Забытый город «Афики Севера»: история Уоррингтона, ставшего академическим центром и логистическим хабом

Overlooked town that was 'Athens of the North' with deserted paths and rundown high street The Cheshire town played a key part in the English Civil War and became a hub for academia in the North West during the 18th century, earning it the nickname the Athens of the North An overlooked Cheshire town with a struggling high street was once the academic centre of the North. In his new book, Where Tourists Seldom Tread, Lancashire lad Christopher Moss set about looking around some of the country's destinations least likely to inspire tourists, to better know the country and unearth some buried gems along the way. "None of the towns in this book has an overtourism problem. But they are all worthy of visitors; they are all intriguing, complex, multi-faceted," Chris explains. The book begins in a town close to where he grew up. "I've come to visit a familiar town and take a circular walk along the banks of the River Mersey and the Manchester Shipping Canal, great watercourses widely ignored - certainly by travel writers and tourist boards - and, from the evidence of the deserted footpaths, by Warringtonians," he writes. Warrington has had a recent-ish facelift, having been designated a New Town in 1968. Large numbers of houses were built to the north and west of the town, making it the largest conurbation in Cheshire, twice the size of Chester. Despite its size, it's a place most people beyond the county's bounds will know little about. Rugby league followers may know of the hugely successful Warrington Wolves, the only British club to have played every season in the top flight. Military enthusiasts may know of RAF Burtonwood, the largest US Army Air Force base outside the United States during World War II, where the likes of Bob Hope and Humphrey Bogart visited to entertain the troops. Furniture fans will, of course, know that Warrington welcomed the UK's first ever IKEA, way back in October 1987. But there is a certain understatedness that has left Warrington firmly off the tourist trail. "Warrington's inner-edges are cookie-cutter Anglo-American: roads, roundabouts, strip malls, fast-food outlets, big boxes, big car parks filled with big cars. There's a new bus station that's so underwhelming it's almost invisible," Chris writes. Venturing further into the centre, Chris' early exploration uncovers little to write home about. "How many shuttered charity or chain stores can we walk past without getting dispondent?" he asks. "Mid-sized town shopping centres are, the standard narrative runs, all the same, all full of empty units. But Tolstoy's claim about unhappy families works for retail spaces too; sadness and emptiness vary from town to town." While the "faux market hall" that serves as Warrington's food hall may suggest the town is struggling to grasp what it should be in the here and now, it's a place with a lot of history. This is most evident in the Oliver Cromwell statue, presented to the town in 1899 despite considerable opposition from the local Irish community. During the Civil War, the Lord Protector ordered his forces to march on Warrington, where the 7th Earl of Derby had stationed royalist troops. In a bid to stall Cromwell, Derby ordered the town to be set on fire. Today, Cromwell stands in front of Warrington Academy, "an almost elegant, vaguely Georgian building." Back in the mid-18th century, local minister John Seddon opened its doors in a bid to train ministers of Nonconformist chapels, at odds with Oxford and Cambridge's refusal to admit anyone but Anglicans. Foreign languages, English literature, and chemistry were taught at the academy, including by Joseph Priestley, the man who discovered oxygen and invented fizzy water. "The academy lasted only until 1783, but it had a significant impact on intellectual life in the North-West. It was refounded and recloated in 1786 as the Manchester Academy, its staff subsequently traveling to York, back to Manchester, and down to London, before the institution finally became Manchester College, Oxford," Chris writes. The presence of the academy and work its members did was enough to earn Warrington the nickname "the Athens of the North". "Warrington might have become a northern Oxford, an Edinburgh on the Mersey," Chris opines. In more recent years, Warrington has found itself not at the centre of British academia, but its transport network. Roman-roads criss-crossed the town, hundreds of years before the Manchester Ship Canal and the M6 came through. By some measures, Warrington is the Los Angeles of Lancashire, thanks to a network of motorways as densely packed as the car-loving Californian city. As with all of the places he visits, Chris does not sugarcoat his view of Warrington. But he is also steadfast in his commitment to draw out what is good and often overlooked in a place. "I think Warrington is seen as boring by most people, at best. The west Lancashire plain is flat and here it has been mostly paved over. There is neither grinding poverty nor auspicious wealth. Manchester and Liverpool are almost exactly twenty miles to the east and west, respectively. They drain the town’s workforce, ingest its disposable income, ignore it equally. But Warrington is a portal between the Cheshire fields and one of the most built-up areas in Europe, and between the South and the North; the fast train to London doesn’t stop after Bank Quay. Warrington has always been halfway to elsewhere, a logistics hub long before everywhere else became logistics hubs. Bypasses abound. I’ve sometimes wondered if it was a sense of logistical daydream," he writes. Where Tourists Seldom Tread is available in hardback for £19 and ebook for £12.99 on bookshop.org.