The move - Part 1

If you’ve read the last few posts, you will have noticed that I haven’t said just where the Langsetts have washed up, now that we’ve jumped off the good ship Manchester.

Well, it was very nearly York.

Ah, York. The place where me and Mrs L first met. Like everywhere in the UK at the moment, York is riding the crest of a bicycle filled wave. In some places, that means that two people now cycle instead of one. In York, it means that more or less everyone cycles.

I lived there ten years ago, in a house full of students. In all my circle of friends, I knew three people who rode bikes and another one who sometimes left the "Bikes and bike accessories" pages of the York Press open on the dining room table. It never even crossed my mind to get a bike. Most of the time, I walked. On nights out, my housemates and I would occasionally treat ourselves to a taxi from Fleetways, which would often be a luxurious Mercedes driven by a doleful redundant structural engineer or something similar. These two modes of transport covered all journeys admirably, other than the trek out to that nightclub on the ring road (which required a special bus and a willingness to contemplate a drunken twelve mile walk home).

It’s all changed now.

These days, visiting York is hard work, particularly if (like me) you get a tiny bit excited and / or distracted every time you see someone riding a bike. When we visited to see whether we still liked the city, there were so many bikes being ridden all the time that it was more or less impossible for me to concentrate on anything, because I kept trying to check exactly what sort of bike each passerby was riding and decide whether I approved or not.

It’s in places like York that you can get an inkling of just how significant a major shift to travelling by bike could be. When I drove into the city to pick Mrs L up from her new job, I was pleasantly surprised to find out it actually was possible to drive into town and out again within a reasonable period of time. At rush hour, no less. Ten years ago, this would have resulted in a lot of sitting in traffic, interspersed with desperate lunges forward to try and get through traffic lights before they turned red. On the basis of my extremely unscientific - but nonetheless persuasive – test, either the drivers of York have fallen victim to some sort of mass illness which has left them unable to operate a steering wheel, or the increase in the number of bikes is as a result of a matching reduction in the number of cars.

Mrs L backed this up when she started work, confirming that her office – a recently completed conversion of a Victorian building that is home to 2,000 office workers – has no car park at all.

And it’s not just about the bikes. York is a very lovely place, chock full of interesting stuff left by everyone from the Romans onwards. Our old landlord used to host dinners for the York Georgian Society, meaning there was a very real chance that you would meet gentlemen in knee breeches and powdered wigs emerging from the portico of his home beside the Knavesmire. He had a superb story about meeting the Crown Prince of Jordan. It was that kind of place.

But as much as me and Mrs L loved it, we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to pay what was needed in order to get a house that would fit us and the girls inside it. So we looked a bit further afield

The new commute - Part 2: In which The Langsett's lamentably late looking locates a lovely little line linking home and work...

A few weeks ago I did some low level griping about the high-ish potential for death and serious injury that could be found on my new ride to work.

Since then I have dealt with used cunning and lateral thinking to circumvent the issue. In short, I have been driving to work.

And the drive is pretty good: there is a big motorway passing not far from the fragrant gardens and handsome wrought iron gates of Chateau Langsett, from where it sweeps over the Ship Canal and up the hill past Worsley - creating the formidable barrier which made me grouchy when I tried the ride by bike - through an excitingly curvy junction with another motorway before firing the Polo at surprising velocity into a new NCP multistorey car park next to a handsome Georgian church.

Furthermore, the immense gravitational pull of Manchester city centre sucks virtually all vehicular traffic towards in in the morning, while its gag reflex spits it all back out in the evening. So my side of the motorway is a kind of empty, Robert Moses designed fantasy world of empty tarmac a hundred feet wide, while the other side is crammed full of stationary vehicles of all shapes and sizes.

At times, it feels like I might be building up a considerable store of commuting bad luck which will come crashing down on me at some point in the future.

