People much fitter than me played sports.

By a bus layby was a water house, a supersized version of the water pump I'd used earlier that dispensed still and sparkling water. Two old ladies were stood beside it with shopping bags packed with empty bottles, filling each one in turn; I silently disapproved, but apparently part of the purpose of the water house is to reduce people using plastic bottles so I guess they were being eco friendly. It still felt a little like they were taking the piss.

The blunt bulk of the Bonola shopping centre loomed up ahead of me, and I followed its flank in search of a way in. I was out of luck. There didn't seem to be a pedestrian entrance at all. Eventually I gave up and walked through the car park underneath to a sloped travelator.

I wasn't here to shop. I was here to have a few moments of blessed air conditioning. I thought that, perhaps, I might have a coffee and a small snack, if I could find somewhere suitably middle-market for me. I wanted a corporate chain of some sort, somewhere I could be anonymous and hide away and not have to be confronted by waiters or tipping or speaking too much English to bewildered Italians. I wanted an Italian Greggs, basically, where I could buy something pastry and slip away. I was out of luck, however, as everywhere seemed far too classy for me, far too "eatery".

I'm not saying that the Bonola was an exclusive mall, by any means; quite the opposite in fact. I just mean that what it had was still overwhelming to me. I am chronically afflicted with shyness, with awkwardness and anxiety, with a fear of doing or saying the wrong thing. I don't have the confidence to pull up a chair and get waited on, to order a single coffee and a croissant, to casually cast down a few coins to clear my bill and wander off. I need the regimented world of customer-shopkeeper, an exchange of goods for money, then I can go. I was soon headed to the exit, back down to road level, without so much as a Coke passing my lips.

Incidentally, on entering the mall I was confronted by a large sign telling me that photography was strictly prohibited inside, so please enjoy all three pictures I took inside, to stick it to The Man. Unfortunately I didn't get a photo of the lady who came up the opposite walkway moments later who was wearing a Fido Dido t-shirt and made me think I had somehow slipped into a wormhole back to 1991.

Bonola station was located through a couple of underpasses decorated with graffiti and gentlemen of the road. It gave me another above ground building, and I want you to cast my mind back to where I complained about how dull Lampugnano was. How I thought it could do better. Well, Bonola was trying for something.

I didn't expect that something to be bright blue paint all over it. I'm not sure about the mindset here. I mean, it's not attractive, so we can rule that out immediately. It's not tied to the corporate appearance of the line, because, as we've seen, the M1 is a bold red. I could only think that the blue was some kind of special anti-spraypaint coating to put off the local "artists". Perhaps it was more of a psychological barrier, with nobody locally wanting to post their tag on such a hideous background.

Inside they'd made a valiant effort at a bit of a feature with circular rooflights. Unfortunately, ATM had missed that you need to keep those features clean and well-maintained, otherwise you're drawing people's eyes to a mess.

That's not a skylight, it's an angry sun about to go nova.

Long-time readers (hello you!) will know of my fondness for a station clock. The Milan Metro has an example in most of its ticket halls, and it's a good one: sturdy, clear, and always showing the correct time.

I was at San Leonardo, which was the terminus of this branch of the M1 between 1980 and 1986. Its station building has not been blighted with blue paint.

In fact, that was the first surface building that looked like it was in a good place.

The sun was baking down now, burning at the streets and hapless English bloggers who didn't really take in how going to Italy in a July heatwave would fundamentally alter their body chemistry. Everything about me was wet and clammy. Everything was moist.

Still, I did finally get to see my devoted Italian parishioners, as the church that gives the station its name had reached chucking out time (I don't think that's the correct theological term). Groups of elderly people made their way slowly out of the front door and dispersed to the surrounding homes. I don't think there was anyone under the age of fifty, which doesn't bode well for the future of the Catholic church.

Molino Dorino - the next station, and not, as you may think from that name, an adorable mouse in a children's cartoon - was built as a single station extension in 1986. It was hard not to imagine the Milanese authorities didn't so much plan metro extensions, more come up with them on the fly when they realised they had some money left over. "Turns out we got more council tax than usual this year, fellas - shall we build a bit of underground railway?"

The real reason for the extension was to get another park and ride on the map. Molino Dorino is nestled in the corner of a major road junction and has been gifted with a car park that looks like a modern fortress, turrets and towers overlooking the roundabout as you approach. There's another bus exchange here, and the metro station building is... oh dear.

It just doesn't work. It's horrible! Leave it bare, for goodness' sake. Anything to distract from this sky blue abomination.

It's a lot better on the inside, though it suffers from an overabundance of empty shops. I can see why they'd have built it with a mini-mall inside, what with all those bus customers too, but now it looks sad. ATM have recently signed a deal to regenerate their commercial spaces, handing them over to a private company to try and get some life into them. It's a shame they couldn't do it themselves but it's not hard to see what needs to be done. People don't buy newspapers any more, they don't smoke, they bring a bottle of water from home; the on-the-go facilities that would've traditionally filled the mezzanines are all dying off.

Pero station brought something truly shocking. At the track level, every station on the M1 looks more or less the same. A central tunnel - usually with pillars dividing the two directions - and platforms on either side. It's so standard I've had problems differentiating between the pictures I've taken, having to zoom in to the name to make sure I don't stick a Gambara in the Wagner section by mistake.

Pero gave me an island platform.

Perhaps heat stroke was setting in but I found this far too thrilling. It's not a true island - the escalators and stairs are all in walled off sections behind it, leaving only passageways to access the southbound tube - but still, the variation was welcome.

Above ground Pero had another pleasing sight - a small head house for the escalators and stairs. This shift in architectural style is probably due to it being constructed in 2005, long after the rest of the line (it's the newest station on the M1, for the time being). Putting the entrance in a dedicated building at the centre of a small piazza feels like a far more 21st century way of building a Metro station.

I was now forced to go back down underground for another train, something I hate doing unless it's really necessary. Unfortunately the final station on this branch wasn't constructed for people to walk to at all.

Rho Fieramilano serves the huge exhibition centres of the same name, a complex surrounded (like the NEC in the UK) with motorways and industry. Milan is extremely keen on its exhibition centres; I've never known anything like it. They've hosted the World Expo twice (in 1906 and 2015) and both the red and green lines terminate at complexes of boxes for exhibitions. Fieramilano, meanwhile, is the modern replacement for a centre in the city itself, bits of which are still in use.

I've never been to a trade exhibition in my life so I'm not really sure what they involve, but surely they're not that frequent and busy? There are twenty pavilions at Fieramilano so clearly they're getting a lot of use. I began to think about all the industries that must turn up there to look at booths covered in inventions, clusters of dental hygienists and plasterers and psychotherapists all gathering in breakout groups to hear the newest innovations.

It also made me think about Expos. The Wikipedia page for "World's Fairs" shows that, after the Brits invented them with the Great Exhibition, we hosted one more in 1862 then decided we couldn't be bothered any more. It's strange that the UK has absolutely no appetite for hosting this multinational event ever again - as far as I'm aware we don't even bid for it. You'd have thought somewhere like Manchester or Glasgow would be all over that to bolster their credentials as an international city.

I went through the glass topped ticket hall - which, in the July heat, was like a greenhouse; it's lucky Italy isn't a country that gets hot very often, eh readers? - and emerged above ground. I'd not gone to the exhibition centres themselves but had instead looked for a pedestrian entrance, the one that is theoretically for people not attending a convention.

I may as well have been on the surface of the moon. Long expanses of concrete with footpaths nobody used. Bridges carried conventioneers around on air conditioned, traffic free routes, while us peasants hunkered by their little staircase into the underworld.

I'd gone from an idealistic version of city life to its dystopian cousin. It could only get better after this.

Red Route

2026-07-18T15:55:23.205+01:00

The Milan Metro has five lines named, understandably, the M1, M2, M3, M4 and M5. I decided to tackle them in order, because of course I did, so early on a Sunday morning I boarded an M1 train to its southwestern terminus: Bisceglie.

That's the terminus for the time being. Milan has the habit of extending its metro in dribs and drabs, a couple of stations here, three more there, and as we'll see these extensions don't always go to plan. Earlier this year a three kilometre extension to Olmi was approved from Bisceglie, with new stations there and at Parri and Baggio.

I walked up the steps to the exit behind three excitable teenage boys lugging large, oddly shaped bags. One of them had his on a trolley, which made me think they might be golfers, but up top all became clear. Bisceglie has a bus terminus built above it and there was a coach waiting for the boys and their mates. It seemed they were members of a youth orchestra of some sort, and the bus station was swarming with kids clutching their instruments. It was all pleasingly wholesome: a load of enthusiastic youths off on a Sunday morning to bash their way through Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

I let the boys get ahead a respectable distance then hovered on the steps to take the sign pic.

They don't get any better just because I'm abroad, folks. And yes, I'm wearing a hat. The July sun in Milan was absolutely merciless and when you're blessed with a Tefal Head like me, certain protection needs to be taken. I do appreciate that it gives me a vague air of "background drinker in the Rovers circa 1976" but I am far too old to wear a baseball cap and if I wore a straw trilby I would almost certainly get beaten up. And with good cause.

I walked along the wide avenue towards my next station with a broad grin on my face. This is where I can be at my happiest: indulging my strange little hobby in a new city, knowing I had dozens of underground stations ahead of me. This is the dream for me. I could do this forever, working my way from metro to metro, then going back to the start to see what's changed.

Half-eight on a Sunday morning isn't exactly the time to experience Milan's vibrant personality but that was fine with me. I was happy strolling down a wide boulevard, shaded by trees in the courtyards of neat apartment blocks, watching cars and trucks roll towards the city.

All too soon, I'd reached my second station. The Milan Metro isn't big on surface buildings. The majority of its stops are reached via staircases at the side of the road going down to a ticket hall built below the surface.

There was a wait of a few minutes for the next train and I watched one arrive at the opposite platform. As you'd expect for the Continent, Italian trains drive on the right; this fact absolutely refused to log in my brain and I'd spend the next few days being surprised when a train appeared in the tunnel behind me. I may not be the cleverest person around.

Primaticcio was the next stop, constructed underneath a road junction with exits at each branch. As you'd expect, I immediately walked out of the wrong exit, and had to cross the road to get to where I actually wanted to be.

I slid onto a back street here, one cooler and more shaded, where the apartment blocks hugged the pavement and hosted small businesses at their base. A gay couple emerged from one of them, carrying light bags that looked like a picnic in waiting, and took off in their small car with a rev of the engine.

There was a curious building on one corner; a little bit of internet searching claims it's a synagogue, but there was no signage saying so. Unless this is sadly how Jewish people have to be in 2026, concealing where they worship.

A woman with a tiny dog passed, getting its walk in before the day turned roasting, and I advanced on the station at Bande Nere. Is it just me or does that sound like the hero of a Spaghetti Western? "Quake with fear, banditos, for Bande Nere is here!" And then his horse would rise up on its back legs and a load of dodgy ethnic stereotypes would scatter.

I will say that the positioning of the station signs is a bit of a problem. You only get the name of the station on the staircase going underground, which meant every time I stopped for a sign selfie, I had to pause halfway down and whip out the camera. Fine when it's a quiet suburban stop, not so great when I got to the busy inner city. There were a multitude of strange looks caught in the background as the days wore on.

Bloody hell I look awful. The hat makes me look even more of a dweeb than usual.

At platform level, Bande Nere was much the same as the previous three stations. Milan's station architecture is not awe-inspiring and unique. The lines were built with value in mind, so the design elements are pretty uniform; two side platforms, columns between the tracks, cladding on the walls. You get there via a staircase and, sometimes, an escalator, though that more often than not is up only. There are exceptions - and they were extremely welcome when they came - but each line's format is repeated endlessly along their lengths.

Case in point: at Gambara the cladding stopped being lime green and became this pink and grey speckle. Gambara was the terminus of this branch, opening in 1966; the stations as far as Inganni then opened in 1975, with Bisceglie opening in 1990. The change of the cladding is the only hint that there was any gap between the openings, like rings on a tree telling you its age.

The mezzanine areas were built to house commercial properties, and some of them still house one or two - usually a newsagent-cum-snack shop-cum-tobacconist-cum-ticket office. Most of the retail space is a bit sad, however, the windows covered with ATM logos and up for rent.

Let's see if I can manage a half-decent selfie?

Nope.

The Piazza Gambara lead me onto a diagonal route to my next station. I was taken with a grand looking building on one side of the road which I assumed was a museum of some sort; it actually turned out to be a historic nursing home for the elderly, the Pio Albergo Trivulzio. It's existed for centuries as an alms house, providing care for the poor, and the painter Angelo Morbelli did a great number of artworks of the interiors and the people within. Apparently he was fascinated by the place; these days you'd get called a pervert if you turned up at the door of a nursing home and asked to study the residents.

More apartment blocks, six or seven stories high, a variety of styles and eras but all with balconies and outdoor spaces. I kept looking up at the terraces, hoping to see a louche Italian enjoying one of those tiny coffees, but it was still too early. It's a skill how they manage to have a single shot of pure caffeine served in a thimble and yet it still takes them half an hour to drink it; if they were in a Starbucks an employee would push them out with a broom to clear the table for someone drinking something heftier.

At De Angeli, the street cleaners were out with their trash bags and grabbers, picking up litter from the flowerbeds. The fact that there was a group of them, all in hi-viz, makes me think they may actually have been doing community service, but it was still nice to see.

Appropriately at De Angeli a heavenly light shone down and obscured the sign.

Wagner, my next station, is the last on the Bisceglie branch. I'd already completed one spur of the M1 and it had taken less than an hour. At this rate I'd have done all five lines by Wednesday and I'd be able to go out to Lake Como and relax with George and Amal Clooney for the rest of the week.

Instead of continuing towards Pagano station and the city centre proper, I decided to cut across to the other branch at Buonarroti. The two stations are barely 300 metres apart, at either end of a straight road; you can't deny that the Milan Metro gives you convenience.

It was gone nine am now, and the city was beginning to wake up. Restaurateurs were raising shutters and turning over chairs on outdoor seating. Doors were being propped open to allow a breeze in. There weren't many actual customers, not yet, but you could feel the life slowly seeping into the piazzas and pavements.

The Buonarotti of the station name is Michelangelo Buonarotti, better known to us English speakers as the Michelangelo, of David and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fame. There's something quite sweet about Milan insisting on his formal name for the piazza, like he's being scolded by his mum. The statue at its centre, however, isn't of Michelangelo at all, but is instead of Giuseppe Verdi. He looks very casual, hands behind his back and jacket pulled away.

The Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, which the statue looks at, was founded as another retirement centre for musicians and opera singers by Verdi himself. His tomb is inside and it continues to give a home for divas in their declining years. I wouldn't fancy giving those ladies a substandard lunch, I'll say that much; even in their 90s I bet they can throw a grade A hissy fit.

From Buonarroti to Amendola, and a surprise. The station originally opened as Fiera, because of its proximity to Milan's Exhibition Centres, and so it was built to accommodate crowds. The ticket hall was put under a plaza and given a large multicoloured roof.

Ok, it could do with a bit of a clean, but it was incredible how much the daylight lifted the ambience of the space. With black walls and black rubber floors, the stations on the M1 can seem particularly dark, with only the red of the line theme as a contrast.

There's also a large statue in the square by the station, called Ragno agonizzante, which translates as "Spider in Agony". And yes, it does look a bit like a dead spider, one of those desiccated ones you find curled under the sofa when you move it to hoover. Why you'd want to have a piece of artwork representing this in your city is another matter.

I walked along the Via Monte Rosa, a mix of brand new office buildings and older apartments. Graffiti for a gang of football "ultras" - rebranded hooligans - carried the number 1312, which I have learned is code for ACAB. There was a branch of Popeyes, which irritated me; I accept that British people have terrible taste in food and will accept any American nonsense that gets pushed our way, but you think the Europeans have a bit more class.

