Route Britannia, the Journey South: A Spontaneous Bicycle Ride through Every County in Britain

by Steven Primrose-Smith

  I was now in my second county, Greater Manchester. I'd decided very early that I wouldn't attempt to cycle through the centre of the city of Manchester. I'd once worked in Salford and I didn't need to be reminded of that miserable commute. There's a reason Manchester is, according to the BBC, the suicide capital of England.

  Towns don't really end around here. The terraced houses of one place merge into the next in one huge conurbation. It's not great cycling, to be honest. I suddenly found myself, arbitrarily it seemed, in Bolton. I couldn't find a newspaper story naming it the capital of anything in particular but it does have a grim statistic attached. The saying that “you can't go wrong with bricks and mortar” doesn't apply here. Since the year 2000, average British house prices have increased 172%. That is, a home worth £100,000 in 2000 would be worth £272,000 in 2016. In Bolton, its value would be £91,000. Prices have actually dropped 9% over a decade and a half!

  As if to underscore these numbers, the rain came down harder. My stomach was telling me it was time for lunch and so I ducked from the shower into a fish and chip shop. For £3.20 the portion was massive, a fish the size of a killer whale. I could barely walk afterwards. It was just as well I didn't need to.

  I cycled through the damp, grey town, passing a pub with a sign offering “Great Food Daily!” I could imagine the conversation inside.

  “Pah! This steak is awful. I thought you said you did great food daily.”

  “We do. It's usually around six o'clock, before the kitchen gets busy. The rest of the time it's mostly crap.”

  I had a couple of places to look out for in town. One was Smithills Farm. I had my list of recommendations people had given me but without any explanation as to why I should go there. I parked up outside and looked at their sign. They advertised a special rate for Brownies and Beavers and I suspected this petting zoo wasn't really aimed at me. To be honest, the idea of patting sheep and stroking goats in the drizzle didn't hold much appeal.

  As you might expect within an enormous conurbation, campsites are in short supply around these parts. While I slowly tackled Moby Dick in that chippy I'd found one on the outskirts of Bolton near Edgworth and phoned the owner to see if it was open at this time of year, and it was.

  I climbed another long hill to reach the site – another farm – and rang the bell to a house. A woman appeared from behind me and her expression wasn't a happy one.

  “Sorry, I assumed you were in a camper van,” she said. “I tried to call you back to check but there was no response.”

  I told her how I had to keep my phone switched off when I wasn't using it otherwise the battery would be dead in 24 hours.

  “Do I need a camper van? You've got fields,” I said.

  “I have, but look at them.”

  We opened a gate and squelched around in mud. It was like a paddy field. It had been a wet day in a wet spell of a wet winter in a region of Britain that is generally wet and the local clay soil doesn't drain well. Then more bad news came.

  “Are you a member?”

  “What of?”

  “The Caravanning Club.”

  I had a tent. Why would I be a member of The Caravanning Club?

  “No.”

  “Ah, then you couldn't have stayed anyway.”

  That might have been useful information on the phone.

  “Could I become a member?”

  “Not here.”

  Great.

  “Right then, is there another site somewhere around here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  “It's just up the road.”

  “Great!”

  “But it closed down.” Not great. “But you could always go there and see if they'll put you up.”

  She gave me vague directions but I couldn't find the place and it seemed like a lost cause, hunting for a closed site amongst swampland in murky weather. I checked on my phone for the next nearest alternative and – joy of joys! – it was a mere fifteen drizzly miles away, the other side of Rochdale. Can you feel my positivity being tested already?

  The route took me on busy roads through the centre of rush-hour Bury. I wasn't supposed to be here at this time of day. I'd planned a leisurely jaunt through the place tomorrow to sample their famous puddings, black ones and steak ones, but now, early evening, its famous market was closed. In the gathering gloom, Bury wasn't impressive, a place whose drabness on this grey afternoon was so similar to my home town of Blackburn, Britain's shisha capital apparently, that I thought I must have made a wrong turn.

