Hebden Bridge

The station buildings at Hebden Bridge on the Calder Valley route between Leeds and Manchester date from a rebuild in 1893. In 1997, another refurbishment restored Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway-style signage, which is very prominent in the pictures taken last week, as a lunchtime Leeds-bound Northern service was sent on its way from platform two.

Hebden Bridge is an attractive riverside town built of local stone. The compact central area, including cobbled streets and marketplace, is largely given over to tourism these days, with gift shops and plenty of cafes to choose from. The town also has a growing reputation as a regional art centre. To the north and a few miles out of town is Hardcastle Crags, a popular local walk up a stony riverside path to a former cotton mill, built c. 1800, and known as Gibson Mill. It has been with the National Trust since 1950. A café occupies the former weaving shed. A short extension to our walk led to the top of Hardcastle Crags, themselves, with panoramic views across the attractive hilly surroundings.

This part of West Yorkshire is fascinating, historically, but I wouldn’t describe it as pretty, overall. When it is overcast, the soot-blackened older buildings that have not received their post-smoky industrial era clean-up can make the area look gaunt, gritty and even quite forbidding, at times. On the other hand, looking down from the tops – and it is very up and down up here – in bright sunlight, it has a rather magnetic appeal. Calderdale is now more widely known through the BBC’s Happy Valley series of TV dramas. There are former industrial and residential gems everywhere - reminders of the centuries old woollen industry that made this region rich way before the industrial revolution. The Bankfield Museum at Halifax, former home of the Akroyd family woollen mill owners, is just one example.

Old villages have merged into larger towns wherever there was enough flat land to build on. Historic properties now rub shoulders with modern estates and factory units. This is the homeland of my dad’s family. Priestleys were big landowners here for centuries. There is currently one glaring gap in our direct ancestry lineage, but the feeling is that if an uncomfortable truth had to be buried in the early eighteenth century, when most of the people directly affected could not read or write, then the chances of uncovering any relevant facts about it three hundred years later are not that likely. There is no harm in trying, though.

Ovenden, near Halifax

On the 13^th of October 1763, Nathaniel John Priestley of Ovenden, aged 22, married Susannah Wadsworth, also of Ovenden, at Halifax Parish Church. Though this is still a mystery to be fully unravelled, it is also how we found ourselves looking for the site of Ovenden’s former station.

Ovenden is on the edge of Halifax, and the line built by the Halifax and Ovenden Joint Railway included a wooden station building there in 1881, on the route to Queensbury and Bradford. The station eventually closed in 1951, though through traffic continued for another 9 years after that. Information on the admirable Disused Stations website meant that tracking down the former station’s location was fairly straightforward, though the amount of foliage that has grown up around it since the 1930s is somewhat dramatic. Accessed from Old Lane just off the A629, the construction still stands – just about - as the offices and stores for the scrapyard that now occupies the site. A small section of the concrete northern-bound platform also remains.

A little further up the main road is Holdsworth House, an historic yet welcoming and comfortable hotel, which for two centuries of its lengthy past was the home of the Wadsworth family. Whether this is just a coincidence as far as our branch of the Priestleys is concerned also remains to be confirmed. What we can be sure about, is that the Beatles stayed here in October 1964, after a performance in Bradford.

The next day we visited Shibden Hall, another ancient stone-built country house and the former home of Anne Lister, whose fascinating life has been the subject of the television series, Gentleman Jack. Though investing in both coal mining and canals, Anne Lister apparently did not welcome the railway age, even though this same line from Halifax to Bradford would eventually tunnel beneath her land but not until some four decades after her death in 1840.

     

A Wakefield Trinity

The central theme in my new book, Back on Track in 2022, is a love of place. Whenever I visit new places, I tend to quickly form a view of them, based on first impressions and early encounters. Of course, this could quickly amount to a rush to judgement - even prejudice or a self-fulfilling prophecy if I’m too swayed early on or if I haven’t given myself a chance to uncover true delights through a lack of planning.

We have been to Wakefield before. I find the Hepworth [2011] a difficult building to love, being so flat-faced, angular and uniform. If “stark” and “concrete” are amongst your favourite words, then it may be more to your liking. Sometimes, the modern art, sculpture and installations inside matches the exterior very well, though I’ve been grateful in the past for some stand-out moments. A Martin Parr photographic exhibition comes to mind.