Further up there were some soldiers by the side of the road, prepping for the day ahead. I'd already spotted a gaggle of them outside Milan Central when I arrived the day before. It seemed that they were being deployed at crowded parts of the city, presumably to reassure us that if a terrorist were to attack, he'd be swiftly shot by one of the nation's soldiers. I'll admit I hadn't even considered that I might be murdered by a lunatic until the presence of the army raised the idea.

Now I don't want to disparage the soldiers of the Italian army and their no-doubt fine history of bravery and combat. I'm not going to peddle tired stereotypes about them being lazy and perhaps less disciplined than their contemporaries elsewhere. I'm sure they've been in many conflicts over the years, and I'm sure they've won some of them. I will, however, note that these soldiers in particular had gathered round a fan to cool themselves, and I'm not sure you'd get away with that sort of behaviour if you was a British soldier in, say, Afghanistan. It didn't exactly scream "fearsome killing machines".

Piazza Lorenzo Lotto is a square that has existed at the centre of Milan's leisure activities for decades. The fiera was close by, the city's racecourse abutted it, and on its northern edge was something I really wanted to see: Milan's Lido.

Opened in 1931, it still houses the largest swimming pool in the city, along with other sports facilities. I love a lido. Every town should have one, especially if you can put a lid on it in winter for ice skating. Swimming is so much more pleasurable when it's under a blue sky, and with global warming, you don't even have to heat the water. A rare upside to the death of the planet!

The Lido di Milano is, however, in a bit of a parlous state. It closed for refurbishment in 2019 and since then work has been fitful. It begins, it stops, it begins again; the completion date has slipped from 2023 to, possibly, the end of this year, though nobody seems very hopeful it will actually happen. In fairness, it is a large job, with additional facilities being added to turn it into more of a multi-use sports facility, but that still doesn't explain the hikes in costs and the sheer length of time being taken.

I skirted the edge of the piazza, heading back to the metro station entrance. This was made more complicated by the roads being churned up as the city installed a dedicated trolleybus lane through the centre of the square and down the middle of the adjoining roads. Eventually I made it to the entrance on Via Monte Rosa, having done an entire 360 degree circuit.

As with Amendola, Lotto was built for the crowds, and below ground it was expansive. On a quiet Sunday it all seemed over the top.

Lotto also gave us our first interchange on the M1, to the M5 line. The original three metro lines meet in the heart of the city, but the twenty-first century additions skirt it to the north and south, providing bypasses and alternative places to change.

I was going to continue with the rest of the Rho branch, but I think both you and I need a rest at this point before this turns into a slightly more boring War and Peace. Come back another time for more pointless perambulation. I can't promise you it'll be interesting, but it will at least be thorough.

Ciao Bella!

2026-07-14T14:55:13.503+01:00

For the past few years I've been lucky enough to travel to a large European city to visit all the stations on their metro. It started with Amsterdam, then there was Stockholm, and last year it was Helsinki.

This year, I planned on it being Hamburg. I started reading about it, bought a book, and then I thought: isn't Hamburg a variation on Amsterdam/Stockholm/Helsinki? Another large Northern European port? Aren't you repeating yourself?

I cast my net across the continent a little wider. For monetary reasons, it had to be somewhere not too far - my dreams of visiting Baku's Metro were sadly put to one side. It had to be big enough to get my interest - out went Thessaloniki - but small enough to collect in a week - that ruled out Barcelona. I'd really rather not get killed while visiting it too, so sadly that was the end of Kyiv or Moscow. It'd also help if it wasn't in the middle of a major extension, too, so I wouldn't feel like I'd missed out on something, so Lisbon will have to wait for another year.

I finally came to a decision. I was going to... Milan.

First opened in 1964, the Milan Metro has 125 stations spread over five lines, the newest of which opened only last year. Actually the official map above is a little busy because it includes the S lines, suburban rail routes that pass through the city in a tunnel. Wikipedia has a much clearer version with only the metro stations on it.

That's manageable, I thought. I broke out the Excel spreadsheet and worked it out. It was more than manageable. It looked like fun.

So there was the task: one week, five lines, travel around the network and hopefully don't get burnt to a crisp by the roasting Italian sun. It was exhausting, sweaty work, but I'm happy to tell you I did it. In fact I'll tell you exactly how in a series of long and tedious blog posts over the next few weeks. Sorry about that.

Dock Tales

2026-06-17T22:54:29.197+01:00

You might come to this blog for many reasons. The trains. The photos. My witty repartee. If you come here to admire the scenic beauty of England, then I'm afraid this post is not for you. Outside Birkenhead North station is a vast hinterland of abandoned docks and industrial units. This is the back streets, the abandoned parts, the leftovers of Britain. And here I was walking through it.

For once, I was in familiar territory. This bit of the Wirral is familiar to me because it's the location of the Bidston Recycling Centre, the peninsula's number one spot for getting rid of rubbish, and as the owner of an awful lot of rubbish, I've been here a fair few times. Many's the afternoon I've trudged back and forth with arms full of wood or broken tiles or, on one particularly sad day, boxes of VHS video tapes that nobody else wanted.

It lends a certain piquant aroma to the surrounding area, particularly on a hot day in June, and there's no real way to disguise it. Still, it could be worse; for many decades, the tip was simply the Bidston Dock, and rubbish was poured into it without any consideration to separating your paper from your food waste. The pile has now been grassed over to form a hillock and nature reserve - one that has carefully placed stink pipes scattered around to let out the methane.

Crossing a bridge that wasn't really necessary any more, I reached a building site. Piles of rubble and metal were being shifted from side to side. This will soon be a David Lloyd Health Club, boasting the largest padel facility on the Wirral, indoor sports courts and a cafe. It'll also boast an open air swimming pool, with the CGI images showing sun loungers scattered around the edge like a Benidorm getaway. Remember a few sentences back when I was talking about the smell coming from the tip? Yeah.

I managed to get over the busy dual carriageway - one gentleman stopped his car and waved me across, which was good of him. The flowers here are a tribute to PC Dave Phillips, who was killed here by a car thief as he tried to deploy a stinger in 2015. I went up the steep hill, towards the district of Poulton, past a working men's club and a church with an open door inviting you into their cafe.

For decades there was another railway station in a cutting here: Liscard and Poulton. Opened in 1895, it was the only interim stop on a branch line to the ferry terminal at Seacombe, and as such had an important role getting Liverpool commuters across the river. It was never incredibly successful, however, and when the rest of the Wirral Railway was electrified in 1938, the branch was left powered by steam. That decision hung a noose over the branch which wasn't finally tightened until 1960, when the whole route was closed and the tracks lifted.

The deep cutting was instead repurposed into a far more twentieth century route - the approach road for the brand new tunnel under the Mersey, the Kingsway. Nothing remains of the station as a result. There would've been an island platform where the central reservation is now, and the booking hall has been replaced with an electrical substation. If you squint you can just about see the slope on the right hand side of the road that was where access was, but you have to use your imagination.

The only indication that there was ever a railway here is in the street running alongside, which is still called Station Road.

I crossed back over Mill Lane and followed a bendy avenue that paralleled the tunnel approach. A woman in a pink tracksuit unplugged her electric car from the public charger built into a lamppost; across the way, a group stood on the doorstep of a house, laughing and gossiping. A small side road had the unusual name of Paula's Way - I've not been able to find out exactly who Paula was - and then there was a wide road with stores that seemed to have escaped from another era. The credit union was alongside a sewing store and a supplier of fruit machines; even the paper shop still had a sign for the Daily Post, which hasn't been published since 2013.

A footbridge takes you back over the motorway here, and I've always been fascinated by it when I passed underneath because someone has decided to paint it in the Merseytravel colours. There's absolutely no need for it to be in grey and yellow, but there it is, and I enjoy it. I walked over, keeping my eyes averted from the speeding vehicles below, instead taking in the many black stickers plugging a men's hairdresser in town. Their use of the phrase English Barber had a vague dogwhistle to it.

A row of Victorian terraces now descended back towards the dock, with huge storage tanks providing the full stop at the bottom. Most of the houses had venetian blinds or a thin film stuck to the glass to stop prying eyes, though a couple were old school with net curtains. On the corner, an abandoned toilet sat alongside the wheely bins, vaguely hoping a kind dustman would cart it off for them.

I turned to the side, where a pub had been converted into a pair of houses, and down a one way road augmented with a chicane of kerbs to slow joyriders. The pedestrian entrance to a recreation park was crowned with piles of fly tipped rubbish; bits of plywood, black bags, an upside-down pushchair. I'll remind you that ten paragraphs ago I was talking about a massive recycling centre that would've happily accepted all that, but I guess it's simply too difficult for some people to give a shit.

I was on the Dock Road now, an unlovely stretch of tarmac between yards and garages. Anonymous business units surrounded by parking sit opposite tyre centres and scaffolding. Some of that has been swept away for a new grey building, angled in the middle to follow the dock, which will form the new HQ for an MDF manufacturing plant. It's still unfinished and looks far too clean and pristine amongst the rest of the grimy units.

Round another corner, and I was confronted with the new face of the docks. It's been nearly twenty years since Wirral Waters was unveiled to the public, an ambitious plan by Peel to fill the land round here with skyscrapers and businesses and turn it into a glistening Dubai on the Mersey. You'll be unsurprised to learn that literally none of that ambitious plan has actually happened; in fact, Peel's complete lack of activity has been the cause of raised eyebrows, with some accusing them of land banking. Where the Dock Road meets Duke Street, however, there is an actual sign of progress.

Miller's Quay is a development of six brightly coloured apartment blocks that wouldn't look out of place on a dockside in Frankfurt or Amsterdam. They're a bright, bold statement of intent, a big show of investment, and even better they've been completely occupied since almost the first moment they opened. There have been a few teething problems - parking was a problem for a while, with many residents preferring to leave their cars on the street rather than pay the fees, until double yellow lines were laid down - but it's a remarkable success. They're even getting their own Sainsbury's, a little grey and orange blob now under construction, which is a canary in a coal mine of gentrification.

I wasn't sure whether the public realm around the towers was public after all. The signage was vague, and in 2026, you kind of expect anywhere nice to be patrolled by stern-faced security men intent on kicking you out. I walked between two of the buildings boldly, as if I had a right to be there, and found a lovely little promenade on the waterside with plenty of benches and planting.

I'm not one hundred percent certain I was meant to be there, but I had a nice little stroll and nobody leapt out to demand to see my papers. Next to Miller's Quay, however, there's a large plot of undeveloped land; it was marked for an apartment block for over 55s, but the delivery partner pulled out. I wouldn't want to be a pensioner round here - as I said, it was only just getting a supermarket, and there are no buses along the Dock Road except for, bafflingly, the N1 night bus when it passes through the new tunnel on the way to Birkenhead Bus Station. I can't imagine there being many old dears who've much need for a bus at four in the morning.

The footpath has been upgraded along this side of the road to full luxurious dockside living, though on the other, its's still a strip of grey tarmac beside factories. It was a strange, schizophrenic place, working and living coinciding; I doubted that many of the people on the fourth floor of Miller's Quay finished their cappuccinos on the balcony then wandered over for a shift at the skip hire place across the road.

The East Float apartments were the first to be redeveloped into residential in the docks and for years they've stood on their own, isolated, the home of pioneers who gambled that they were buying into the new Albert Dock or Canary Wharf. Beside them are some interesting red modular homes built by Urban Splash; there was meant to be an apartment block behind, but the division that built houses went into liquidation. Only now is there work going on to build the block, a pile driver relentlessly banging into my thoughts as I passed, although its design is not quite as interesting as the first phase.

I'd walked the whole length of the float now, right down to where a lifting bridge allows ships to pass through from the Mersey. The docks still see a lot of maritime use, even today; there's frequently a naval ship moored up for restocking or refurbishment. It's nothing like it used to be of course, and with all the actual freight handled across the river in Liverpool, it's no wonder Peel are scrabbling around for new uses for all that land.

The problem is, they don't really seem to know what to do with it. As I crossed the bridge, I approached the derelict Central Hydraulic Tower. It once supplied power to the whole dock complex, and it's designed to resemble the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. It's a beautiful building that's fallen into disrepair.

The first plan for the tower was that it'd be a bar and restaurant, with a rooftop lantern giving you views across the river to Liverpool. There would also be a new hotel. That fell through, and instead it was proposed to be something called a "Maritime Knowledge Hub", linked to the Wirral Met College next door. That's also fallen through, and in the meantime, the Grade II-listed building is quietly collapsing.

It's really hard to know what Wirral Waters is, or will be. The feast of glowing glass skyscrapers was never going to happen - everyone knew that - but it doesn't feel like there's any kind of purpose here now. It's as though Peel will simply allow anyone who turns up to build on their land. A new factory? Sure! Apartment blocks? Why not? Down here, on the edge of the docks, there was the college, plus an office development, with a scheme called Egerton Village ("a dockside restaurant and bistro, small independent retail units, artists’ studios, managed workspace and even a central public events space") meant to occupy the space in between. If you've got the money to build, you can. It doesn't seem like a place.

It's a development in search of an identity. To me, the obvious solution is to fill it with apartments; the one thing this country needs is homes, and a vibrant new waterside village based around the docks couldn't miss. I stood at the side of the road; behind me was the Liverpool waterfront, while in front of me acres of open water stretched away. Surely someone could do something with it all.

The grey sky that had been amassing above my head finally broke. I'd planned on walking back along the Corporation Road to Birkenhead North, closing the loop, but I didn't have a coat and I'd already walked a fair few miles. Instead I headed to Hamilton Square and bought myself a cup of tea.

Today actually marks the anniversary of this blog; the very first post was on the 17th June 2007. Somehow I've managed to push through it for nineteen years, despite the general trend of the internet and increasingly vitriolic calls for me to stop, and I have you, the readers, to thank for that. Your readership - and generosity - has always been appreciated. Thank you again. Here's hoping we'll all still be around for the twentieth.

6. Birkenhead North

2026-06-15T22:58:57.487+01:00

Opened: 2nd January 1888, though its name was Birkenhead Docks back then. It was renamed to Birkenhead North in 1926.

Line electrified: 1938.

Number of platforms: Three. One platform serves Liverpool trains, the second New Brighton and West Kirby trains. The third is technically a through platform but is mainly used for stabling and turnbacks these days.

Points of interest: A planter commemorates Philip Rodney Perkins, 08.09.1955 - 05.12.2025 - Goodnight God Bless.

On the outside wall is a mural dedicated to Charlie Landsborough, a folk singer who grew up nearby. I have a close personal connection with Charlie because I'd never heard of him until I started work in the music department (or "Sounds" as we called it, because we were very cool) at Birkenhead's WH Smith. I quickly learned that not only does Charlie have a dedicated fanbase on the Wirral, but also that they'll turn up on the day his new album is released demanding a copy at nine in the morning. We used to regularly have arguments with head office that yes, we definitely should have thirty copies of a CD by this man they've never heard of because they will sell in about eight minutes, and their reticence is yet another reason why WH Smith went down the dumper.

Birkenhead North also has a massive and very popular car park attached to it. After about eleven am you'll find yourself cruising the aisle for a spot for a good while. There used to be electric chargers here too but a while back they disappeared.

As the point where the Wirral Line splits in two, and in close proximity to the Birkenhead North depot, this is also a spot where the train crews will swap over, meaning there's a mess room for them. Look closely and you can see the fenced off yard where they can have a fag.

Attractive Local Feature sign: None. In fact I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever find one of these because every station so far seems to have managed without one.

Original blog post: 9th September 2007

What's changed since then? The lift-accessible bridge opened in 2014, and there's a now-faded sign to commemorate the occasion at the foot of the steps. A vending machine has appeared in the waiting area, plus a toilet. There's a sign on the footbridge that points to trains to West Kirkby and it's been there for years now and nobody seems to be in a rush to correct it.

The local area has also been extensively redeveloped since then. New houses have been built all around the station, replacing the Ilchester Square social housing with small well-kept semis and a stretch of parkland. This also meant that the notorious New Dock Hotel was demolished. I always like to mention it, because it was nicknamed "The Blood Tub"; there were lots of reasons given for this nickname but my favourite is that there were so many fights on a Saturday night that the landlord used to use a broom to brush the blood out the front door.