  The evening was drawing in by the time I passed through Rochdale and arrived at the campsite in Newhey. According to the ever-uplifting Daily Mail, Rochdale, or at least one area of it, is the sickest place in Britain. That's “sickest” as in “most ill”, not some modern street way of calling it fab and groovy. The ward of Falinge, which itself sounds like a medical complaint, has 4,500 residents of which 1,100 are of working age although only 300 have jobs. The rest are unemployed or “on the sick”. I've no idea if this is true. Most of what the Daily Mail writes isn't. So let's ignore it and find something nice to say about Rochdale.

  If you want to invoke positivity there's no person better to recall than Hitler. He, so the story goes, absolutely loved Rochdale's Victorian Gothic town hall so much that he planned to take it brick-by-brick after WW2 and rebuild it in the Fatherland. This is one explanation for Rochdale's bomb-free war. Unfortunately, this story has the air of an urban myth – there's no documented evidence to back it up – and so maybe it's no better than the earlier one from the Daily Mail.

  The campsite sits on the road leading up to moody and desolate Saddleworth Moor. The ghosts of past terrors lie amongst those sad hills. The bodies of at least four of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley's victims were buried in this peat bog. A further body, unconnected to the Moors murderers, was also found there in 2015. The poor sod had been poisoned with strychnine but his identity has never been discovered. By the time I arrived it was seven o'clock. I was freezing cold and soaked to the skin. I turned my back to the horror of the hills and set up my tent in the icy rain.

  This site had survived the recent deluge better than the one in Bolton. It was still damp but not unusably so, and my tent was remarkably dry inside despite being packed away wet. The site only cost £6, half the price of the previous evening and with better facilities. I'd soon learn that there's absolutely no rhyme or reason to British campsite prices.

  I needed to get warm and there was no way my clothes would have dried in my tent at this temperature. I had to find central heating and if a beer had to be supplied at the same time then, hell, I'd just have to take that chance.

  “Is there a pub near here?” I asked the site owner.

  “There are two of 'em,” he replied. “Just around the corner is Bird In The Hand. A little farther is The Bird In Hand.”

  Eh? But that was how it was, two pubs with near identical names within about a hundred metres of each other. I wondered if, back in the days before mobile phones, it was a device to enable Yorkshire-accented philanderers to find an easy excuse to be somewhere they shouldn't without being caught.

  “You said you were out at t' Bird In Hand last night! I phoned. You weren't there. Where were you?”

  “T' Bird In Hand? Nah, that's Wednesday. Last night I was in Bird Int Hand, you daft ha'porth.”

  There may have been some truth in this. I would later meet a Rochdale man in a distant corner of Britain who told me that these pubs are famously used by cheating lovers because “they're up on the moors and no one knows who you are.”

  But back at the campsite, the owner explained the difference between the two establishments.

  “The farther one is cheaper but it's rougher,” he said.

  For the pragmatic reason of not wanting to get any wetter than I already was, I decided on the nearer one and walked into what felt like someone's living room. About six blokes sat around and the conversation instantly halted when they saw me enter. Wa
sn't it around here that an unfortunate Yank wandered into that moorland pub in American Werewolf in London? I got myself a pint. It was hard to believe the other pub was the cheaper one; a pint of bitter here cost just £1.80. It was like being back in the eighties. I sat myself down near a roaring fire and tried to warm my bones. Their chatter restarted a little self-consciously. They occasionally looked over towards me and then turned away again quickly if I caught their eye.

  There was an excruciating conversation happening to my left. A bloke in his forties, Quinny, was sitting at the bar and was clearly coming on to Brodie, the pretty, ever-patient, 21-year-old barmaid, her long brown hair in plaits. He was explaining to her how he'd recently got divorced and was living in a van on the campsite for the next six months. This truth didn't exactly make him more attractive to the poor girl. He temporarily gave up and turned his attention to me.

  “So what's your story?” he asked.

