My first view of the county was from an overnight train from London to Carlisle travelling to a Scout camp. In the dark I saw the silhouette of an industrial landscape somewhere round Manchester, black and overpowering for a ten-year-old.
I did not travel north again for some twenty years when we moved to Little Hayfield in Derbyshire. Our end-terrace house had a via Stockport address and the part of that town north of the culverted Mersey was in Lancashire. We often visited our friends the Sharples in Stockport and explored the large Victorian covered market. These were, and still are, characteristic of the north of England and we visited many during our time in the north.
We sometimes used to drive at night up the Monk’s Road to its 329m (1,079 feet) moorland summit to see the vast scintillation of lights to the west across the Etherow valley to the sprawl of suburban Manchester beyond.
On our exploratory excursions in our small dark blue Fiat 750 we visited many towns in Lancashire including Bury and Bolton. The first I found fairly dull but Bolton was surprisingly attractive. The place seemed clean and orderly with an impressive town hall. It grew very rich with many cotton mills in the 19th century and the legacy of this remained. Today it partly defines itself as a cultural centre for GM (Greater Manchester) and, on 4 August 2024, as I was writing this, there was an anti-immigration march/riot there – one of many around the country.
From Little Hayfield we often used to visit our friends Chad and Anne Morrit who lived in Ramsbottom, a former Lancashire cotton town on the river Irwell. The complicated journey took us through the deprived post-industrial towns of Stalybridge, Oldham and Bury, all of whose foundations and fortunes had depended on cotton. The roads were particularly difficult in winter with deep Pennine frost, snow and yellow fog. Sometimes in foggy weather small flares were posted on difficult corners, adding to the Dickensian atmosphere, but they did not help much – one just had to know the route.
The Morrits were delightfully unusual people. We first met, through a mutual friend, in the tired old industrial city of Salford where Chad had idealistically established a modern art shop in a particularly deprived part of the city. Needless to say, the locals were more interested in cheap food than modern art and he soon went bankrupt. But I wonder if he played some small part in the later resurgence of Salford as a cultural centre with the celebrated Lowry art gallery and the development of the arts and architecture area of Salford Quays.
By visiting the Morrits we were able to see the dereliction at the weary end of the Industrial Revolution. I well remember the back alley behind the Morrits’ live-in Salford shop. Each terrace house had a small garden with a gate opening onto the back alley which ran the length of the street. It was grimy and full of rubbish with a feeling of oppression rather than freedom.
One memorable event at this period took place in a Manchester restaurant where I was lunching with a friend. A woman came in and sat at a nearby table by herself. “Isn’t that Wendy Craig?” I whispered to my friend, who confirmed my identification and immediately walked over and asked if she would like to join us, to which she readily agreed. Wendy Craig was a very well-known TV sitcom star in series such as Not in Front of the Children. She was appearing in pantomime at a Manchester theatre nearby, she told us.
Towards the end of the lunch a small group came to our table and told Ms Craig that she had won the BAFTA Actress of the Year award. The lunch immediately turned into a party and very quickly the press arrived. It had been snowing outside and we had to stage a snowball fight with Wendy Craig for the cameras.
In the mid-80s we visited Wigan to see the newly refurbished Wigan Museum. In one area there was an aged textile machine and an elderly lady sprang on it as though meeting a long-lost friend. Perhaps she had had to spend many long hours tending a similar machine when she was a girl or young woman around the turn of the century.
Leaving the museum we walked for a short distance along the Leeds & Liverpool Canal to the celebrated Wigan Pier. The original pier, a ‘tippler’ for tipping coal trucks into barges on the canal, was demolished in 1929 but a replica was built in 1986. We must have visited just before the replica arrived, as the only thing on the canal bank was a metal plate which we were told marked the position of the erstwhile pier.