Proof of visit:

I would never permit a full-length photograph today because you'd see my beer gut and nothing else.

Tickets Please

2026-06-10T09:59:56.566+01:00

Nostalgia is a terrible disease that runs right through the railways. "Oooh, it was better in the old days!" is a curse. There is always someone to point at steam trains, or third class tickets, or British Rail, or train doors you have to hang out the window to open, and say "that's so much better than what we have now". You can sit on an air-conditioned, electric train, almost silent as it glides along, with power sockets and tables, and there will still be a railway fan who will say "I used to like it when you could open the window to hear the screech of the rails and choke on the diesel fumes. Bring that back!"

This post is going to come with a tinge of nostalgia, and I apologise in advance. But I'm using that nostalgia as a way of asking a question about Merseyrail's future. My question is: what happened to all the ticket collectors?

When I first moved to the north - bloody hell - thirty odd years ago, I lived in Ormskirk. Every time a train pulled onto the platform there, a man would appear at the exit and politely collect your ticket.

When I first started visiting the BF via Birkenhead Park - bloody hell - twenty-nine years ago, a man would appear at the top of the ramp and collect your ticket as you passed.

It was a simple and effective way of enforcing ticket sales. I remember distinctly seeing scallies turn round and get on the next train out of Birkenhead Park because they couldn't produce a little orange card.

Last Bank Holiday Monday, I went to New Brighton, and at the exit there were some ticket enforcement officers who stopped everyone as we went through. And they were managing to collect a fair few dodgers in the process. So it is still possible to do it. There seems to be no appetite, however.

You can, basically, ride Merseyrail for free. You're gambling on there not being inspectors on the train but I very rarely get my ticket checked. I'd guess about once every ten journeys. If you're not going to Liverpool, Birkenhead (Conway Park and Hamilton Square) or Southport - where there are barriers - you can get away with not paying. How is this still a thing? Why aren't there barriers everywhere?

I get that they're expensive, of course, and some stations would need a major reconfigure to be able to accommodate them. There's also the issue of having a member of staff there to assist. Other railway companies across the world have managed it. San Francisco's Bart has recently finished installing them, and they've discovered that not only has revenue been protected, but also vandalism and anti-social behaviour at the stations and on the trains has gone down. The network has become a sealed unit only for people with a ticket.

And if you're not going to put barriers in, well, how about bringing back the bloke at the exit? It was actually a good idea. It actually worked. It might also stop me and other law-abiding citizens feeling like a mug when we pay for our ticket and never get checked.

(Yes the bloke at Birkenhead Park was a bit fit and it was always a pleasure to see him but that's not what this is about ok? Besides he'll be pushing sixty by now).

Notes On Camp

2026-06-04T17:11:30.930+01:00

With the new stations of the Wolverhampton-Walsall line behind me (the WolWal Line? Wolvall?) I shifted from one side of New Street to the other. It was in a state of low-level chaos; a problem with the lines going south had caused a huge backlog of delays and cancellations. Dejected passengers lined the platforms waiting for trains that wouldn't come. My own, tiny, local train was delayed by twenty minutes, and as it passed the losers standing by I sank down in my seat so it wouldn't look like I was revelling in my good fortune.

We rose up out of the tunnel, giving us a great view of the HS2 station slowly coming together at Curzon Street. That exact same day Heidi Alexander had stood up and announced that everything would be late and expensive and also, not as good as it was meant to be, and I looked at that vast swathe of concrete and workmen and trucks and diggers and wondered exactly when I'd be able to stand outside it and take a sign selfie. If, indeed, I could still stand at that point. Perhaps my carer will take the picture for me.

The train pulled onto the Camp Hill Line, Birmingham's newest suburban route. I wondered how the people in the houses lining the track felt about this sudden uptick in noise; a rarely used freight line transformed into a commuter line. I bet there's a lot less nude sunbathing in the back gardens now.

The most distinctive part of Moseley Village station isn't anything to do with what's been built; that's all distinctly perfunctory. Metal walls, orange lampposts, all the same playbook. The thing that draws your eye is the entrance to the tunnel beyond the platforms.

Is it just me or is there something vaguely... vulva-like about that? It's the keystone at the top, poking over the splayed curves of the tunnel. It's a little bit dirty. Obviously I'm no expert in this matter but you don't have to be Sigmund Freud to see the symbolism of a train sliding into that.

I politely averted my eyes and went up the stairs to the newly laid out plaza on top. It's a large, bare stretch of block paving that's been clearly designed as an event space. I could see the shadows of artisan soap makers, organic candle stalls and expensive streetfood yet to come scattered across the pavement. It's certainly a cut above Willenhall's cycle lane and zebra crossing.

It quickly became obvious why Moseley Village got the full town square treatment. It turned out this place was posh. Right outside the station was an M&S Food Hall, and it very much continued on that theme. Restaurants and beauty salons cascaded down the hill towards the main road. Estate agents with expensive listings. An old church high on a mound above us. At the junction, a dual carriageway had a vague air of boulevard with tall trees and benches to relax on. The original station here, closed during the war, had been called simply Moseley; you could hear the letters from the residents' associations demanding that Village suffix to show they were a cut above.

This sounds like reverse snobbery, and it is a bit, but it didn't stop me finding Moseley charming. It was certainly an improvement on the grim industrial backstreets of Darleston. I turned up a hill, where a pub poster advertised a forthcoming appearance from drag queen Harley La Rue. Where Class Meets Sass it promised, which I puzzled over for a while until I realised my Southern accent was standing in the way of the rhyme (Where Clarse Meets Sass). I wonder where the dividing line is for that long A. Perhaps the Watford Gap.

The road gently rose up the hill and I realised once again that I should really check out the gradient lines on the OS Map before I plan these journeys. It went up and up, past lines of neat villas and new shiny cars parked close to the kerb. The Moseley Dovecot, a remnant of a great house that was once in the area, stood behind a fence on a patch of green.

I passed a Jewish primary school and a cul de sac of identical terraced homes that was choked with cars. A builder's yard and then, on a whitewashed wall, a picture of an eggman raising his hat to passers by; beneath him, the road sign had been adorned with the Prince symbol. I couldn't decide which was more incongruous.

Blocks of flats now intruded on the street, new and old, while the big mansions had multiple buzzers and concreted fronts. A funeral home had a large stained glass window presiding over passers by, and I found myself humming Slumber Inc without even thinking about it. I am nothing if not predictable.

At a curve in the road my second station appeared, Kings Heath (no, there isn't an apostrophe; yes, it is annoying). There are only three new stations on the Camp Hill line; it terminates at Kings Norton, an already existing station that lacks an apostrophe. It's amazing that this new, exciting transport link in England's second largest city is three stations and two trains an hour in each direction but there it is; we settle for what we can get.

At some point, the trains will go into Moor Street, where there is more capacity than the ridiculously overcrowded New Street, but before that happens Bordesley station needs to close so that new chords can be built. The proposal to close it is already out there, though there isn't a suggestion of a replacement on the Camp Hill route once the new lines are built (the Metro's newest extension will take over the slack). When this will happen is, as always, entirely guesswork.

Kings Heath also has a small pedestrian space outside, though it's more of an infill between the curve and the road and the straight front of the footbridge; I can't see anyone holding a craft fair there.

I took a seat on the platform. There was another man there who also carried a camera. I imagine Men Who Like Railway Stations have been swarming all over the line for the last couple of months; there are probably dozens of YouTube videos about it all in deep detail. This is probably all old news to you. But you get it when I write it, so tough.

The final station is the jewel, the one that everyone likes: Pineapple Road. What a lovely, evocative, fun name. It's the kind of whimsical station name you wouldn't think would pass muster in the boring old 21st century; after all, for most of the 20th century it was called Hazelwell. Pineapple Road is a great fun name, one that calls to you.

It is, of course, nothing special on the ground. If a kidnapper dumped me on a platform on the Camp Hill line and ran off with my glasses so I couldn't read the sign I wouldn't be able to tell them apart. Two platforms, metal awnings and stairs, lifts and footbridge.

Still, I hoped Pineapple Road, of all the stations, would offer a little bit of artistic licence. A moment of character. I was excited to spot some metal fretwork and I stopped for a good look.

I'm afraid to say it depicted random wild flowers. There wasn't a single pineapple to be seen, which simply isn't on. It's called Pineapple Road. It's on the Camp Hill line. It's begging for a level of flamboyant extravagance hitherto unseen in the West Midlands. There should be small pineapples on top of every pillar, lamp post and help sign. There should be pineapple murals and pineapple brickwork. You shouldn't be able to move for the pineapples.

When I win the EuroMillions on Friday (£137 million, watch this space) I will personally pay for a two metre high golden pineapple statue to be erected outside the station. I will give the station the campery, the whimsy, the sheer delightful personality it deserves. I will make it the destination it should be.

Small Wins

2026-05-27T12:05:30.058+01:00

It's very easy, at this moment in British history, to allow yourself to become despondent about the state of the nation. About the inability of government, media and thought leaders to advocate for change. About the failure to deliver any world changing projects or schemes. About the general attitude of "will this do?"

It's easy, in all of this, to miss when something good actually happens. When there is a change that will directly improve the lives of people in the country.

Which is why I went to the Midlands.

In the last few weeks the West Midlands Railway has acquired two new lines, long orange streaks across the map on routes that weren't previously open to passengers (at least, not in this century). Those railway lines gifted a total of five new stations to the map. Five new chances for travel, regeneration and opportunity. Obviously I had to visit them.

My first port of call was Willenhall, on the new line between Wolverhampton and Walsall. It's a former freight line that now lets you travel between two major conurbations without having to go into Birmingham city centre first. It doesn't sound much, but that's the kind of small link that makes a big difference. Any chance to avoid New Street is surely a plus.

Willenhall will not be confused for one of Europe's great termini. It has two platforms, two shelters, and some seats. There is no ticket office, but there is a ticket machine. It's been decked out in bland grey with some splashes of corporate orange here and there.

It was already being well used when I arrived, with a dozen people disembarking with me (and one girl rushing down to the platform a full minute after the train had left; she tried to style it out, pulling her phone up and leaning on a wall, like she really wanted to hang out on a railway station for an hour).

I went up to the road bridge, which has been gifted with a cycle lane and plenty of pedestrian space. It turned out the town centre of Willenhall was less than a minute's walk from the new station; it could not have been more convenient. I would've been pretty annoyed if I'd lived there in 1965 when it originally closed, removing a handy link, but there are so many reasons I'm glad I wasn't around in 1965 (grrr, Beeching!).

I didn't go into the town, instead turning right past a memorial and the library. There was some lovely Festival of Britain font going on over the old entrance - there's a new glass one to the side, with disabled access - and the "flag of Willenhall" on a gatepost. It was designed in 2014 and references the town's history as the home of lockmaking - it was the site of Yale's factory for decades. I am, officially, over flags in any way shape or form right now; the discourse has ground me down. Sure, you want a flag, stick it up. Stick up all the flags you like. It won't make your wife come back.

The road twisted and turned, past a church tower and a half-dozen pubs - some open, some not. Drinking culture has changed so much in the last couple of centuries as we've realised that (a) getting lashed on your lunch break probably isn't a good thing and (b) getting lashed in general isn't great for your health and certainly won't give you washboard abs. It's sad seeing these former pleasure palaces laden with "for sale" signs but Britain is changing. It's a new world, and that world involves protein shakes and gyms. And also, let's be honest, quite a lot of cocaine. It's a world I'll quietly absent myself from, and I'll be over here, resting a pint glass on my beer gut.

As I walked, it became clear that Willenhall was crying out for a fast, direct link into the city. There were the occasional signs of regeneration - blocks of flats, new town houses - but mostly what I saw was post-industrial collapse. Empty buildings. Debris. Sadness. Small homes with peeling paint and grass growing out of their roofs.

I passed The Meat Shop - a woman was emerging with a bulging white carrier bag, filled with who knew what - and a bus stop with a pair of giggling sixth formers flirting with one another. TLC Bargains had a slogan of SMACK WHACK BANG and an astonishing Instagram account featuring "the Black Country Del Boy". Please do check out the video where he extols the virtues of a spice grinder while wearing a pair of fake breasts. I don't know why.

I turned right at the Sikh Gurdwara, as always enjoying the little bit of exoticism that had crashed landed into boring old England, and descended past a delicious-smelling McDonalds (it was lunchtime after all) towards the railway bridge. The Robin Hood pub, judging by the cards on the back of the bench in the window, was hosting a birthday party. Two elderly people came round from the car park, peered inside, then went in.

The A454 quickly followed, passing over my head while the railway had gone underneath (there was a canal a bit further on, too; a rare one-two-three of transport). In a layby, a truck driver sat in his cab and ate his lunch; a second van backed into the space next to him and the driver similarly pulled out a sandwich. I was leaving the residential streets behind and moving into the industrial.

A company proudly celebrating its 29th anniversary with a special badge on the side of its unit - that's not how anniversaries work - and an ad for Darlaston Gym Boxing hung on a green fence. At the traffic lights, a crane towered over my head, as I turned left to follow the long brick wall of the Imperial Works. Once a nuts and bolt factory, it had become home to various engineering businesses over the years, but now seemed derelict.

It was obvious to me how Darlaston station would help this area. It was thick with industry - trucks were constantly passing me or reversing - but there was still a lot of blank, vacant space that was crying out for a rebuild. Offices, homes - you could slip them in here now, with a canal view and a local station. It needed a bit of ambition and a lot of money but it could be done.

I avoided being run over by a self-drive hire van - they were still getting used to the controls, clearly, and were very apologetic as they lurched out of a side entrance - and passed a rack of traffic trapped in a four-way roadwork. There were so many different businesses around, so many names I'd never heard of, doing work I'd never know about. Receiving deliveries of who knew what, processing invoices from other small anonymous companies, making a nice little profit that bought the owner a decent car and paid for a Christmas party.

Houses returned with a crash: a sudden block of old people flats and a row of 1970s houses. One of them had torn up their lawn to replace it with a large, fake stone fountain, about two metres high. Sadly the water wasn't turned on, otherwise I'd have nipped over to drop in a few coins and make a wish.

The new station isn't on Station Street; road changes have left this as a cut-through lined with a terrace on one side and garages on the other. At the end, there was a vast self-storage unit. The only business that seems to be expanding everywhere is storage, as we own more and more things but live in smaller and smaller homes.

On top of the railway bridge I got a glimpse of the station below. The embankments were still scarred from construction, bare and yet to be turfed, while a team of men with a tanker and a hose were doing some pumping on the newly laid drain - not a great sign, let's be honest. They blocked the way for me to get a decent sign picture with their equipment so I'm afraid this is the best you'll get. It does say Darlaston, I promise.

Actually getting into the station involved a walk up a long road that provided access to the neighbouring cemetery. I got the feeling that TfWM didn't expect many people to walk to this stop, a suspicion confirmed when I rounded the corner and saw an acre of bare tarmac laid out for parking. It was, I'd say, about 10% full, but it was early days. I'm sure in a few months you'll find it hard to get a spot.

Like its brother at Willenhall, Darlaston station is no looker. It gets the job done. There are lifts to get you over the tracks, seats, a roof to hold off the rain.

Darlaston station won't change the world. But it will improve a little part of it. Get your wins where you can.

Class

2026-05-13T18:51:43.299+01:00

When I disembarked at Blundellsands & Crosby, there was a girl ahead of me. She was about seventeen or eighteen, wearing a loose thin shirt over a crop top and tiny white shorts. In the crook of her right arm was a cooler. She peered into the window of the waiting room and then, when she couldn't see whoever she was meeting, she pulled out her phone and began hastily tapping.

I guessed that she was on study leave from her A-levels and was using the opportunity to go to the beach with her mates. I didn't blame her. It was an incredibly beautiful day. The blue sky seemed to reach up and over us, a huge dome of bright.

Blundellsands Road West, the route to the beach, is a parade of elegant Victorian mansions and classy villas set behind long gardens. Some of them have been converted to flats, but a lot haven't; large cars with personalised number plates park on block paved driveways. In between them are prep schools and junior schools and kindergartens. It meant that I heard, in the mid morning air, nothing but the joyous sound of children playing.

The road ended in a merger between land and nature, a no man's land where the grass and the sand butted right up against the tarmac. There was a sign indicating where the nearest toilets were in both directions, and then, a little way behind it, a memorial bench for someone I never met but none the less mourned.

Seb Patrick was a writer and podcaster who grew up on Merseyside, moved down to London for work, then returned in his thirties with his wife and daughter so that he could give them a better standard of living. I knew him through his podcast, Cinematic Universe, and we followed each other on Twitter. It was a social media relationship, where we would interact, swap jokes, but didn't actually know anything about one another. I found him funny and interesting and the updates on his readjustment to living in Liverpool were charming.

Seb died suddenly in 2020. He was 37. All deaths are tragic, of course, but there was a real loss to this one. He was too young, had too many responsibilities, had too much going on in his life.

Social media is a strange phenomenon. Every day I get small moments from people's lives sent to my phone. Every day I quietly build up a picture of a person, a figure behind an avatar, a real human being with a cat and a house and a job. I don't know them. In many cases I don't even know their real name. But I've been getting these little nuggets of their existence in my world for years now. I've never met them but they are in some ways more real to me than actual relatives. I have cousins I've not seen for thirty years and have no idea what they're doing now, while there are people I've never met at the other end of the country where I could probably write their autobiography for them.

Are these people friends? No, not really. But they do become a valuable marker in your life. Humans are social animals and that social interaction can come from a million different ways. It's why I get annoyed when people talk about the "importance" of social media, of Twitter and Bluesky as agents of change and political forces. Yes that happens, but also, some people are watching a television programme and laughing and want to share it. That's properly important to me.

The path rose up, slowly, over a ridge of dunes, as though it's holding off the view until the very last moment. Then you see the long expanse of wide sandy beach and rolling tides and in amongst them, the Iron Men.

Another Place by Anthony Gormley is 100 iron men, based on his own body, and scattered across the beach staring out to sea. The tide washes over them, deposits barnacles and sand on them, and they remain impassive throughout. It was originally a travelling artwork, with Crosby Beach the third place to host it, but Merseyside fell in love with it. After a good deal of campaigning - and despite resistance from the council - it became a permanent part of the landscape in 2007.

It still unnerves you, to see them staring out to sea, but there's also something hopeful and pleasing about them. Certainly the beach users that day were enjoying playing around them. Small children ran up and stared at them while dogs danced around them. It's a massive draw for the area and really, the best kind of public art; wanted, loved, cherished.

I followed the promenade south, taking in the view. Crosby Beach has a strange mix of idyll and practicality. The sands are long and glowing, but behind them are wind turbines, and oil tankers, and the red cranes of the Liverpool docks are constantly in sight. It's a holiday but there's a reminder of work at all times. It's probably done them a favour. Anywhere else in the country and this stretch of uninterrupted sands would be a major destination. Instead it's a secret Scousers keep to themselves.

Sand had swamped the path at some points, a bone of contention between the locals and the council. They argue that the sand stops access to the promenade, which is true, but the council is forced to point at the sea and say "you know how this works, right?" Sefton Borough Council is not King Cnut, and it can't stop the waves. The beach wants to join the dunes behind it and it's not going to let a strip of paving get in the way.

The path opened up to real the frankly gob-smacking form of Crosby Leisure Centre. It's a scifi vehicle that somehow arrived in suburban Liverpool; you expect a woman with a suspiciously large beehive hairdo to come sashaying out. The architects claimed that the roof is to allow the sands to blow over the top without impediment. I believe this is architect speak for "it looks really cool".

I followed the path round the edge, able to see inside to the swimming pool where people larked about in the water. Sadly the building is not a full flying saucer. Only the front half has the amazing sloped roof; at the back it's a brick block, tucked away from the sea where you can't spot it. Still, what a front that is.

I walked onto Bridge Road, a strip between the railway and the beach that was showing signs of being gentrified. It had a mix of industrial units and shops, garages and cafes. The micropub was alongside an electrical wholesaler; the cash-only Chinese takeaway with the racially suspect cartoon in the window was over the road from a cafe offering breakfast-lunch-gelato.

A roadsign welcomed me to Brighton-le-Sands; I choose to believe they added "le-Sands" as a deliberate two fingers to the more famous Brighton's pebbly beach. (It never fails to astonish me that Brighton's nudist beach is shingle. You must be pulling stones out of crevices for days). Squat office blocks were headquarters to engineering firms and vaguely maritime industries. At some point people are going to spot that you can get a three bed semi a two minute walk from the sea for under £300,000 and suddenly the cash and carry will be a nightclub and the chippy will become a coffee shop but until then it's a nice mix of people.

I turned inland, past a row of neat new houses built with electric chargers and double driveways, and a missing cat poster ("Diddy"). I was approaching the railway line, and a cynical part of me thought that a missing cat within one street of an electrified rail probably isn't coming back. I hope I'm wrong.

The other side of the line counts as Crosby, if not technically than certainly in the minds of the residents, and as such it has no need to be gentrified; it was always like that.

Now we were in a world of elevated chicken shops with expensive burgers, of restaurants designed to be featured on the 'Gram, of "CAMRA Pub of the Year 2025". Women in snatched outfits pushed babies in designer onesies. Salons offered "natural facial rejuvenation". And then, in the middle of it, a football ground.

Marine AFC play in the Northern League North, which, as far as I can work out, is the bit below what in my head is still the Vauxhall Conference. I tried reading the Wikipedia page on it but my brain started closing down through sheer boredom. They're below the proper football teams who play in the four divisions that I'm vaguely aware of, let's put it that way.

They've played here since 1903, but that could all change quite soon: they announced plans for a new stadium in Thornton last year. I'm not sure what's happening there, but Rossett Park will supposedly be retained as a "community resource". A great ambition, if it happens; not to be too cynical but a large space in a sought-after residential area that's no longer being used for its primary purpose screams "flogged to a property developer for a huge profit". Fair play to them either way.

I crossed the road with two yummy mummies to where a Carnegie Library occupied a triangular site. The actual library closed in 2013, in the early days of austerity (ah, the memories of when we were told it was a bit of temporary belt-tightening) but because it's one of the marvellous gifts to the nation from Andrew Carnegie, it sat empty awaiting someone who could treat it with a bit of sympathy to restore it.

That new occupier is going to be Moose Coffee, the local breakfast chain that has people queuing around the block for their food. I have a slight resentment towards Moose because their very first branch was round the corner from me in our village; however, that one rebranded as Home and Moose went on to become a Liverpool phenomenon. It's a bit like seeing a really popular band in their early days. I'm wandering around going "I was having Moose Coffee before they even opened a branch in Dale Street" but unsurprisingly it doesn't have the same cache as the Pistols at the Free Trade Hall.

I darted across the road and into a small oblong of park. It was thick with trees and dog walkers. I paused for a moment and had a drink of water. I realised how much I was enjoying myself. This is going to out me as a terrible snob - well, this and everything I've ever written on this blog - but it was nice to be wandering around an area without worrying a drug dealer was going to leap out and accost me. The run of Leasowe-Kirkby-Walton wasn't exactly showing the city region at its best. Now I was in a nice area with nice shops and parks and it was nice.

I followed Coronation Road into the centre of Great Crosby, another string of cafes and old-fashioned businesses that were somehow clinging on. A carpet shop, a solicitors, a decorator's centre that ironically could've done with a lick of paint.

The centre of the village proper is a Y-shaped section of pedestrianisation. Shops and bars line the pavement, tables spilling out for sunny days like today. Even the Greggs had space outside for your al fresco steak bake. A couple of new developments had inserted blocks of apartments into the centre, with more being constructed further down; a pleasing dose of densification where you'd expect the locals to fight against it.

I wandered through its impeccably clean streets, wondering where to have my lunch. I was tempted to go to Greggs and have one of its chicken sausage rolls in solidarity now that it's become a front in the culture wars (they only introduced them to get Muslims to shop there!!1!!1) but that felt a bit vulgar. Besides I got distracted when I spotted a bookshop.

I need to stop buying books. No, really, I do. It's becoming a terrible, terrible burden. I can't wander past a bookshop without getting the urge to run in and buy another novel I can add to the "unread" pile. It's a total waste of money. I walked round Pritchards, desperately trying to find something to buy, and at the same time, resisting every fibre in my body that said I should. After a full circuit I was able to leave, empty handed, breathing heavily but relieved that I'd spent absolutely nothing. (I have since bought two more books from other shops).

A walk back to the head of the pedestrian area, where there's a Sainsbury's, and I was able to spot a changing of the guard. A phone box had been loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck and the workmen were preparing the way for a flatscreen advertising board - sorry, I mean a BT Street Hub, because you can technically still use them to make a telephone call, not that anyone ever will. I'd never seen a phone box being carted off to the knacker's yard before and it gave me a momentary pang of sadness. Then I tried to remember the last time I'd used one and I don't think it was this side of the millennium.

I'd done a full circuit now and was still no closer to finding somewhere for lunch. I mean, there were obviously a lot of options, but most of them fell between "too posh" or "too generic" (yes, there was a Costa). Finally I realised where to go, where I should've gone right from the start.

My thanks to The George for giving me the lunch I needed.

This trip - and also the pint of beer - was funded by your contributions to my Ko-fi. Thanks once again!

5. Blundellsands & Crosby

2026-05-06T12:11:09.611+01:00

Opened: 24th July 1848 as Crosby. Renamed Blundellsands for Crosby in 1865, then Blundellsands & Crosby in November that year.

Line electrified: 1904

Number of platforms: Two, with a waiting room on each.

Points of interest: Quite a few, actually. On the northbound platform is a blue bench, built by a local schoolboy, and dedicated to Brian Boggild. He was the ticket man at Crosby for many years but sadly died of Covid in 2020. I'm guessing he was an Everton fan.

Running under the end of the platforms is a small pedestrian underpass to allow people to continue on their way without the need for a level crossing. It connects Blundellsands Road East with Blundellsands Road West.

The subway has been decorated with a cheery mural of children playing to celebrate Sefton Council's fiftieth anniversary. I'm not quite sure what the connection with this underpass is beyond it being in Sefton but it's nice anyway.

It certainly makes what could be a pretty dark space that little bit jollier.

On the southbound platform there's another piece of art in the form of a mosaic depicting local points of interest.

I can't seem to find any information about who created the artwork, or when. If you know, please get in touch and I'll happily update this page. (Remember when Merseytravel had an entire Art on the Network programme? Ah, the good old days before austerity). The mosaic could do with a little bit of care, though, because it's been protected by a clear plastic screen, presumably chosen over glass because it's less likely to be damaged. Which would be fine except the plastic has turned yellow in the sun.

There's also a small coffee shop, The Green Kiosk, which serves reasonably priced beverages from a tiny shed right outside the station entrance.

Attractive Local Feature sign: Considering all the other points of interest, and its proximity to Crosby Beach, it's a surprise to find there isn't one.

Original blog post: 19th December 2007

What's changed since then? I've aged considerably.

Proof of visit:

Let Me Count The Ways

2026-05-01T17:24:57.743+01:00

Patchway looks a lot more modern than it actually is. A station first opened in the 19th century, it has upgraded lifts and a footbridge, as though someone actually cares about it as a destination. The reason for all this up to date tech is simple: electrification. The Great Western Main Line got wired in the 2010s, meaning that the footbridge here had to be rebuilt higher up, and inadvertently making it a much nicer place to visit. It's yet another argument for electric trains across the entire nation, which is why it isn't happening. Making sense isn't a good enough reason I'm afraid.

The station's main claim to fame is that it serves the Rolls-Royce manufacturing complex, and they even have their own entrance from the platform. Looking at the acres of vacant land I wondered if this was going to be another part of the Brabazon new town, but apparently not. Rolls-Royce are still doing well here, producing aircraft components, and probably also some terrifying murder machines that we'd rather not think about.

I left the station by the car park, where a group of men in their sixties were meeting up for a trip into town, manfully shaking hands and being polite to one another. Absolutely no hugs here. Station Road is a small, narrow country-esque lane which, judging by the speed of the drivers who passed me, is used as a rat run. There's an estate the other side of the trees, but they're weirdly kept separate, in case they go mad and decide to use public transport.

At the end is Gypsy Patch Lane. Is that okay? I don't know if that's okay. It's a wide road that forms part of a chain crossing the top of the city, lined with corporation homes set back behind gardens and front gates. I followed an elderly man returning home; he absent-mindedly picked a piece of litter out of his hedge before going into his home.

Across the way was a pub called Stokers which, unlike a lot of estate pubs, still seemed to be thriving. A quick look at their Facebook page revealed the reason for this:

SCOTCH EGG FRIDAY. I repeat: SCOTCH EGG FRIDAY. What a concept. While other pubs are branching out into gourmet eats or tapas, Stokers is slapping down eighty scotch eggs and doing a roaring trade. That's what you want with your pint, not some padron peppers or a croqueta or two: an egg wrapped in meat with maybe a bit of pickle chucked in as well. I'm writing this from nearly two hundred miles away, and I'm furious I'm not there. Admittedly, I'd probably get my head kicked in - it doesn't look like the kind of pub that welcomes fat train station spotters - but so long as I got one of those cheese and cracked black pepper bites first I'd be happy.

Stokers also had a bonus claim to fame in the car park. Computer, zoom and enhance.

Waiting to feed the students later that day was the legendary Jason Donervan. I felt quite starstruck seeing it across the road, like when I went to Sunderland and saw Amy's Winehouse. Also Jason Donervan never sued anyone for saying it was gay so it's already one-up on the Aussie soap star.

I was quite happily wandering around, hoping that those clouds wouldn't get any darker or more rainy, when I saw a bus stop. The problem was, this bus stop was so good, I actually told it to fuck off. Out loud. Look at it.

It would appear that Bristol has a network called metrobus (no caps needed, it's the future). This is an actual Bus Rapid Transit network, with four express services running around the city.

The bus stops themselves incorporate dispense the tickets, so you can buy before you board, plus seating and a next bus indicator.

Obviously buses are rubbish, in the main. However, part of the reason they're rubbish is they're easy to get rid of - how many "this stop is not in use" signs have you noticed? - plus they're slow and get caught up in traffic. If you give them their own dedicated lanes and busways and modern vehicles that are easy to use and understand, people will be all over them. I was wildly impressed (although a bit of reading up has shown me that they're not necessarily all they should be; bus lane provision has been spotty, meaning the vehicles get caught up in the traffic with everything else).

It's not the only bit of Bristol's transport planning that surprised me. While I was reading up on the stations I discovered that there are actual local government plans for an underground railway service.

Obviously this is all heavily caveated. They're talking about it being possibly a mix of over- and underground services, so it might be a tram network with a couple of tunnels rather than a full metro. The proposal came from Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees, who's now in the House of Lords and his position has been abolished entirely (there's a Metro Mayor for the West of England instead). Funding was allocated to look into the proposals, with a suggestion of four lines, each of which costs one billion pounds. That sounds like far too low an amount to me (Line 4 of the Milan Metro, which opened in 2024, cost €1.7 billion) and the amount will be rising every moment there aren't spades in the ground.

None the less, I'm thrilled by the optimism. This is exactly what the regional mayors should be doing. Not monkeying around with the odd station or new bendy buses; big, transformative projects that will comprehensively change the city. Even Andy Burnham - perhaps the most powerful city leader in the country - only tentatively talks about an underground system for Manchester, even though Manchester should've got one about, oooh, a hundred years ago. The idea that there is a city in the United Kingdom actually pushing for modern, transformative public transport is thrilling, and gives me a little bit of hope for the future. I look forward to riding on the Bristol Tube one day. I'll probably be in an oxygen tent by then but that's not the point.