  “I'm staying at your place,” I replied.

  “Yeah, I saw you come in on a bike earlier. Are you travelling?”

  I nodded.

  “Where you going?”

  “I set off yesterday and I'm cycling through every county in Britain.”

  It took a second for this to sink in.

  “Why are you doing it? Are you doing it because you want to?”

  I already had a pint in me at this stage and so my bollocks filter had been removed.

  “No, I don't want to do it,” I lied. “I'm being forced to. Please help me!”

  That got a laugh from the room. Everyone else's attention now turned towards me. Fresh meat, y'see.

  “Where are you going to tomorrow?” asked another fella.

  That depended. I wasn't exactly sure where I was. I may have strayed over a county border and inadvertently found myself somewhere I shouldn't be until later.

  “We're still in Greater Manchester, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” replied one bloke.

  “Well, you're not,” said another, laughing. “You're actually in Yorkshire.”

  “Nay, this in Lancashire,” added a third.

  Maybe county divisions are meaningless if you don't actually know in which one you live. A discussion broke out. Wherever we were it was close to several borders. The topic seemed to be resolved by barmaid Brodie.

  “If you actually look at the border,” she said, “we're in Greater Manchester.”

  The discussion got a little more heated.

  “I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't mean to start a fight.”

  “Where are you from?” asked one of the guys.

  “Lancashire.”

  “That's alright,” he smiled. “People from Lancashire don't know where they are.”

  The evening continued with merry chat in a warm room with my clothes slowly drying and the cheap beer flowing. I stood up to get closer to the fire. Quinny was still working his magic on Brodie despite getting steadily more drunk. Occasionally, to convince her to take him on, I'd hear him say something hopeless like, “I'm good looking, me.” She wasn't persuaded.

  Another bloke, Tom, younger than the rest, entered the pub and took a seat at the bar.

  “Hey, I know your brother,” Quinny said to him with a slur.

  “Yeah,” replied Tom, not seeming to want to get involved.

  Quinny got up and went to the toilet. It was clear from the reaction of absolutely everyone else in the pub that Quinny was a new face around here and wasn't very popular with the locals.

  “He's always pissed,” said Tom. “He's told me he knows my brother three times now.”

  “He just asked me out,” Brodie said to him. “He invited me to McDonald's.”

  Quinny was clearly a smooth operator.

  I got up to go to the bar for a final beer and talked to Tom. His surname was Power and his brother, the one that Quinny knew, was, brilliantly, called Max.

  “Homer Simpson changed his name to Max Power in one episode,” Tom said.

  I decided to test the one fact I knew about Rochdale.

  “Do you know Lizzie Bardsley?” I asked.

  “Oh God!” he replied, shaking his head.

  Even if the name doesn't ring a bell you might well remember her. She was on the very first episode of Wife Swap, back in 2003. She and her fella were both on the dole and claiming close to forty grand in benefits. She had so many kids she'd had to move out of that shoe into a massive pair of wellies. On the programme she was swapped into an extremely middle-class family and, just as the programme makers had hoped, sparks flew. She became a celebrity of sorts for about an hour and, despite being a larger lady of disputable physical attraction, posed topless for the Sunday Sport newspaper in what wasn't their finest hour amongst of lifetime of terrible hours. Unfortunately for her, despite earning money for her media work, she didn't stop claiming benefits and was subsequently busted.

  “I can't believe we're talking about Lizzie Bardsley,” he said. Tom spoke with a laid-back voice and an accent more Peter Kay than Peter Kay. “She's a scratter.”

  “A scratter?” I asked.

  “Rough as toast.”

  I laughed. That's a great expression.

  “So you know her?”

  “Not really. But she lives just down the road in Milnrow. She chatted me up once.”

  This had been in a pub or a nightclub and I don't know if it was before or after Wife Swap but it clearly hadn't been an avenue Tom wanted to pursue.

  It was the end of a long and lovely evening.

  “I've got to go now,” I said.