Between 1968 and 1987 I visited Liverpool many times in the course of my work at Ferodo and the English Tourist Board. My first excursion was to the Royal Liverpool Dockyard which had recently developed its facilities for handling containers. Ferodo supplied friction materials (brake linings, clutch facings etc.) for some of the dockyard trucks and gantries. My job was to write and photograph a story on this for Ferodogram, the company’s internationally distributed house magazine.
The dockyard was a busy, gritty working man’s strongly unionised environment but the manager who showed me round was very helpful and enthusiastic. His guys were liable to crash into things in the afternoon.
Also while in Little Hayfield we went on an expedition to Chat Moss, an extensive area of raised lowland bog shared between Manchester, Salford and Wigan. My interest was to try and find a non-biting midge called Glyptotendipes mancunianus (the Manchester midge by translation of its specific name). The midge has now been renamed G. scirpi by agreement with taxonomists, so the Manchester midge has been taxonomised out of history except as a synonym (Peter Langton says the genus is rife with synonyms), though my coinage of the ‘Manchester midge’ can stand and will probably not be challenged. I wonder how long it will be before ChatGPT, if asked what the Manchester midge is, will reply “Glyptotendipes scirpi” and invent a description of its phenology and habits. G. scirpi males are about 4 mm long with black stripes on a greenish thorax, a long beard of hairs on the front tarsi and racquet-shaped depressions on each segment on the back of the body. These depressions, shared with other members of the genus, probably account for the ‘glypto’ in Glyptotendipes. Glypto is Greek for something carved or embossed and pops up again in anaglypta wallpaper.
Chironomidae, or non-biting midges, is a large family of diminutive insects with very delicately and variously coloured species. They are important for their ecological contribution to the water in which most of them spend their early stages. Pupal exuviae of G. scirpi have been described and the species occurs in stagnant water, ditches, ponds and lakes. The larvae are said to mine the leaves and petioles of aquatic plants, including Scirpus (sensu Germany 1928). The midge may have been first described from Chat Moss in Manchester but it is probably quite widespread.
Chat Moss itself (or at least the parts we visited) resembled a post-apocalyptic landscape: a flat expanse of greenish brown speckled with darker spots and blobs. The whole was squared with darker lines, actually drainage ditches, as though the place was a gigantic map. There were a few ramshackle huts making us wonder if the moss was no more than abandoned allotments. I later learned that it had very rich soil and was much used for growing salads for Mersey Valley towns and cities. We must have visited after the salad harvest.
Sadly we found no trace of the Manchester midge.
In 1974 Liverpool was declared a Special Development Area (SDA) and I often had to travel to the city from London. I was usually able to stay in the historic Adelphi Hotel, an Edwardian Baroque establishment once deemed the height of luxury. It had many of the features of a cruise liner, some emulating the Titanic, and the bedroom doors opened outwards as they did then and maybe still do. It saved space.
I was often shown round the other attractions by the city’s director of publicity. We visited many of Liverpool’s historic pubs with their over-the-top Victorian and Edwardian decorations. We had a memorable evening in the local Chinatown; crossed the Mersey by ferry; visited the rebuilt Cavern Club of Beatles fame; and enjoyed the unique atmosphere on board the Royal Iris, a former Mersey ferry boat moored as a nightclub on the city waterfront. In 1983 and 1984 I was closely involved with the International Garden Festival, first as an advisor from the English Tourist Board then as a visitor with the family.
On one longer stay in Liverpool I caught a bus one afternoon through Toxteth and Willow Bank to Calderstones Park on the south-eastern outskirts to see the eponymous Neolithic megaliths in the palm house. There was also a wonderful collection of bromeliads (pineapple family) which I enjoyed. But the highlight of the day was the two half-hour bus journeys just listening to the chatter and banter in authentic street Scouse, the Liverpool dialect, as people of all ages got on and off the bus.