I turned off Gipsy Patch Lane - nope, still not okay - and onto a fast road running between parkland. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I started to spot rooftops appearing behind the trees, as a housing estate quietly surrounded me. Unlike the corporation works I'd been walking by before now, this was very private, a network of cul-de-sacs hidden away. It turned its back on the main roads, showing them blank walls. It didn't feel welcoming at all; it viewed strangers with suspicion.

I negotiated another roundabout, and paused in the Tesco Express for a bottle of Coke; the staff were loudly complaining about a fellow worker and his laziness, shouting across the aisles. Beyond that was another pub, though this one was extemely closed. They clearly hadn't got the memo about Scotch Egg Fridays.

The road sloped down and there was the entrance to what was, in its own way, one of the most significant railway stations in the UK.

Motorways were springing up all over the UK in the 1960s and 70s. While they had ordinary, boring official numbers, they also often acquired other names in planning, names designed to capture the imagination of the locals and distract them from the six lanes of viaduct crashing through their neighbourhoods. Linguists looked to America, because in the 1970s everyone wanted Britain to me more like thrusting, exciting, everyone driving everywhere America, and they alit on the term "parkway" - a term for a fast road that is usually scenic and surrounded by trees. It might be a lie - if you've ever got a cab from JFK into Manhattan you will have travelled along a series of Parkways, and it's about as scenic as the bottom of a wheelie bin - but it sounds nice, particularly to naive British people who didn't know much about these new roads and heard the word "park" and thought of ducks and lakes and grass. As such, the M32 motorway, which goes from the M4 into the centre of the city, was dubbed the "Bristol Parkway" and then, a few years later, when a new station was opened quite close to junction one, it was also called "Bristol Parkway," to let people know that it was conveniently located for that great motorway.

Something strange then happened. People forgot that the M32 was called the Bristol Parkway at all, and instead associated the name with the station. They thought that Parkway meant there was a place to park, because the new station had, in fact, been built with a large car park to enable commuting. In a rare example of 1970s British Rail actually capitalising on some good publicity, they started using Parkway as a generic term meaning "we've got a large car park you know". Hence Liverpool South Parkway, Tiverton Parkway, Oxford Parkway, and a load of other stations across the UK that don't have a big motorway next door. It's a strange story of the British public being told a word means one thing and deciding, comprehensively, that it absolutely doesn't. I still think Parkway is an incredibly boring thing to stick on the end of a railway station name, and I object to it every time I see it, but that's not Bristol Parkway's fault.

The station has proved so popular it's been repeatedly expanded over the years, with the latest rebuild coming in 2001 and looking very turn of the millennium. A metal roof and plenty of circulation space, though not many actual seats, plus the obligatory branch of Costa. There were originally two platforms - there's now four - and the car park has been upgraded to a multi-storey, with a further satellite car park up the road. It's a roaring success, so I shouldn't be sniffy about it, but I have to admit I'm not a fan.

It might be that it felt a bit tired. Twenty-five years is usually about the length of time railway companies can go without doing any maintenance to a station - "it's still new!" - and the building and public areas all felt cluttered and in need of a good scrub. It needed to be stripped back of all the extras that had arrived over the years and restored to its clean lines.

I went down to the platform, where I learned that Bristol Parkway is Home of UWE Bristol, and got on a train to Temple Meads. There were still a couple of stations left in the city for me to visit, on the south side, but I didn't like the look of those clouds, and I didn't have a coat. Plus I fancied a pint. You're a great city Bristol. I hope to revisit you very soon.

Brizzle Kicks

2026-04-26T17:41:56.304+01:00

For reasons far too dull to go into here, I found myself in Bristol with some hours to kill. How many hours? I didn't really know. It could be two, it could be four, it all depended on when I got a phone call. I needed something to keep me busy but not an extreme voyage of discovery.

Readers with long memories might remember that I've been to Bristol before, back in 2016, when I was thinking of turning this blog into a book of some kind. That didn't happen. I did travel round the country, though, and one of the lines I visited was the Severn Beach Line, which goes from Temple Meads along the coast. This is what the line diagram looked when I visited:

And this is what it looks like now:

Why, there's a whole new station on there! (And also Weston-Super-Mare, but for the purposes of this blog, we're ignoring that). Portway Park & Ride opened in 2023, which meant if I visited there, I'd complete the whole line once again. (I repeat: ignore Weston-Super-Mare. It's got a thinner green line, if you notice, because it doesn't count. I decided.)

This meant travelling from Bristol Temple Meads, which I've never really got on board with. I know it's an extremely important station, both from an engineering perspective and architecturally, but it doesn't fly for me. It may be because it's largely a through station. A terminus has a grand feeling of arrival, of being a destination in itself, while a through station is simply a stop on the way to somewhere else. It also makes the station lopsided; the facilities all end up to the side.

Big fan of the Isambard Kingdom Brunel statue outside though. I had no idea he was so dinky, barely scraping five feet. He looks like he should be playing the Artful Dodger. We love a Short King.

It was fun catching up with stations out the window of the train, remembering where I'd gone and what I'd done. I have a strangely powerful memory about railway stations - I get a glimpse and I can remember the day, the weather, where I went and what I did. This doesn't extend to railway station names, by the way. Those all blur together. Show me a platform though and I can tell you some stupid fact about my visit, every time.

Portway won't win any architecture awards, not least because there's nothing there you could really call architecture. A single platform, an off the shelf shelter, some lamp posts. The line's single track here so there isn't even a need for a footbridge. It's the most perfunctory of new developments.

Its real purpose is clear once you've followed a pathway lined with pictures of newts drawn by local schoolchildren. Apparently this is to commemorate the newt crossing that was installed when they built the station. As with all children's art on the railways, I have no time for it. Pay a proper artist. Still, I suppose we are now entering an era of AI art, and soon there will be illustrations of chubby cartoon characters with a yellow piss-wash to distract us all over the network. Then I'll be desperate for a poorly scrawled daubing by Candace, age 9.

Portway has been gifted with a wide car park and a bus exchange, both of which were well used when I visited. In fact, there was a double decker waiting at the top of the footpath as I approached from the station, only to pull away when I got within a few metres; I imagine that amused him greatly for the rest of the day, thinking that he had deprived a commuter of a bus ride. What larks.

It's interesting to note that the actual name of the station is Portway Park & Ride. Firstly, urgh. How demeaning. Secondly, I'm not sure I've ever seen the words Park & Ride actually incorporated into the name before (I'm sure I'm wrong). The usual format would be to call this a Parkway, which would then make it Portway Parkway, which I think is brilliant but I'm sure the council thought was unnecessarily flippant for a major transport investment.

The reason for the station's existence can be seen soaring over your head: the M5 viaduct over the River Avon. Junction 18 is down the road, and the hope is this station will pull some people away from driving directly into the city. The car park looked busy so it must be working.

I left the station through a scrappy back exit that took me directly under the bridge, to a level crossing that blocked access to a section of industry. I stood politely at the closed gate, trying not to catch the eye of the driver in the car waiting with me, trying to quiet the voice in my head that said look, you can nip right across, it's only single track and you can see if the train's coming.

Eventually the Bristol-bound train passed through and we were allowed to cross. I diverted to the side, into a small patch of gravel and through a gate into the Lamplighter's Marsh, a stretch of open country on a bend in the river cut off from the town by the railway. Above me, the trucks on the viaduct made a tinny, metallic sound as they crossed.

I was almost immediately assaulted from all sides. I'm not sure what's happening this year, but I have been suffering with the worst hay fever of my life. I can't take a stroll past a single bush without sneezing, and as I walked across the marsh my eyes were streaming and my nose was running. Nature seems to be particularly vindictive this spring and I'm not a fan.

I bravely pushed on, passing joggers and dog walkers, taking in the sunshine and the clear blue sky. It was wonderful to be out on my own, strolling without a jacket, feeling the sun on me. It was a slow rejuvenation. I absolutely felt as though I was sloughing off my winter burdens.

The Lamplighter's Inn was still there, and seemingly still open, which pleased me. Ten years later that's not a guarantee with a pub. As with my previous visit, I was too early for a pint, but that's good in a way - a decade long piece of symmetry. I climbed up through the village, where the houses were painted; I remembered them as being gentle pastels before but now they were stark primary colours. I much preferred this colour scheme, particularly the purple one; brave and bold, shaming the boring semis over the road.

Shirehampton station was still tucked under the railway bridge, opposite the Daisy Field, and I took another sign pic. It's a GWR station now, not First Great Western, but while the font may have changed my dopey expression remains the same.

The question was, where to next, and I decided to take a trip to another new (to me) station, Ashley Down. This opened on the line north out of Temple Meads in September 2024, barely 18 months after construction started, which may be some kind of record. I've never known a railway station project go so smoothly. (How's Liverpool Baltic coming along Steve? Never mind).

It's not a looker, I'll give you that; two platforms, a bridge, lifts. No sign of a ticket office. But it's been neatly done, with a bit of landscaping outside and easy access to a cycle path. A perfectly decent suburban station in a district that could do with fast efficient transport into town, forcing you to once again wonder why there was that sixty year gap between the closing of the old Ashley Hill station and the new one opening.

There was now a steep walk uphill to the main road. I'd forgotten how hilly Bristol is. While Sheffield, say, has a reputation as a slog to get round, Bristol has a breezy, happy vibe to it that belies the absolute nightmare that is getting from one district to another. I pushed up the slope to the top, where a block of new build flats barely concealed the floodlighting rig for Gloucestershire County Cricket ground. Bristol Rovers' home ground is also within a mile of here; I repeat, why wasn't the station opened before?

It was bin day, apparently, and in Bristol there seems to be a mix of wheelies, crates and bags for their recycling and rubbish. I looked at it with a slight feeling of dread. At the moment Wirral has one wheelie for rubbish and one for recycling, but there's a promise to introduce food caddies at some point, and I imagine our free and easy days of chucking paper and glass all in the one bin will soon be over. Our neighbours once wandered off with one of our bins, which we had to reclaim when they put it out again a couple of weeks later, so I get anxious about disappearing receptacles. Surely the wind will blow a bag away? Or those crates will prove tempting for teenagers to chuck about?

That was an awful lot of Bin Chat. This is how you know you're a middle aged man. The bins assume an importance entirely out of step with reality.

Up and round the block, descending to a pair of retail parks with a Lidl and an Aldi side by side; I didn't think that was allowed. It feels slightly dangerous. Maybe they all roll out at eight o'clock for rumbles in the car park, with the staff of Home and Bargain coming between them shouting "no, it's not worth it!".

A neat row of hire scooters were parked by a greenspace; unlike in Liverpool, where you are never more than eight seconds from being mown down by a student recklessly weaving on one, even though the city centre is about eight foot wide and entirely flat, I could actually see the point of them in steep Bristol. It also helped that the scooter users seemed much more considerate, and there were plenty of cycle lanes for them to be segregated from the traffic.

In case you can't read that, it's a picture of Jesus under the slogan, When all hope is lost, remember some people still support Bristol Rovers. One thing I dislike about Bristol is that Banksy has seemingly given graffiti artists carte blanche to fill every piece of wall with their nonsense. We get it, you're an alternative city - I have never seen so many people with coloured dye jobs in my life - but 98% of the scrawl on the walls isn't art, it's just names and letters and the odd bit of swearing. I'm not really a Banksy fan - oh, the police aren't necessarily on the side of the populace? Please, deliver more astonishing truth to power, sir - but at least his stencil work has a certain amount of class and talent to it. It's like the council are afraid to power wash away Holly McManus Is A Big Fat Slag And Nobody Will Touch Her With A Bargepoll - Donna in case Donna later uses her spraypainting skills to portray, I don't know, Gemma Collins as the Mona Lisa, and her "Treatise against Holly McManus, 2026" is suddenly worth eight hundred thousand pounds and the city can flog it to fund a library for another six months.

The road continued up and up, long stretches of semis, a lot of them undergoing building works to take away pesky front drives and add loft conversions. A delivery driver did a frankly terrifying u-turn across both lanes of traffic, causing cars to slam on their brakes in both directions, and I don't think his cheery wave of thanks placated them. I remember reading once that DHL's delivery programme in America never makes the vans do a left hand turn, preferring to send them round the block on the much easier right turn; clearly Amazon or Evri or whoever don't extend the same software to their UK drivers.

A crossroads and I was passing the Bristol Civil Service Social Club and a bus shelter filled with expectant riders. Houses were To Let from the unfortunately named CJ Hole estate agency. A small row of local shops, with the owners stood outside having a chat, then a clothes recycling bin surrounded by bags and bric-a-brac.

More shops, mainly takeaways and beauty salons, the only businesses that can't go completely online. A pub had been converted into a Tesco Express, while a restaurant promised English breakfasts and Indian meals, which I believe is the only food any British person ever needs. Further up, a regeneration project had filled the back roads with new avenues of homes named after writers. Shakespeare Avenue and Wordsworth Road? Fine. Beatrix Place? Disrespectful; no surname, just because she's a woman? (And all three Brontës get one Walk between them.) Amis Walk and Dahl Walk? Problematic.

Still, it was better than the next bunch of streets that were all simply given numbers - Seventh Avenue and so on. I imagine the intention was to give it a glamorous, American air, but it actually came off as unimaginative and impersonal.

I'd left the city of Bristol at some point, into one of its neighbouring boroughs, and there'd been a definite social slide. Filton had once been home to aircraft manufacturing, but it had been downsized over the years. The Bristol Brabazon and Concorde were built here, but now the runway is being turned into a new town, also called Brabazon; there will be thousands of homes, offices, a new arena and a railway station on a former freight line to serve it all.

Filton Abbey Wood station, meanwhile, has slowly grown over the years from a couple of platforms to four, though its facilities remain minimal - long ramps and stairs and a footbridge.

I'd gone to the local Asda to get a bit of lunch - in a masterpiece of planning, even though it's right next door, there's no way to access it from the station, and it involved a twenty minute detour. I bought three things, for the meal deal, and all three items were wrong. I picked up Cherry Coke Zero: vile. I got what I thought was a steak slice but turned out to be steak, cheese and Marmite - in the bin with that. And the only wrap they had left was a disgusting "Southern Fried Chicken" concoction, that dripped a radioactive sauce on my jeans that stained them a frankly disturbing shade of brown. I only managed one of the wraps before my gag reflex kicked in.

Still no phone call. I guess a couple more stations wouldn't hurt?

Home Run

2026-03-20T11:36:17.501+00:00

The first thing you see when you step out of Walton station is a wall. Five metres high, with a rounded top. The distinctive exterior of a prison. This is Liverpool Prison, or, as it was known before the modern world decided to suck all charm out of everything, Walton Gaol. The main prison for the Merseyside region, famous and infamous, home to 1300 people and not somewhere I ever hope to see the inside of.

Prison frightens me, as I think it does for anyone who's never so much as shoplifted a Mars Bar. One of my most persistent fears is that I'll be accused of something I didn't do and end up serving time for it. A friend of a friend was once accused of molesting some kids he'd babysat for as a teen. It got all the way to trial before being thrown out by a judge who was baffled by the lack of evidence; he was entirely innocent, of course, and it turned out his accusers had made similar allegations about other people in the hope of getting compensation. Still, imagine getting that close to being locked away, tarred as a criminal, put in the nonce wing; vulnerable, scared, and entirely innocent. At least if you've done the crime there's a slight edge of "it's a fair cop". I shuddered slightly as I walked by.

The traditional, Victorian, HMP Slade gates are now hidden behind the wall, and a new entrance has been built in the corner of the complex. Colourful images of the city skyline welcome visitors like it's a theme park; in reality, it's an awful place to be, regularly condemned for its conditions, overcrowded, and in need of comprehensive redevelopment, if not demolition. There's a real problem with drug use and the small signs pinned to the walls advising that flying drones is illegal don't seem to be as off putting as you'd expect, strangely.

I turned south onto the Southport Road, one of those fine avenues that are all over Liverpool. Long straight lanes constructed to allow trams to run with ease, but completely devoid of them in the 21st century. Semis with paved over lawns were the norm, with the households' other cars parked on the pavement.