It has also been making my legs feel weird. Instead of pushing me and my bike to work and back, the right one depresses the accelerator slowly all the way to the floor as I go up the ramp onto the motorway, then presses the brake pedal slowly all the way to the floor when I arrive at the multistorey car park. My left foot taps nervously on bits of interior trim. I am not, in short, getting the same use out of them as I was when I was riding to work, and the result is me jogging up and down stairs at work to get cups of tea and stationary that I don't really need.

I need to sort out a better ride to work, I thought. If only there was some kind of route planning website  - oh! That was easy!

Feeling a bit shamefaced for being so grumpy about cycling provision in Manchester, I realised that by stringing together the rubbish, painted on cycle lanes around the massive shopping centre, the Bridgewater Canal towpath and National Cycle Route 55, I could do almost all of the ride off road. Well, ok, the last bit into Bolton looked a bit flaky. But what would Fred do?

 
He would probably knock out the bricks on one side, hold it up with pit props and then get Mrs Dibnah to set fire to it, creating one of the most awesome spectacles known to man

The biking equivalent of which is trying it out right away. Out came the mighty British Eagle.

Over the miracle motorway...

...and then the Bridgewater Canal takes you to Monton, where you can nip up through this little gate onto NCN Route 55. This stretch of Route 55 runs along an old railway line, first on top of an embankment and then, as the ground rises, through a cutting. It's great: there were fields with cows having an evening snack over to one side, and then the quiet tree lined tunnel of the cutting with families taking an evening walk. There was even...

...a choice of routes. Tyldesley and Leigh are off to the left (I think). Bolton is to the right. The route is all uphill, but it's a nice, constant gradient and easy to steam up at a good speed.

There's a lot going on in this bit of Greater Manchester at the moment, as far as cycling is concerned. Part of the route into Leigh that you can see branching off to the left above is being turned into a guided busway with a traffic free cycle and footpath alongside. Also, Salford City Council have just secured funding to put in a further 1.5 km of traffic free cycle path to provide access to Port Salford, Peel Holdings' enormous distribution estate next to the Ship Canal.

It's not perfect: there are signs telling you where NCN 55 goes all over the show while you're in Salford, but none at all when you cross into Bolton. The other thing that happens in Bolton is that the route suddenly ends in a big clump of buddleia with someone's back garden to one side and a field to the other side. Somewhere close by the was the constant exhale noise of the motorway. A couple of miles zig zagging though random streets was needed at this point, but eventually:

In Bolton, it was very much all going off. Bradshawgate is deathly quiet in the day time, but now it was decorated with the blue flashing lights of a police car. Some ladies were sitting in the highway having a word with the officer while cheery revellers watched from the bars lining the street.

Feeling pretty chuffed with myself, I headed for home, back though the "challenging" bit of the route:

And then back onto the old railway line. It was properly dark now, and it turned out that my little Cateye front light was more for decoration than for actually lighting up the path. A lad in a dark hooded sweater loomed up out of the darkness a yard or two off the starboard bow and then just as quickly vanished behind. Some pale lumps in the path turned out to be another pair of Boltonians, both of whom had had quite a lot of Vimto, sitting on the ground discussing where to go next. Ten more minutes of being utterly terrified that I was going to ride off the side of the embankment, and I popped out of the little gate again back in Monton.

In other bike news, the cycling revolution is pretty much complete. Proof of this came from my brother Matt, a gentleman who routinely spends his Saturdays boiling his back tyres on drag strips up and down the UK.

"I noticed I was turning into a bit of a porker," said Matt, "so I bought a bike."

And this is what he bought:

Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooo yeah.

The realisation that I needed a BMX of my own so that I could pick up from where I left off - that is, jumping off ramps made from an old bit of wood propped up at one end with a brick - came more or less instantly. My own BMX arrived as a Christmas present when I was about 8. It was a chrome Kuwahara Laserlite. Of course I didn't know that at the time. I just knew it wasn't the Raleigh Burner that I secretly coveted. I nearly had a bit of a cry when I realised how much it would cost to go on that nostalgia trip

Incontinence supplies at internet prices

It's all change in the Langsett household. I've landed myself a new job; although Mrs L quickly out-newjobbed me by also getting not just a new job, but one in an entirely different bit of the country. In the meantime, there's a new commute to get to grips with. The old commute is pretty good, too. It starts in one Manchester suburb and ends in another one, but in between there's quite a lot of this:

So the new ride to work has quite a lot to live up to.