  “You want to come back to my van?” asked Quinny. Perhaps he was just desperately lonely. “I've got beer,” he added. But I'd had enough.

  “Will you come back here?” asked Tom. “You're a nice man.”

  I smiled at his openness.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You call up Lizzie and then the three of us can have a party.”

  *

  It was Day Three and I had an appointment with my third county, the first one to allow me more than a single day's visit. But I had to get there first. The rain had cleared, leaving a crisp morning under a blue sky. Temperatures, however, suggested it was still very much winter, and a Russian winter at that.

  As I skirted its eastern edge, the gravitational pull of Manchester was strong with all roads leading to it. On my right I could see its distant towers as I passed by Ashton-under-Lyne and later the dark hills of the Peak District to my left. With all its traffic this part of the world isn't exactly beautiful, but it's far less ugly than it had been in my imagination. And the people were friendly. I received many a thumbs-up from drivers and no car came too close for comfort. If anything, they hung back when they probably had enough room to get around. Three or four times I pulled in and stopped to let buses or lorries squeeze past. There was no need to make drivers hate cyclists any more than they already did.

  It was nice to leave the urban chaos of Greater Manchester behind and the instant that Cheshire's welcome sign appeared everything went wonderfully rural.

  Driving habits changed too. Two cars – expensive ones – pulled out sharply in front of me and nodded curtly as if to say thanks for letting them out when, in reality, I hadn't intended anything of the sort. I had to brake quickly or otherwise crash into their doors. In both cases the driver was in his forties and wearing sunglasses in April despite the weak winter rays. But it's not unusual for money to turn people into arseholes. And this was definitely a well-moneyed area. I had a map depicting the regions of Britain and their associated stereotypes. I'd now apparently strayed into the land of the WAG, a useful term since it meant Abbey Clancy could update her CV without recourse to a spellchecker.

  This is the so-called Golden Triangle, formed by Wilmslow, Alderley Edge and Prestbury, and contains the most expensive streets in northern England, which, since you've already heard about Bolton, might not sound so impressive. It's been home to most of the recent squads of Manchester's United and City. The houses of Prestbury's W
ithinlee Road average over £1.5 million, making it the most prestigious street in the north although, overall in the UK, about 4,527th.

  Today had been about escaping traffic rather than visiting the interesting bits of Britain and I opted for a slightly shorter day that put me within easy reach of a genuine highlight tomorrow. Once again, campsites were thin on the ground and so options were minimal in the flat farmland of Cheshire. In charge at The Royal Vale Caravan Site were two lads, who both looked in their late teens and seemed to be running the place for a dare.

  Eventually, after telling me everything I needed to know about the site, I asked what the damage was. The expression on his face suggested I was the first camper he'd ever had to deal with and so pricing was fluid.

  “Er, let's call it twenty quid, shall we?” he said like he was doing me a favour.

  Jesus! I nearly choked. That's the most I'd ever paid on a site anywhere in the world, even when I accidentally camped near Euro Disney. I suppose that's what you can charge if you stick 'Royal' in your name. But I didn't complain – I still had to get my breath back – because I didn't want to cycle miles and miles to another site. I didn't care if Wayne Rooney lived just around the corner, twenty quid was a lot of money to sleep in someone's field.

  In the evening sunshine I set up my tent, enjoying the slightly more sophisticated, albeit expensive, air of Cheshire. The young robber at reception had given me a hand-drawn map of the surrounding villages with the local pub highlighted on it. It was a couple of miles away. I set off on my bag-free bike and very quickly the roads didn't match the map. I came to a junction, saw another cyclist and asked for directions to Lower Peover. He pointed me towards a pub although, as it turned out, not the one on my map.

  The Crown felt a lot more upmarket than last night's living room affair and it had prices to match. Four quid for a lager is surely London prices, not northern England's, but this part of Cheshire wasn't a true reflection of northern England. If you receive fifty grand a week for playing two 90 minute games you'd earn more than the cost of that pint every second you're on the pitch.