A side road took me between two expanses of municipal green. The Stuart Road Playing Fields straddled the road, wide lengths of playing fields laid out for the betterment of the residents. There probably should've been a leisure centre here, but instead there was an "Activity for All" building. It seems to be a sort of indoor football pitch with a cafe attached. Looking at their website, it's a community interest company, doing stuff the council used to, which is the modern way I suppose. My main objection is that it uses the American spelling of centre on its exterior.

I walked round the side of it to get access to a leisure facility I've never seen before in the UK. The playing fields are home to the Liverpool Trojans who proudly proclaim they're the oldest baseball team in Britain. As such, they've got a diamond laid out behind the "center".

That's an actual baseball diamond, sitting in a park in Bootle. It's fascinating to think that there are leagues and games going on for these sports all over the UK with a small but loyal following. I actually don't mind baseball; it's the most tolerable of America's big sports, with a proper history and style to it, and like all the best sports you don't need hundreds of dollars of equipment to play it - just a bat and a ball. It also helps that it's basically Posh Rounders, and we've all played rounders at school, so it's that little bit more comprehensible than whatever nonsense happens during an American Football game. Also, and this is very gay indeed, but I really like baseball shirts. They're very appealing.

I took the opportunity to stand on the Home Plate like I was [quickly googles "famous baseball player" here - who was the one who was married to Marilyn Monroe?] Joe DiMaggio and take a selfie. Look at me, I'm doing a sports. Then I turned back and walked through the car park to the street, attracting the attention of a wiry gentleman and his mate in a car with the engine running. They watched me as I left, examining me for possible narc giveaways, but then concluded I was simply a fat loser and left me to it.

The houses along Stuart Road get a great view of the playing fields, and it was clear that many of the owners had spruced up their homes with extensions and attic conversions and the like. One household had left a pair of unwanted bar stools on the pavement for any passers by to claim, so if you like black leatherette, head there now. A carpet van was parked on the lower stretch, hazards flickering, while the workmen manfully carried an enormous length into a house that didn't look big enough to accommodate it.

On the back streets behind, there were terraces of Victorian redbricks, two up two downs. Occasional new builds gave away the locations of bomb sites. Outside a sheltered housing development, there were two workmen, one in his forties merrily carrying a single bag to his van, while behind his teenage apprentice staggered under the weight of a load of tools. He helpfully opened the back of the van and waited for his protégé to catch up.

The Breeze Pub is, per Google, "temporarily closed;" the Facebook site hasn't been updated since January last year and half the sign is missing, so expect it to be converted to bedsits any day now. It's a terrible shame when a pub closes of course but looking around it was a miracle it had lasted this long. A real back street boozer, no gastropub menu, reliant only on local patronage, not a destination in any way. Society has changed, as has what we want to spend our disposable income on, and for all the trumpeting about "save the British pub!" if nobody wants to use it then is it really good to preserve it? If it were up to me I'd have put all the WH Smiths under preservation orders and insisted on government money to force them to go back to the orange cube logo and selling records but this is the problem with capitalism; the market dictates.

A series of bollards across the road discreetly demarcated the old city from a new development. Walton Hospital was a famous neurology centre on Rice Lane for a century, but consolidation of the services in the area plus a need to expand saw it move to Fazakerley - sorry, Aintree - Hospital in the 90s. The empty site has since been converted into a twist of cul-de-sacs and town houses with neat little driveways and Ring doorbells.

The railway line ran across the back here. A couple of bridges crossed it, taking you to undeveloped scrubland, ready for enterprising homebuilders to sweep in at some point, but also the site of a never-was station.

The plans for the Link and the Loop back in the 70s were incredibly ambitious, with underground loops meeting at a new six platform station called Rocket, a below ground University stop, and new halts all over Merseyside. One proposal was a new station called Breeze Hill, between Kirkdale and Walton. It shows up on some early "proposal" maps, sometimes as a replacement for Walton and Rice Lane - allowing interchange between the branches - and sometimes as an extra station to fill the gap.

It never happened, of course, and I can't really see it ever having had much demand; it would've cannibalised the stations either side if it was an infill. It's not really a huge gap, and there's not a density around there to justify it.

It is, however, fun to imagine where it might have been, and this cutting behind the old hospital seemed like a prime candidate. No expensive tunnelling necessary, next to a useful amenity, space to encourage new development. I wandered onto the bridge and snapped a photo of what might have been in a world where Merseyside got everything it ever wanted.

Back onto the road, and round the front of the Walton Hospital, now converted into apartments of course. It's still a prominent local landmark and pleasingly preserved, even if the clock is wrong.

There's still some medical provision on the site. Clock View Hospital is a mental health centre, catering for acute cases, and housed in a pleasing modern building. I shuffled past, once again hoping never to see the inside of it. Next door was a block of housing association apartments with inset balconies. Strangely, each balcony had a glass screen at the top and bottom, with only a narrow gap around it to let fresh air in. It negated the principal of a balcony, to me, and if anything reminded me of Hannibal Lecter's cell in The Silence of the Lambs, with its perspex front and air holes to let you smell Jodie Foster's L'Air du Temps. It's an unfortunate association given the building across the way.

I was on Rice Lane proper now, a road that gives its name to a station I'll be visiting another time. There's a huge Sainsbury's, and a former pub, and a small curved building which houses a pizza delivery firm. It's a surprisingly elaborate building, considering its humble occupant, and that's because it was originally built as the entrance booth to the Liverpool Zoological Gardens.

Where there's now a housing estate and car park was, for a period in the 19th century, a space for chimpanzees and elephants. It was a disaster almost from the start, with the owners constantly adding new attractions to try and pump up visitor numbers (a concert hall! a camera obscura!). It gained a reputation for prostitutes, though, which meant it definitely wasn't a place to take the family on a quiet afternoon, and finally closed in 1865 after thirty two years. The pizza place is the only remnant of the old zoo.

The road's lined with retail units with flats above, though more and more were being converted into ground floor residences too. The Revival 7 tea room carried the Royal coat of arms over its door, though the wording underneath was Recognised by HRH, a delightfully vague term. I'm imagining the Queen being driven along the road in her limo on the way to Aintree Racecourse and pointing at the shop out the window - "oh a tea room, how nice" - and that was it, Royal patronage.

I turned off into a side road. Victorian villas that would be getting high six figures elsewhere in the city looked dirty and unloved; multiple bells by the door told the story of their conversion. As I rounded the corner, a man was hefting a wardrobe down his driveway to his waiting car. I felt like I should've offered to help him, but I've recently been suffering from terrible back spasms - I spend way too much time slapping on Deep Heat patches and grimacing at the dinner table. Don't get old, folks.

Between the side walls of two houses was a tiny public footpath, which I eagerly took. I love delving into the backs, the off grid routes. This one takes you over the top of the Kirkby branch of Merseyrail...

...and drops you neatly at the back of Walton station in time for your train. I'd completed a loop, or, if we're going to use baseball terminology, I'd rounded all the bases. I think. I don't actually care enough to check if that's right.

This entire trip was paid for by Ko-fi donations. Once again, thank you for your support!

4. Walton

2026-03-13T16:52:00.000+00:00

Opened: 2nd April 1849 as Walton Junction; this is the first station after the split between the Ormskirk and Kirkby lines. This was renamed to Walton in 1970 but they have to add (Merseyside) in official references so it's not confused for Walton-on-the-Naze or Walton-on-Thames.

Line electrified: 1913

Number of platforms: Two

Points of interest: There's one road into the station. About halfway down, it splits in two; one goes down to a small car park and the Liverpool platform, while the other branch goes upwards to the station building at the top. The Ormskirk bound platform is accessed through the ticket office and across the footbridge. That's not very interesting, is it? Ok, how about there used to be some railway cottages on the Liverpool platform, wedged in the V of the junction to Kirkby. They're gone now, so that's not very interesting either.

Attractive Local Feature (ALF) Sign: None.

Original blog post: 24th July 2007

What's changed since then? Nothing much, so far as I could tell. This was the very early days of the blog so I wasn't really taking pictures of the stations, relying on my "amusing" commentary instead, but aside from the flat station sign being replaced for a cube and possibly the new shelters I couldn't see anything that would've changed in twenty, or maybe fifty, years.

Proof of visit:

Everything Old Is New Again

2026-03-03T22:05:00.000+00:00

I'd been to Kirkby exactly twice before in my life. The first time was at the turn of the Millennium, when I came here for a job interview at Knowsley Borough Council; I didn't get the job, and my main memory of the place is the bus exchange, where I loitered while I waited for my appointment. The other time was when I collected the station, and back then I walked out, took a photo, and walked back in.

This was the first time I was walking to the town centre without being a bag of nerves, and it meant I could look around and see Kirkby properly. I imagine there's a certain amount of sniggering going on out there among local readers, something along the lines of why would you want to?, but I was open-minded, and to be honest, it looked like one of a hundred other English towns I've visited over the past couple of decades. Rows of houses, semis and terraced, small blocks of flats, the odd cottage that pre-dated the construction of the estate and now looked out of place.

I was walking along one of those "shared spaces" they have for pedestrians and cyclists. I hate those. A white line down the middle of the pavement to divide you from people on bikes, but nothing to say who should be on the left or the right. It's not infrastructure, it's paint. Dig up the pavement and put in a proper cycle lane with a kerb either side - there was certainly enough room. Of course that costs money, but at least people might use it.

I passed a woman walking an incredibly odd looking dog - it was like a black labrador, except it had the legs of an Irish Wolfhound; it looked like it was on stilts - and a house with a Liverpool FC themed number plate. Five stars were arranged neatly across the top line, and then, above the Liver Bird, they'd added a sixth, slightly off centre.

Millbrook Park - sorry, Millbrook Park Millennium Green - appeared on my left, a long stretch of lawn and trees curving around a small brook. There was a helpful notice board to welcome you to the park, but I'm afraid it was covered with bollocks - not graffiti, nonsensical copy that actively irritated me. There were Tips to make the most of Millbrook Park Millennium Green which included:

TALK: this is a great place to meet friends

as well as

DAYDREAM: this parks [sic] offer a perfect setting to rest, unwind or enjoy a picnic

Thanks for the hints, guys! I wouldn't know how to use a park without them. Perhaps you could advise me on how to use the paths - I put one foot in front of the other, right?

St Chad's Church, one of those older buildings that dated from the 19th century (though there's been a church here for hundreds of years more) sat amidst a neatly landscaped park, and then there was a huge roundabout to signal the entrance to the town centre. This gave me my first look at the All-New Kirkby. Originally built after the war, Kirkby was a place for Liverpool residents who'd lived in slums to move to; it was a New Town, even if the Government refused to designate it as such. It carried with it that hope of a new, healthy, exciting future, a 20th century where people can live somewhere designed for them. Town planners tried to make it a place where the residents would thrive.

The problems started almost immediately. People were moved here before facilities were opened. Communities were broken up and scattered. Kirkby became the home of Z Cars, the slightly dodgy northern town riddled with crime, and then the 1970s crashed into Merseyside. Joblessness rose, drug addictions followed, poverty swept across the town and kneecapped all of those hopes that the city had imbued in its child-estate when it built it after the war.

For years, the town has been undergoing regeneration of one kind or another. The 2000s have, however, brought real concerted efforts to remake Kirkby. At first this involved a new stadium for Everton alongside a Tesco superstore. There was considerable opposition to this, both from the locals and from Everton fans, who noted that it would mean moving the club outside the City of Liverpool. Kirkby is Liverpool, to me, the same way Bootle or Birkenhead or New Brighton are, but that's because I'm an outsider who doesn't understand the passionate disdain each part of the city region has for one another. All the Merseyside boroughs count as Liverpool as far as I'm concerned, the way Tower Hamlets and Brent and Enfield are all London. Those plans failed when the Government refused to support them, so Everton, eventually went off to the docks, while Tesco simply wandered off.

The council joined up with a different developer, who helped to construct a new retail offering on the north side of the town centre, while the local authority demolished an office block and a swimming pool and a library, moving them to newer facilities elsewhere. Then that developer partnership went south, and it's only now that a huge patch of land just south of the main precinct is getting developed - though I'm not sure what they're building. There was going to be a Lidl and a cinema as well as new houses, but looking around I can only find evidence that the houses are going ahead; the Lidl will almost certainly appear at some point, but it all seems to have gone quiet on the cinema front.

On the plus side, the bus exchange has been vastly improved since I last saw it, so there's that. It now backs onto a new Civic Square, constructed on what was a car park for the council, which has some large Instagram friendly chairs with wings positioned around for tourists to use as backdrops in their photos. Kirkby being overwhelmed with tourists, of course. Still, you can't argue that it's not an improvement on a car park.

I was headed for the Kirkby Centre, the replacement for the civic centre that sat on one edge of the square. It's home to the library and the Kirkby Gallery, which the website informs me is "one of the best contemporary art galleries in Merseyside and the North West of England" - a bold claim, given that Merseyside is also home to the actual Tate Gallery. I scampered up the stairs and found a pair of closed doors to the gallery, but a helpful sign informed me that this was because they were keeping the heat in. That wasn't all they were keeping in. I pushed it open a couple of inches and was confronted with the noise of over-excited primary school children in the middle of some kind of art experience. Everywhere I looked there were red jumpers. I backed away.

Instead I went into the library next door, which does have a piece of art of its own: a fibreglass and resin sculpture by William George Mitchell. It was commissioned for the original library and then ported over to this one. Its 1960s aesthetic doesn't quite fit with the more pared down practicality of 21st century municipal - it's like wandering into an Amazon distribution warehouse and finding a Chagall on the wall. It needs to be surrounded by architecture as brave and interesting as it is. At least they kept it, though; it would've been easy to chuck it in a skip for being outdated.

I checked the stacks for James Bond books - not a single Ian Fleming, shame on you Knowsley Libraries - then walked back out and into the shopping precinct. Like High Streets all across Britain it had seen better days. A central square was surrounded by Iceland, Max Spielman, B&M, and a closed Sayers with a logo they haven't used for at least thirty years. Charity shops and vaguely council-looking outlets occupied many of the storefronts.

There was also, though closed now, a Benetton. A bit of scouting around on the internet revealed it lasted three whole years, from 2022 to 2025, and I am absolutely astonished. Benetton is one of those brands I thought was high-class and expensive - I always think of Victoria Wood saying "I don't always buy anything in there but I do like to go in and unfold things" - so the idea of it being in one of the poorest parts of Merseyside next door to a Pound Bakery is baffling. Mind you, the only branch in the Liverpool city region is in Allerton, not Liverpool One as you'd expect, so who knows what's going on there.

The shopping centre reminded me a little of Coventry. The same Fifties/Sixties aesthetics, the same long straight lines of construction, the simple yet clean look. It was a precinct built for an era of small local shops and mum walking into town a daily run for groceries, before fridges and supermarkets and cars changed everything.

The market was a similar story, now mainly mobile phone unlocking services and vape shops, though Martin's Deli did advertise itself as "the home of the famous Kirkby sausage". I can't actually find what a Kirkby sausage is; even the Echo wrote a piece entitled Have you heard of the "famous" Kirkby sausage? and they're always claiming that some minor shop on a back street is "iconic" or "unique" and has a queue of people out the door every morning. The recipe must be a closely guarded secret because I can't find anyone who's talking about what's in it. If I was a proper travel writer I'd have bought one and eaten it there and then - raw so I could taste the flavour - and then waxed lyrical about its stunning taste, but I'm not, so I didn't. The Kirkby Sausage remains a mystery to me, unless you count that lad I once met who [that's quite enough of that].

A closed up bank building continued the 1950s look, no doubt soon to be demolished because nobody would want a shop that looked like that, while to the side two women rolled out of a different marble-clad former bank that had been converted into a pub. It was ten past eleven in the morning.

I'd reached the new part of Kirkby town centre, the bit that they were especially proud of. It consisted of a health centre, a vast Morrisons, and a few drive in takeaway restaurants - McDonalds, Taco Bell, KFC. Surrounding it was a huge car park. It was not the model of regeneration I think anyone should aspire to.