All the UK’s former industrial towns and cities face the same urban planning problem – what to do with that no-man’s land lying between the central business district in the inner urban area and the surrounding residential districts. In the old days, this was the over-crowded zone of old industries and factory workers’ housing. Through slum clearance programmes and the gradual decay of a jumble of manufacturing premises that are now mostly gone, what to do with it has become a challenge for any cash-strapped local authority.

Progress has often been in the form of vast paved areas interrupted by a sprinkling of new saplings - if they can survive unwanted attention, some convenient [if initially unintended] car parking opportunities on former wasteland within walking distance of the centre, a new public building or two, and, hopefully, a facelift for whatever listed buildings are left behind. Old terraced street patterns together with their names disappear for ever in favour of curvy, widened inner-ring roads. As always, it works better in some places than others.

Another more recent addition to Wakefield since our previous visit is the West Yorkshire History Centre, opened in 2017, and this is our immediate destination and the main purpose for revisiting the city on this occasion. This dramatic construction is modernist and imposing, but rather curious. It is fully glazed at ground level, whilst the upper layers are all metal-cladded, a sort of glass-bottomed ship cutting through the waves of downtown Wakefield. The historic records archive inside was well-organised, and free library access to ancestry websites online was certainly quicker and easier to navigate than from home. The receptionist was welcoming and helpful and apparently unmoved by the repetitive thuds and clattering from the skateboarding activities taking place on the slabs immediately outside the entrance.

With our job done in the archives, we asked about the possibilities of a late lunch, but there is no food at the WYHC. The recommended café opposite had closed at 2.00, which is probably itself a record in my experience, but Kirkgate station is in view and it has a café that I’ve heard has a positive reputation. We wandered over, avoiding the skateboarders and giving as wide a berth as possible to the extremely thin and “old before his time” bloke leaning against a fence and swigging a purplish liquid from a plastic bottle, surrounded by a gaggle of junior-school-age children buzzing him like wasps round a honey pot.

The frontage of Kirkgate station dating from 1858 is magnificent, reflecting the brash self-confidence of the Victorian railway companies. Cleaned up and imposing, its only when you step inside that the first impression bubble is burst, pretty much straight away. The renowned café is shuttered from head to foot. In spite of relatively recent refurbishment, the station, though relatively vast, is still unmanned. The platforms are extensive but the whole place feels bleak to me, not helped by that enormous and obsolete wall that formerly held up the overall roof, which incongruously dominates the scene.

Still lunch-less, we returned to our car just in time to see a young man, all in black with a hoody and face mask, pull to a sudden halt on his black motorised bicycle alongside two youths standing on a street corner. An exchange took place and he was off as quickly as he had arrived. It was a brazen act, with no effort made at concealment on either part. Somehow, in inner-urban 2022 Wakefield, it didn’t seem to be much of a surprise, at all.    

Comparisons of architectural style, appreciation of modern art and dabbling in family history from a comfy chair in a nice warm well-lit room all seemed a chasm away from the raw reality of “existing rather than living” for some folk on the east side of Wakefield. Charles Dickens flagged up these contrasts two centuries ago, but it increasingly seems we have not moved on much in that respect during the full lifetime of the steam railway.

   

Hopper at Patchings

We are quite well off for art exhibition sites in mid-Notts. One such is Patchings Art Centre near Calverton. There is often an interesting selection on view in the Barn Gallery above the café. Here until November 20th is The Artist Collection – an exhibition by 10 professional artists, all award winners from the TALP 21 competition. Michael Salt’s Whitby Sands was the highlight for me, a vibrant and uplifting land and seascape.

In the grounds, Patchings have developed an Artists’ Trail. With a series of small studios devoted to particular old masters and linked by paths between the trees, the circuit includes some of the best-known artists and paintings over the centuries, in the form of large-scale glazed panels, thus making good use of natural light. Edward Hopper’s 1929 image, Lines at Sunset [this version attributed to Bob Owen], is the sole representative from the railway scene. It is a lonely yet evocative study bringing home the vastness of the American interior. It’s a great reminder of our journey by train across that continent with mile after mile of wide-open spaces and relatively small settlements – such a contrast with the archetypal “big city” environments.

   

Back on Track in 2022

A light-hearted account of post-pandemic journeys to some favourite railway locations, all for the price of a couple of pints, or so. Laced with anecdotes from previous visits and underscored throughout with the notion of a love of place.

Bassenthwaite Lake Station

Much of the former track bed of the CK&PR west from Keswick was used for improvements to the A66 road to Workington. Near the foot of the lake, the derelict station building at Bassenthwaite has recently been restored as an already very popular café. A short section of track was re-laid next to the platform, now occupied by a replica SNCF Class 241 locomotive and mock-up of some Wagon Lit stock, including a baggage car. The train was used in the 2017 film version of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. We enjoyed breakfast at a table for two in the art deco-style carriage. The main station building is decorated with reminders of the line as it used to be before closure in 1966. The Keswick to Penrith section further east survived until 1972. 

The Cockermouth, Keswick and Penrith Railway

The path along the former track bed of the old CK&PR east of Keswick has been dramatically improved since we last walked it. From the old station building, which is now part of the adjacent hotel, there is now an excellent asphalted cycleway all the way to Threlkeld. Some of the old bowstring bridges are still in situ on this most scenic and dramatic former approach to Keswick by train, as the railway crossed and re-crossed the River Greta through a wooded gorge.

One of those bridges had been destroyed by the 2015 floods, curtailing progress on our pre-pandemic visit well before Threlkeld. Today, with the bridge restored, an excellent asphalted cycleway takes us to the edge of the village next to the A66. A splendid modern café, apparently an extension to the local community centre, was there to welcome us.

A Brief Lakeside Encounter

One of the things that we really like to do when we are in Keswick is go to the Theatre by the Lake. The setting is wonderful, there is a nice café with views towards Causey Pike and Catbells, there is always a warm and cheery welcome and - most of all - those productions we have been to have been most entertaining and well produced in every way.

A double bonus this time, was a railway-related live production of Noel Coward’s famous war-time film, Brief Encounter. The last night is Saturday 8^th October, so you might still just have time to catch the train.

 

A Railway Reunion after Sixty Years

On Saturday 24^th September we met up with John Dyer at Winchcombe station on the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Steam Railway. In 1962, John had left Wallasey Grammar School for a career in the RAF, eventually finding his way to retirement near the heritage line.

Between September 1960 - when most of us started at “big school” - and John’s departure at Easter in 1962, he was the leading light in the school’s railway society, which he had inaugurated a few years before our arrival. With the support of Maths teacher, Jack Dugdale, and John’s right hand man, who we knew only as “Abbott”, as well as with further encouragement from a string of teachers who provided the necessary “responsible adult” role on our trips to railway locations - made in the school’s name and with us all in our school uniform - John was instrumental in fashioning our life-long affection for the steam railway, which we still celebrate with just such get-togethers as this one.

John arranged shed visits by sending off for the required permits and working out feasible itineraries, in between organising our regular meetings in the blacked-out geography classroom, where b/w British Transport Commission films were shown on reel-to-reel projectors after school. I have consequently felt indebted to John for his industry and application, taking on a lot of responsibility for us when we were out and about, and at a time that he was a senior pupil at the school.

In more recent times, after I had made contact with John again after a gap measured in decades, he furnished me with a multitude of photographs he took at the time and over the few years before we became fully involved as enthusiasts. I have used these photos in my blogs over recent years, with John’s blessing, for which I am also very grateful.

John accompanied us on a return trip to Cheltenham during our recent Saturday afternoon together, and we had the chance to reminisce about the railway society and some more general school experiences. John still contributes actively to the running of the GWSR. To join up with John in Gloucestershire, we had travelled from Merseyside, Yorkshire, Cheshire, Avon and Nottinghamshire, not forgetting that we had come further south than usual in order to belatedly celebrate another John’s big birthday - so “Cheers” to the two Johns. 

  

GCR Autumn Gala 2022

We dipped in to the gala on Saturday afternoon. It is always a good show when traffic is so varied and frequent. The visiting Ivatt tank and the railbus, as well as the 0-6-0 from the NYMR were the added attractions.