We also made family trips to the Lancashire coast with Cynthia and myself, three girls and the dog tightly packed into our tiny Fiat 850. One port of call was Ainsdale on the 22-mile-long Sefton Coast. At Ainsdale we could park on the flat sandy beach and explore the extensive dunes with their rich wildlife. We went to the seaside resorts of Southport and Blackpool, drove round Pendle Hill of witches’ fame, and meandered across the still largely private moorlands of the Forest of Bowland.
In later years I made many visits to Blackpool as part of my work. One memorable occasion was when I travelled from London with a Lord, who I shall call Lord Nameless. He purchased four miniature bottles of whisky, two each, before the train left Euston. Another four appeared before we reached Milton Keynes and I had definitely achieved my full capacity by Crewe, so I began putting the miniature bottles in my jacket pockets. Lord Nameless, needless to say, seemed unaffected. By the time we reached Blackpool I looked like an overambitious shoplifter with my pockets chinking with a ridiculous number of the little bottles.
We were met at Blackpool station by the town’s marketing director who whisked us away to our hotel and on to dinner where Lord Nameless drank further copious quantities of the wine which I managed to avoid. We were then treated to a tour of Blackpool’s nighttime attractions which gave Lord Nameless further imbibing opportunities. A real bonus was being able to see a stand-up performance by the famous comedian Les Dawson in the Grand Theatre. There was a party of elderly ladies in the audience whom he reduced to almost uncontrollable mirth. We finally staggered round a few nightclubs where Lord Nameless had a number of nightcaps and at last I collapsed into a comfy hotel bed.
This was far from my only visit to Blackpool and I went to many meetings and conferences there as well as seaside trips with family. I remember in the Wakes Week when many factories and workplaces closed how we watched a group of coal miners playing football on the beach in their underpants. I also got to the end of the pier, tried to enjoy the famous illuminations and felt sick after trying the rides in the Pleasure Beach amusement park.
In the early 1990s I worked closely with David Thornton. I often stayed in the town at the Thorntons’ house when we were setting up Black Marketing. I was enrolled as company secretary and we had our first board meeting at the Barton Manor Hotel just north of Preston, on my only visit to the town apart from waits at the station for trains to a variety of places.
On one of my visits to Blackpool I drove north to Fleetwood at the tip of the Fylde peninsula. This seemed to me a rather forgotten place and very down compared with Blackpool. It had been a flourishing fishing port and a rail terminus for ships to the Isle of Man and Scotland. One very striking building was the large, neoclassical North Euston Hotel designed in the mid-Victorian era by Decimus Burton. It faced out over the deserted Esplanade and the vast mudflats of Morecambe Bay in sad witness – Ozymandias-style – of forgotten glory and ambition.
Around 1990 I visited the Gait Barrows National Nature Reserve, renowned for its extensive area of limestone pavement, flat sheets of Carboniferous limestone scribbled with splits and holes down which all manner of rare plants were flourishing. We were a group from Butterfly Conservation and were shown round by English Nature staff.
Gait Barrows and the nearby village of Silverdale are just about as far north as one can go in Lancashire, though there is a small spike of land in the Pennines that also claims the gold of the north-east corner of the county. And, if one includes Furness there is much land further north including the Old Man of Coniston, a mountain once cited as the highest point in Lancashire. There is considerable topographic confusion about the parts of North Lancashire.
Using Ordnance Survey maps, the most northerly point is at County Stone on the flank of Coal Pits Hill, a spur of Gatty Pike, and the most northerly named feature in Lancashire is a shake hole. Green Hill, often cited as Lancashire’s most northerly point, is a short distance to the south-west. I have not been to this remote spot but in our years in Little Hayfield we often used to explore the lonely Pennine roads in the area by car.
My farewell to Lancashire was after the Silverdale field trip. With Cynthia, Dobby and Gary Roberts we drove through Carnforth, where we used to get stuck in pre-motorway traffic jams en route to the Lake District, and headed for the seaside resort of Morecambe. We stopped at a small café outside the town for a meal, then drove round the visitor areas again before heading south.