I understand that hard-up councils get a supermarket offering to build in their town and leap at the chance of jobs and opportunities. What it then does, however, is stop anyone from going anywhere else. Birkenhead did something similar when it allowed a huge Asda to open on Grange Road - there was suddenly no reason to wander any further into the town, so nobody did, and everything started closing. It's a massive Trojan Horse. I found it profoundly depressing. The precinct had been human-sized and pleasant - walk to a shop, walk to another shop. Here you could park ten yards from the front door then get your dinner from Maccy D's on the way home without even leaving your car.

Kirkby pleased me in many ways. It had self-evidently had its struggles but the recent regeneration did actually feel transformative - it was more than a few new lampposts and some bushes, it was comprehensive. I liked the Kirkby Centre, and I'll have to go back to see the artwork some time when it's not swarming with six year olds. I hope that the new development on the former college site will bring housing and people and bustle to the town centre. It's just a shame that there was that massive supermarket leeching off the hope to one side. It didn't help that the Morrisons looked away from the precinct, showed it its back. I do hope that the town gets back on its feet. I want it to succeed.

3. Kirkby

2026-02-25T08:13:00.001+00:00

Opened: 1848. (Weirdly, despite owning half a dozen books about Merseyside's railways, I've not found a more precise date than that. Kirkby was a tiny hamlet then so maybe nobody really cared.)

EDITED TO ADD: per a tip from Anonymous in the comments, the opening date was apparently the 20th November 1848, making Kirkby station a Scorpio.

Line electrified: 2nd May 1977

Number of platforms: One. There were two until 1970, when the platform towards Wigan was taken out of service to save a few bob. This caused problems when the diesel services were replaced by electric ones, so a second platform was built the other side of the buffers and people wanting to get from Liverpool to Wigan trains walked down and under the bridge to board it.

This then caused even more problems when the line was extended to Headbolt Lane. The Wigan service was cut back to there and now there's a stretch of single track after Fazakerley and before Headbolt Lane. For the time being that's not too bad, but if the line is ever extended any further - to Skelmersdale, for example - that's a bottleneck. The plus side is there's very little chance of that ever happening because this is the United Kingdom. (Moral of the story: don't single track anything).

Points of interest: None. Sorry.

Attractive Local Feature (ALF) Sign: None.

Original blog post: 21st November 2007

What's changed since then? Kirkby's had a bit of a makeover to get some parking spaces and better interchange with the buses. They also revamped the station building. Before it was a little brick triangle. It's been expanded and the ticket window moved to the exterior, meaning the station operative also gets a good view of the car park to help with security.

It's a marked improvement and makes the station feel a lot more like a place. It's out of the town centre so it could feel like an afterthought but this makes it far more of a destination.

Proof of visit:

Light In The Darkness

2026-01-25T21:08:00.002+00:00

When you turn out of Leasowe station, north of the level crossing, you pass between two large industrial concerns. To your right is BristolMyersSquibb, the multinational pharmaceutical company, where employees are working on medicines to cure and alleviate any number of ailments.

To your left, is Premier Foods, which, as large lettering on the front of the building clearly informs you, is the Home of the Mini Roll.

I will leave it to the reader to decide which business is providing the more valuable service to society. All I will say is that I have never needed an anti-diabetes medicine, but I have eaten a Cadbury's Mini Roll with a raspberry jam filling, so as far as I'm concerned the Moreton Bakery wins. They don't make Typhoo tea here any more, by the way, despite what that building says: various corporate takeovers and buyouts over the years led to Typhoo closing the factory in 2023. They went bust shortly after, so there's karma for you.

Reeds Lane continues for a while as a mix of open space and odd buildings. The Birket, a small river that empties into the Wallasey Docks, runs through here, and combined with the proximity to the top of the peninsula it means that the land round here is often marshy or prone to flooding. It'll seem like you're in a perfectly ordinary housing estate and then there's a patch of scrubland, unloved and unattended, though in the 21st century they're getting fewer and fewer as Wirral tries to build as many homes as possible. I'm very much of the opinion that if people have lived in this part of the world for a thousand years but haven't seen to build their home on that bit of land there's probably a very good reason for it but then I'm not willing to put up with a small amount of annual flooding in exchange for a three bed semi with its own parking space.

I passed a shopping corner, the Tesco Express (est. 2022) unable to compete with the glittering sign of the Leasowe Local Store over the road, a store that promised "tobacco-drinks-vapes-groceries", and I think it's very telling that "groceries" is fourth in that list. Beside it was a pharmacy without a branded sign, merely promising that it would "provide NHS services"; it used to be a Well, but given how pharmacy services in this country are constantly chopping and changing, it could be a Boots by the time you read this. I'm not even sure what company provides my drugs any more, I just go in and see what tabard the girl behind the counter is being made to wear this week.

Leasowe is a good, stout, old-fashioned council estate, and I absolutely mean that as a compliment. It was laid out by Wallasey Council starting in the 20s and 30s and it still carries the air of aspiration and hope. The roads are wide and straight, the houses large, with gardens at the front and back and enough room on the side return for a garage or a porch. There are grass verges, and greens. I crossed one diagonally, a wide square of grass with children's play equipment at its centre. It must be great to open your front door and let your kid go on the swings while you watch from a distance.

Of course, since this is 2026, most of the houses have been bought and sold many times. (Bloody Thatcher). Each home had its own distinct fencing, its own front wall, its own front door, as the new people sought to make their mark and make it a bit less... council. Now and then there were homes that looked like they must've done when they were built - unencumbered by a double glazed front entry, the garden a stretch of grass that hasn't been paved over, a lack of any boundary barrier at all. Everyone else was trying hard to be different, mainly by covering up the grass with tarmac and parking a couple of cars on it, though one house had a plastic lawn with a Mickey Mouse ears motif made out of white stones laid into it, so the imagination can take you anywhere.

St Chad's was opened in 1954, as a combination church hall and place for prayer, but it was quickly decided that this was undignified and money was raised for a proper church alongside it. It opened in 1967, reeking of Swinging Britain, all concrete and stained glass. It's lovely.

It's not ostentatious or over the top but it's just that bit special enough to be interesting. I particularly like the bell tower.

St Chad's sits alongside a long avenue that forms the spine of the estate, at the point where Castleway North becomes Castleway South. Again, it's a piece of elegant town planning, a central route lined with trees. It's a community area, which is something we've lost from new housing estates these days. Homes are rammed up against one another without room to breathe.

I continued along Twickenham Drive, past tight blocks of flats, three stories high with a central stairwell. The entrance was enclosed with a glass front door for security these days but I liked their symmetry and their politeness. They added bulk and density without being ugly. There was a leisure centre here, too, as the residents of Leasowe were gifted with all the community facilities they could need. (This sort of thing used to be a bone of contention for my mum when I was growing up less well-off on a private estate, while the council estate next door got multiple bus routes, a swimming pool, a market and a shopping precinct. They also used to regularly have riots and sex workers on the streets and dead drug addicts being found in bin stores but she was still annoyed that their library was so much bigger than ours just because they were local authority).

A noticeboard promised Unity in Our Community with flyers for energy saving advice and the name of the local housing association. A faded poster pushed the Leasowe Fun Day, back on the 21st August (Bouncy castles and assault courses, face painting with the Hive, entrance through the Addy) and behind it was the Millennium Centre, a building whose name was modern for exactly one year and now seems hopelessly dated. The Millennium Centre houses the library and council services and a Family Centre, one of those places for parents to get an hour's supervised contact with their children once a week to prove they're definitely not going to belt them any more. Behind it were some newer houses, built on top of a different, long-demolished Council building; that had once been home to the Wirral Incontinence Laundry Service, so I imagine it must've smelt lovely round here when they had the machines on the go.

I followed the road round, past a house with a flagpole in its garden flying both the Union Jack and the England flag. One good thing about living on Merseyside is we've been largely exempt from the flag-shagging madness which has gripped the nation over the past year. Liverpool is, after all, "Scouse, not English", a city whose football supporters boo the national anthem at Wembley. Nationalism gets a very short shrift round here, and its roundabouts and lampposts have been largely unadorned - the closest to home I've seen them is in Ellesmere Port, over the border in Cheshire. If you want to go for that sort of nonsense you have to put up your own flagpole in your own garden and even then I've seen way more flags flying to commemorate Liverpool's 20th league victory than a tribute to His Majesty.

There was a small parade of shops here, including a Sayers, the Merseyside bakery that was thoroughly tramped underfoot by the mighty Greggs. (For the record, I much prefer a Sayers sausage roll, though I admit there's a certain amount of nostalgia involved in that). Opposite, Heron Foods occupied what used to be the estate pub, the Oyster Catcher.

While the pub closed in 2016, it still lives on in a mural on the side wall, showing that nostalgia comes round quicker and quicker these days. Also there, somewhat incongruously, is a hovercraft. Scousers have long enjoyed trips to North Wales, spending holidays in Rhyl, Prestatyn and Talacre, but the Dee Estuary means that while it's an extremely short distance as the crow flies, you have to basically travel via Chester to get there.

The invention of the hovercraft suddenly opened up a new option. In 1962, a summer service from Leasowe to Rhyl opened, skipping across the water in a straight line and cutting travel time hugely. It's a brilliant idea, and hovercrafts will never not be exciting; I myself used the one from Portsmouth to the Isle of Wight a few years ago and it was like being in an episode of Thunderbirds. The wide beaches at Leasowe and Rhyl made them ideal spots to launch the service from.

Unfortunately, it was perhaps a little too soon to launch a hovercraft route. The technology was still new and so there were technical problems - the sand would get in the engines, putting the craft out of service, and if the weather was bad it couldn't run at all. The Irish Sea is famously short of millpond-like conditions, meaning it was an unreliable route to the seaside, so the passenger numbers weren't there on the days it did run - which turned out to be only 19 out of the scheduled 59. It would've been lovely if it had succeeded. To this day, it takes an hour to get from Leasowe to Rhyl by road, and even longer by train. Perhaps Rhyl wouldn't be quite as sad as it is today if the hovercraft was turning up on a regular basis.

I disappeared back into the streets of the estate, past more open green spaces and builders laying down paving slabs over grassy lawns. An electricity substation was accompanied by an abandoned fridge freezer and a shopping trolley; you don't really see shopping trollies outside of the supermarket car park these days, so it was somehow a delightful throwback.

I paused outside a block of flats and took a picture of the number of the block. The address is housed in a light box, with the numbers on the outside, and I find them very charming. I walked on, taking in the folding chairs around the front door, and the swing set in the garden. How nice, I thought. What a lovely little community.

Then I heard a strong, violent hammering. It caught my attention and I saw a man behind the window of one of the flats. He was pointing right at me and shouting. There's a certain kind of noise Scousers make when they're really annoyed, when all you can understand is vowels and s's, and he was in full flow. "uuuus AAAAY eeeee aaaarrrss DICKHEAD". I understood that last bit.

I put my head down and hurried on.

A few seconds later I heard the noise again, the mass of vowels and the scream, and I realised that this time it was outdoors. That he'd come outside and was in the street and hurling abuse at me. I assume this man didn't like having his block of flats photographed for some reason. He was taking it very personally.

I could've turned round and walked back to him. Said, "hey, I'm just an architecture fan, and I liked your home. If you're not happy having it photographed I'm fine with deleting it, that's no problem. Have a great day!" I did not do this. I kept my head down and carried on walking and didn't look back. In my pocket, my hand curled protectively round my phone. The third volley of indecipherable fury sounded like it was closer to me, and I was ready to hear running footsteps, and prepped myself to use my iPhone as a club if I had to. It would've been pathetic and I would've got my teeth kicked in and the phone would've been robbed but hey, you've got to have a plan.

He didn't chase after me any further. I made it to the Leasowe Road, a long dual carriageway that shadows the coast, and I dashed across to try and put some traffic between me and him. Only then did I pause and look back and make sure nobody was behind me.

I've gone to some very dodgy places over the years for this blog. Nationally infamous spots, both at home and abroad. But I think this was the first time I genuinely thought I was about to get lamped. I took a moment to swallow my heart and try and get it back into my chest then started walking again.

The Leasowe Road is a very long, very straight, very boring four-lane road that runs from Wallasey Village towards Moreton. The most exciting thing about it is that you can get up a fair old head of steam on it if you're a man with a small penis. There was one on the road that day, in a black car with tinted windows, who put his foot down and roared down the road as though it were Le Mans, the engine making a noise it almost certainly wasn't supposed to the whole time. I was, needless to say, incredibly impressed.

Further along I encountered a man digging around in the bushes. He was holding a gardening cane with a coat hook strapped to the end and pushing it at random into the greenery. I couldn't work out what was going on. Had he lost a gerbil down there and was hoping to trap it?

Past the golf course - this part of the Wirral is 20% bunker - I encountered the entrance to the Leasowe Castle Hotel. I have fond memories of this place, because one of my best friends was married here about twenty years ago, and I got astonishingly drunk and danced until my shirt was wet with sweat; there was also a buffet, and a buffet is the best food, and makes everything better.

Unfortunately the hotel closed suddenly last year, without warning, leaving staff unpaid and the building to rot. This seems to be the 2020s way to close businesses; every other week there's a report of a bar or a restaurant where the waitresses have turned up on Monday morning and found the windows boarded up. Like everything in the UK today the hospitality industry is on a knife edge and it's entirely down to fate which side you'll fall on.

I took a wander up the drive for a look and it was sad and derelict. Little memories of the hot day of the wedding came rushing back, the photos in the garden, the laughs in the bar, the picture I took of my friend Jennie smoking a fag where she looks ridiculously cool. It's not really a castle, just a manor house with ideas above its station, that has been occupied and abandoned over and over for five hundred years, extended then demolished, useful then a drain. It's currently on a downward slope but will no doubt swing back up again one day.

There was a sanatorium and hospital on the front here for decades, until medical science developed to the extent where a cure for tuberculosis was something better than "some sea air?" Flats fill the spot now, looking over the marshes and grasses of the North Wirral Country Park, a spot of open land between the road and the sea defences here which mean you can walk from New Brighton to West Kirby without ever leaving the coast. There are still concrete anti-landing craft defences on the shore.

I was heading for Leasowe Lighthouse, which is technically in Moreton, but I felt I had to visit to finish the area off. You can see it looming up at you as you walk along the road, the end point you're aiming for, a white column of brick rising up over the flat marshlands.

There was, for centuries, only one way to reach the port of Liverpool from the Irish Sea, and that was to follow the coast of the Wirral between often hidden sandbanks. As the port expanded, the chance of shipwreck expanded too, and so a system of lighthouses was built along the shore to warn off vessels. The one at Hoylake is now a private home; the one a little further downstream was washed away in a storm and replaced by one on Bidston Hill. The one at Leasowe was constructed in 1763 and originally had a brazier on the roof.

Leasowe lighthouse was the first in the world to receive a parabolic reflector behind the light, put there by the Liverpool dockmaster, William Hutchinson. He'd been experimenting with using mirrors to increase the visibility and he installed them here in 1772; suddenly the light was visible from 20 miles away, instead of five.

It is, undeniably, an incredibly important building, locally, nationally, and internationally; it helped change maritime navigation and helped turn Liverpool into the world's most important port. It's 2026, though, and nobody has any money for anything, so as a result it is cared for by dedicated volunteers, and only open a few times a year - the next one is on the 18th February, if you're in the area and have strong calf muscles that can carry you up to the top. Alternatively they host abseiling days, if you really want to hurl yourself off a monument; you do you.

I took a seat at the base and had a drink of water. When I'd last visited Leasowe I'd whizzed through, basing my entire visit around a very poor gag about Danger Lane. This revisit really showed me what I'd missed back in those days when the station sign was the important part and the rest was irrelevant. I'd experienced history, culture, and a little threat of physical violence. Not bad for a Friday morning.

2. Leasowe

2026-01-24T14:52:00.000+00:00

Opened: 5th May 1894 (there was a halt here for a couple of years in the 1870s called Leasowe Crossing but that was closed)

Line electrified: 13th March 1938

Number of platforms: Two

Points of interest: Leasowe was rebuilt ahead of electrification and given elegant Art Deco stylings in concrete. This means two waiting rooms with flat roofs jutting out over the platform, plus a footbridge connecting them which has a muscly charm.