Let's get down to the nuts and bolts. My destination is a place where this man is rightly revered as a god:

A place where, if the massive piece of machinery behind Fred is anything to go by, the entire town centre is powered by steam. A place where there are whole mirror glass fronted shops entirely devoted to the sale of Quality Meats:

I tried the route out on my Claud Butler first thing on Sunday morning, which is where the photos came from. But I first rode it at night, a few of weeks ago. And it gave me the creeping horrors.

For the most part, I notice the dodgy bits of riding on the road for only as long as it takes for them to happen. Someone overtakes you with a couple of inches to spare. But a couple of seconds later, they're gone, and you're still getting lungfuls of fresh air and the sun on your face. If I do stop to think about making roads safer for lads and ladies on bikes, my big plan starts and ends with fitting uncannily accurate rocket launchers, like on Chuck Norris's bike in Delta Force to all bikes.


This ride was different though. It was cool and late when I set out. There was barely anything on the road, apart from me. And the absence of cars, buses and trucks made it easier to appreciate what a pig of a route this is. It is structurally unsafe.

The first big obstacle is a monster, out of town shopping centre. It should be easy to get past on a bike, because there are bike paths all around it. But they're the kind of bike paths that consist of red paint on the pavement. I might be doing the designers an injustice by saying that the paint has been splashed down at random without any thought about where each path is trying to get people to, but that is exactly the impression that's been created. A couple of years ago, a young woman from my part of Manchester, Georgia Flynn, was knocked down and killed trying to figure out her way to work at the shopping centre on her bike.

I carried on, over the Ship Canal and up the hill towards Worsley. The next obstacle was a motorway junction. There's a steep uphill gradient in the mix here, so there is absolutely no chance that you'll be travelling anywhere near the speed of the cars that come belting down the slip road from the motorway. There are no crossings or traffic signals to make it easier for you. If you're on a bike- or on foot for that matter - the motorway might as well be a wall.

In Walkden, there was a particularly evil one way system - one of those which maroons a whole town centre in the middle of a constant, revolving wall of traffic. It was late on a Tuesday evening, so the roads were really quiet. But you could imagine the roaring, swirling maelstrom of vehicular death that it would be at 8:07 on a Tuesday morning, where the weekend might as well be located in another plane of existence. And in case you can't imagine it, I found this short film of it on the t'internet.

Finally, there was this terrifying invitation from Bolton Council to maroon yourself between two merging streams of high speed traffic waiting for - hell to freeze over? I dunno. Clearly there's no realistic way of getting across the slip road without a lot of sweaty palmed stumbling over your own bike.

But then there was this very direct bit of advertising, which lifted the mood a bit:

Greater Manchester has just won £20 million to improve cycling provision in the city - the website setting out the plan for spending that cash is here. Let's get involved in a bit of internet activism: if you're reading this, and you live in Greater Manchester, and you've ever found yourself thinking - as I did at that junction in Bolton - that the road designer must want you personally and thoroughly dead, then get in touch with the people holding the purse strings and tell them where the money needs to be spent

This new commute of mine is not all bad. As you're coming over the top of the hill to Bolton, you get this lovely teaser view of the town hall clock tower with Winter Hill rising behind. I would love to ride up here when there's snow on the top - I bet it looks beautiful.

Coming back down the hill towards home, there's Worsley Delph - two hundred yards and a world away from the motorway, with the half timbered Packet House hidden amongst the trees.

And that's why some thought and money needs spending on cycling provision in this bit of town. This could be a great way to get to and from work. But at the moment it feels a bit too much like an audition for a part in Casualty.