1021. Over breakfast, my landlady apologises again for having missed my email but I assure her it is fine. My intention is to cycle to Port Sunlight but I woke up feeling very tired after the previous day's fiasco so instead I navigate my way through the inner suburbs of Chester, quiet on this Saturday morning, to catch the Merseyrail. It’s another sunny day although I gather a change is due. There is nothing particularly remarkable about the train journey which runs through the area of ‘outstanding artificial ugliness’ which is the South bank of the Mersey.
1138. The same cannot be said of Port Sunlight - replace 'ugliness' with 'style and character’. The village is still artificial though, being a model village built by Lord Lever for his employees at the Sunlight Soap Factory. Each house or terrace is architecturally unique and designed by the most modern and famous architects of the time. No garages of course but the streets are so wide as to not seem crowded with parked cars. The centre of the village is dominated by the impressive Lady Lever Art Gallery which houses Lord Lever's eclectic collection of art, furniture and pottery. Apparently he started off by buying paintings and using them in soap adverts so they were all women in white clothes or cleaning something! However, he got hooked and started collecting all sorts of things for their own sake. My favourite exhibits are:
· A cabinet with drawers of 50 different types of wood;
· A filigree paperwork furniture piece – you know if you run a strip of paper under a ruler it curls up? This chest of drawers is entirely decorated with thousands of these – very rare apparently;
· A veneered backgammon and chess board inlaid with marquetry insects and creatures. – amazing workmanship;
· Stubbs paintings on Wedgwood plaques over a metre long – it’s difficult to make them this big without warping and the colours are fixed by the firing so they looked bright;
1300 I go outside to take some more photos and get chatting to a resident who says that it is a lovely place to live but gangs of youths hang around the war memorial at night. Incidentally, this war memorial is very large, well preserved and maintained. It has several life sized bronze statues - check out my photos. I would have liked to spend longer looking around but cannot risk missing my Manchester train home.
1402 Rats. Delays on the line due to points failure so the train to Chester from PS is 30 minutes late. At least there is plenty of time. The aim is to catch the 1450 to Manchester at Chester and then the straight through service to Basingstoke. I take one last look behind at Port Sunlight ... It's odd to see this stunning village in the middle of otherwise drab suburbs. I had wanted to visit PS for ages ever since a chap at our church in Clevedon gave a slide show about it...it did not disappoint.
1507 To make up for my earlier bad luck the train to Manchester from Chester is non-stop!
1600 Time in hand to take in Manchester Piccadilly station: a pretty soulless place in my opinion, somewhere you pass through, whereas I compare it to Darlington in which I could easily spend an hour looking at the architecture. There is nowhere to securely store my bike so I make a point of dutifully wheeling it in and out of the shops on the concourse as I browse.
1630 Buy a pasty from the Cornish pasty stand and sit down to eat it. I think the Cornish pasty shops are the modern equivalent of the old saw 'find ‘ee a hole un at the bottom ‘ee’ll find ‘ee a Cornishman'. Perhaps today’s equivalent is 'find ‘ee a station un in the corner ee'll find ‘ee a pasty stand!
1730. Safely store my bike in the train and am on my way back to ‘Blasingsmoke’ as a colleague of mine refers to it. Plenty of unreserved seats so I give up my reserved table seat to a person in a family group of four Aisans so they can sit together. They proceed to munch their way through the biggest bag of Bombay Mix I have ever seen!
2128. Basingstoke station. Curse you, Southwest Trains! they arrange it so that I miss my connection to Andover by 1 minute and I am forced to wait another hour for a train. It eventually comes and to my surprise it is extremely crowded. I then realise that it is chock full of footie fans on their way back from Wembley. A group of ‘Zummerzet’ yokels on their way back to Yeovil are friendly but a little merry on account of the supplies of Scrumpy they have consumed and tease me by demanding that I 'do a wheelie' on the platform when I get off. 'it’s not going to happen' I tell them.
2145 Safely home, more or less unscathed. All in all a pretty good trip - could have gone a lot worse – and has eaten into my target of 50.
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