The footbridge doesn't get much use because there's a level crossing at the end of the platforms, so it's quicker to cross on the flat - assuming the gates are open. If the gates are closed, please do not try to drive through them, as a man attempted in a stolen car a couple of months ago; this only works for James Bond.

Attractive Local Feature (ALF) sign: Two Eurasian Oystercatchers, stood in water, to plug the Wirral Coastal Park. It's technically called the North Wirral Coastal Park but there's only so much you can fit on a sign.

Original blog post: 11th August 2007

What's changed since then? Not much. The usual electronic updates - next train indicators, Tap & Go pads. I have a vague feeling that the waiting rooms weren't open back in 2007, but I can't say that with any certainty. They're certainly accessible now.

Proof of visit:

The sad thing is, I was listening to the GoldenEye soundtrack in that bottom picture, and there is a very high chance that I was listening to the GoldenEye soundtrack in 2007 as well. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

The Skyscraper Condemnation Affiliates

2026-01-16T17:50:00.000+00:00

There's only one place to go from Hooton station.

That's not true; there's a Network Rail depot, and a furniture shop, and an engineering works. And there's the village of Hooton itself, a mile or so away, straddling the New Chester Road. For the purposes of this blog, however, there's only one place to go, and that's the former railway line turned country park.

I descended the ramps down to the foot of the road bridge where the park begins. For decades this was a track bed, heading along the coast of the Wirral, but the villages it passed through en route were either too small or too far from the station to justify keeping it open.

Now it's a linear park stretching along the side of the Wirral, a long strip of path surrounded by trees, great for walkers and cyclists and horses. I've been along it many times over the years, in different moods, in different weathers. Today it was cold and wet. January at its finest. The skies never turned any colour other than gunmetal and the atmosphere clung to me, damp, perhaps rain, perhaps mist, perhaps something in between.

The section alongside the station pushes the railway theming, with fake-historic signage and a bench made out of a gantry. You can see the tracks through the fence, bright yellow Merseyrail trains trundling past every few minutes, a shaft of brightness out of nowhere. Then the path turns and I'm moving away from the railway tracks and into quieter, more distant territory.

It wasn't yet eleven am and so I was mainly accompanied by songbirds. Robins and sparrows dropped onto the path ahead of me, holding their nerve for a while as I approached before flapping onto a high branch. It felt good to be out and about, breaking out of the claustrophobia of Christmas and New Year. I'm a total homebody during the festive period; I close the door on December 23rd and try not to leave the house until at least January 2nd. I'm hibernating with too much food and drink and tv and it's the one time of the year I'm not judged for it.

Still, it was good to feel that fresh air, to hear nothing but nature, to be adrift. The chill of the icy rain woke me up. A man approached with his dog, a friendly black lab that leapt towards me excitedly until being called back, and then I was alone again.

At this time of year the Wirral Way is not exactly scenic. Nowhere is. One problem with living in the UK is that while we get the cold and the rain and the dying off of nature during winter, we don't get that lovely white snow to cover it up and make it look pretty. Instead all we have is varying shades of brown; brown trees, brown leaves, brown mud. Nothing is ever healthy looking, Everywhere is grimy. No wonder we lose our minds when we spot a snowdrop.

Coming towards me was a young woman, gripping her wrist, power walking and monitoring her vital signs and steps the whole time. She was wearing tight black lycra and her long hair was pulled back in the tightest of pony tails; any more of a yank and she'd have passed for a Scouse girl looking for a fight. Her general physique and absolute devotion to the stats on her wrist showed that she wasn't one of these New Year's Resolution nobodies, trying to burn off the Christmas ham with a bit of half-hearted jogging; no, she knew what she was doing. She pushed on the path, right down the centre, and I stepped aside to let her pass, sucking in my beer so I didn't disgust her too much.

This was where it got very lonely indeed; I didn't see another person for a long time. I was fine with it though. It was time with me and without obligation. I was walking around noticing things, paying attention to my surroundings. I wasn't trying to get somewhere. The Wirral Way never feels entirely isolated anyway. Perhaps its the single route, the lack of side quests, the straight down the middle purity of it. It is, and feels, man-made, like it could be taken back into use at any time.

It never will be, of course. Firstly because we don't build railways in this country, not unless you've had fifty years of begging and pleading and don't inconvenience anyone and also can get London involved somewhere. Secondly, even though the places along the route are larger and more populous than they were when the line closed, it's still not enough to make it worthwhile as a rail line. Heswall is the largest town on the Wirral without a Merseyrail connection, but the Hooton-West Kirby line runs by the river, far from the busy centre. The residents of Heswall would also never countenance something as common as a train in their town, especially one that went to Liverpool; the Borderlands Line station out on the edge is bad enough, and nobody uses it because they all have 4x4s that need ramming down country lanes. The problem with public transport is the public tend to use it.

The will-they-won't-they rain gauge shifted to "will" with a heavy shower that actually made me zip up my coat. For some reason, I never do my coat up, ever, unless I can't argue otherwise. It's a psychological block with me. This time I did it and immediately felt claustrophobic; I even tried the hood but that was too awful to tolerate. How do people manage hoods? Flapping around your ears, falling over your eyes, being irritating on every level. I'd rather get wet to be honest.

Hadlow Road is a preserved station on the Wirral Way; a fancy plaque on the wall says they've tried to keep it as if it was 1952 (Only travellers and staff are missing, it says, like it's an M R James). It's been beautifully done and there were plaques all over the walls congratulating the volunteers on their service.

The coffee shop was takeaway only on a Tuesday, but I was surprised to see that the preserved booking hall was open. You assume this sort of thing will be locked away unless there's a stern looking volunteer breathing down your neck but I was able to wander in and have a poke around.

The station master's office included a stuffed cat on a chair and a Christmas stocking persisting with festivities into mid-January. It was interesting to peer through the glass at the display, preserved as if the ticket man had nipped out for a moment.

Had to be done.

What was Bovril's advertising budget like in the old days? You can't go to a single preserved railway or living history museum without seeing a big tin sign for beef extract on the wall. It's even more weird when you consider that you don't see ads for it at all these days, not even when there was that craze for "bone broth" (i.e. Bovril) a few years back. Mind you, you don't get adverts for anything real any more, only betting sites and insurance and maybe the odd car. There was a time when you'd get commercials for biscuits and shirts and Hamlets, stuff you could actually buy, not a website with a quirky name to get to the top of the SEO rankings. And those ads would have a jingle you could hum, and the stuff would be about fifty pee, and you'd have enough money left to get a tram home. Oh no, this blog is turning into a Facebook group.

It was easy to be nostalgic because I was in Willaston now, which is a nostalgic place. (The station was called Hadlow Road, by the way, because there was another Willaston station in Cheshire already, halfway between Crewe and Nantwich). It is a stout little English village that has everything Americans love to coo over.

A village green with a giant tree stood at its centre, surrounded by Tudor-esque homes. There were shops - a hairdresser, a cafe, a Spar - and other little businesses too: a garage, a dog grooming parlour, a physiotherapist. There was a school and a surgery. It was a lively, attractive place, with a noticeboard covered in community notices - litter picks, exercise classes, even an e-mail to contact if you were new to the village and wanted a welcome pack.

I wandered down the street for a while, past the shops and avoiding being splashed by the cars. There was a lot of traffic, but at the same time, I doubt any of them would have traded them for a train from Hadlow Road; this didn't seem like that kind of place. At the end of the road I could see an arresting sight, and I had to get closer to see what it actually was, instead of what I thought it was.

That is a tooth outside the village dental surgery. But to me, it looked like a halter top filled with some saggy boobs. I can't unsee it. They really should've turned the sign the other way up, so the roots of the tooth pointed down.

I'm surprised someone didn't make them do just that, because as I wandered around, I began to notice the signs everywhere. The small, politely hectoring signs from this committee or that, from one volunteer group or another. It began to paint a picture of a clique at the centre of Willaston, the higher ups, who pushed Britain in Bloom and Cheshire's Best Kept Village. I imagined them knocking on my door in September - "we've noticed you don't have a scarecrow on your front wall as part of the village's autumn festival; justify yourself." I ducked past the allotments, and the playground, and the sports field, all of which were extremely well-kept and neat, with a vague feeling that I was being watched to make sure I didn't scuff up the pavement with my dirty shoes.

Past the tennis courts was a small pond, surrounded by a fence and with a noticeboard informing me who the maintenance committee were and telling me that the bridge was called "Founder's Bridge" as a tribute to the original caretakers of the pond. By the time I saw a laminated sign saying there had been an increased incidence of dog fouling in the area and here was a phone number to call and grass people up I started suspecting that Willaston was trapped under the yoke of an elderly Stasi and that a revolution was needed.

I waled past the surprisingly ugly village church, a big red block without much to recommend it, and onto the high street again. The rain had let up to permit pedestrians to linger again, and a group of women chatted across the way while their dogs sniffed at one another. There was a red phone box, of course, though the phone was long gone and it didn't serve any purpose at all now, other than a canvas for the art of local teens; apparently "J*** S**** woz ere PS me brothers eyes touch" and I'm going to skip past the lack of an apostrophe and bring you the drawing which did actually make me let out a snort:

The bus shelter had been done up to commemorate its ninetieth birthday (1935-2025) with a clock and the words OMNIBUS SHELTER picked out along the top. Was that historically accurate, I wondered? Were people still writing "omnibus" on signs in 1935? Or was it another bit of twee nostalgia for nostalgia's sake?

I was back at the village green. The village's sole remaining pub, The Nags Head, wasn't yet open, but the smell of chip fat in the air said they were readying themselves for lunchtime. Homes for pensioners were grouped here and, while it would be lovely to live in a village like this, I wondered if it was not a little isolated when you're old? Once you'd visited all the shops what was there to do? I suppose you could get an omnibus to the station, but the service wasn't exactly frequent.

I was walking out of Willaston now, back towards the station, on a road lined with old houses set back from the road and smaller infill semis built on their land in the Sixties and Seventies. Cul-de-sacs had been squeezed in here and there.

I passed a motorhome specialist, and was shocked to see VW camper vans starting at £49,995. Fifty grand to live like Scooby-Doo! You wouldn't dare drive that to a remote beauty spot in case it got nicked. Admittedly, they do seem to have all mod-cons - fridges and cookers and, I don't know, stained-glass roofs and hot tubs - but still. Go and stay in a hotel where it's comfy and save yourself the money.

It was a largely uninspiring walk back to Hooton station, along a narrow pavement between bare hedgerows. The real excitement was how much had changed by the station itself. For years it was surrounded by a conglomeration of industrial units and workshops; the residential parts were a mile away in either direction.

That was changing, though, and a new development of houses had sprung up alongside the tracks, meaning that some people would actually be walking to the station for their commute for what must have been the first time in decades. This site had actually been an armaments factory during the war, giving the main road into the development a strange name:

Roften comes from Royal Ordnance Factory Ten, the name of the wartime works: other streets are named Sentry Grove and Vickers Crescent. Round the corner, the former Hooton Hotel - where I had occasionally waited for the BF to pick me up after work when the trains between Chester and Birkenhead were particularly nightmarish - has also been demolished in favour of some neat town houses.

I couldn't see a road sign for that development though, so I'm hoping the streets are named after the Hooton Hotel's legacy, with Sticky Carpets Lane and Disappointing Meal Grove. I carried on round the corner, past the surprisingly full car park (£1.50 a day!) and back to the station. It'd been a long time since I'd been to Hooton but I was pleased to explore it again. It was familiar but different. I hope the future stations have enough to keep me interested.

This entire trip was paid for out of donations to my Ko-fi. Thank you for your generosity!

1. Hooton

2026-01-14T19:04:00.000+00:00

I asked my glamorous assistant, the BF, to pick the first station out of the lunch box. (Obviously I also made him wear a spangly catsuit for this purpose). He managed to grab Hooton which, of course, isn't in Merseyside, so that was a great start. None the less, I got on the train and went out there. Each station I visit from now on will get two posts. The first will be like this one: a bare bones run down of the station itself, a bit of its history, what I saw, and what's changed. A second post will follow - hopefully tomorrow - with the more interesting wandering around I did. But first:

1. Hooton

Opened: 23rd September 1840

Line electrified: 30th September 1985 (to Liverpool); 7th October 1993 (to Chester); 29th May 1994 (to Ellesmere Port)

Number of platforms: Four. Sort of. There were once six platforms here but Beeching and lack of use have seen them cut back. Two are gone forever, and the Wirral Way is in their space. Two are dead ends, on the station side, used for storing trains. The platform by the station building doesn't have a number. The platform on one side of the island is platform 1, and rarely gets any use. The southbound platform is platform 2, also on the island, and the northbound platform is platform 3. So it has four platforms, three with numbers, and two that actually see passenger service on a regular basis.

Attractive Local Feature (ALF) sign: A pine cone, to represent the Wirral Country Park, and a green stripe. The entrance to the park is right next to the station.

Original Blog Post: 11th March 2008

What's changed since then? The biggest change is a massive footbridge which includes lift access. I thought this was pretty new, and then I saw a sign on the platform commemorating its opening on the 4th March 2011, and I realised time makes a fool of us all. It also explains why the bridge is starting to rust away.

An MtoGo shop was installed in the ticket office, back when that was a thing the Dutch owners of Merseyrail were trying to impress upon disinterested Brits. It's long gone now, and tickets are dispensed from a blank space that still had its Christmas lights up when I passed. No chance of getting a Twix there these days, although there is a vending machine on the platform.

There are also toilets, which are currently out of use because of drainage issues. One thing Hooton has become notorious for in the last few years is flooding, and it seems Network Rail is trying to address this, judging by the plethora of orange suited workers and long pipes running in and out of the area. Just beyond the road bridge, one of these pipes disappeared into a hatch, presumably pumping away.

This yellow and grey painted laurel is still above the ticket office door, however.

Proof of visit: Oh dear. This is where it gets depressing.

It seems Hooton's ALF isn't the only thing to have decayed considerably over the past eighteen years. On the plus side, I now know how to take a selfie without my thumb getting in the way.

First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

2026-01-04T15:42:00.000+00:00

You spoke, and I listened. That's democracy. I wrote a woolly end of year post about where the blog might go in 2026 and you replied in your thousands [ed: pls chk] to say that you would actually read about me fannying around in the back end of Merseyside. So it's back to where we started, back to Round The Merseyrail We Go. (I will not be changing the header again).

There are sixty-nine stations on the Merseyrail network (nice) and the plan is that I'll visit one, have a poke around it, then have a wander round the vicinity too. Merseytravel publishes Local Area Maps on its website, giving you a rough idea of what's worth checking out in the vicinity of a railway station, though in true Merseytravel style many of the links don't work and some stations don't have one. That should be a good guide for me. I won't be doing the City Line or any of the other stations on the map, because I need to draw a line somewhere, and I don't want to end up visiting the entire north all over again. This is a then and now, let's see what's changed, kind of thing.

After all, a lot has changed on Merseyrail in nineteen years. The trains are different. The ticketing's different. The city centre stations no longer have brown plastic seats, and they don't have that distinctive smell any more. The city region, in general, is in a much better place than it was back then, pre-Capital of Culture, pre-Liverpool One, pre-tourist mecca. No, it's not all perfect, and there are still regeneration projects, poverty, and a real need for investment and good jobs across the county, but it feels like a better place. Also, I'm now in my thirtieth year of living here; it's a lot more familiar to me.

I'll let the fates decide where I visit each time. I bought this lunchbox at Car & Kettle, in Settle; in fact, my blog post about that trip actually mentions me buying it. I've not really used it much over the years - for most of the time it's been in a cupboard full of tupperware - but it's finally got a new purpose.

Each of those bits of paper is a Merseyrail station, and each time I go out I'll pick one at random. Who knows where it could be? Hillside? Aigburth? The prospects are endless! Well, not exactly endless. Not even slightly endless in fact.

You watch the very first one be Birkenhead Park.