Places I like, ....... Piccadilly Railway Station

I first arrived in Piccadilly Railway Station on a warm September day in 1969 thinking I would be here in Manchester for just three years.

Well that was not going to happen and forty-three years later I reckon it was a pretty clever place to adopt as home.

Even now the sight of the city sky line as the train pulls into the station is something I never cease to enjoy.  I would have liked to see the old station before its facelift in 1960, but had to be contents with its ‘60s look which by the end of that century was looking tired.

So I rather approved of the new design, which I know some friends reckon is just like any one of a dozen airports, but I like it.  And of course then there are the trains.  Even given the cost of a railway ticket, and the bewildering different price options, nothing compares with boarding a train.

On one level it’s because you are still in control.  There are no long tedious waits at a check in and no one makes you pay a shed full of more money because your bag is the wrong size and a tad heavier than you thought when it was packed.

Then there are the trains.  Now I accept some of the small commuter ones can still be dismal in the rush hour But I never tire of the excitement as the big intercity ones slowly slide out of the station gently picking up speed  as they clear the platform and head out past the jumble of warehouses, factories and abandoned industrial sites.

And it is easy to forget that for the Victorian passenger this was not just a new way of travelling it was a new way of seeing the world.  For the first time they could gaze down at the roof tops and in to the gardens, yards and streets which ran alongside the tall viaducts.

It was a whole new way of taking in the city and something of that novelty is all too clear from the words of the writer Edwin Waugh who in the winter of 1857, travelled from the heart of the city out to Stretford on a railway that was just eight years old. It was a journey of contrasts. Leaving ‘the huge manufactories, and the miserable chimney tops of Little Ireland, down by the dirty Medlock; we ran over a web of dingy streets, swarming with dingy people ... left the black stagnant canal, coiled in the hollow, stretching its dark length into the distance, like some slimy snake’. And clearing the ‘cotton mills, and dye works, and chemical manufactories of Cornbrook’, the train entered open countryside before arriving at Stretford station.

You can still get that sense of being that detached observer on that same line today, and a little of that landscape has survived.  But we are a long way from Piccadilly Station, still perhaps I shall continue theme with pictures of other stations and other trains. We shall see.

* Waugh, E., ‘Lancashire Sketches’, Alexander Ireland & Co, 1869

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson