Cold War cracks and a coal face renaissance

Today I visited Burtonwood Services Westbound, via a gap in the fence alongside Charon Way (the IKEA approach road). They are virtually derelict. The service station itself - closed; peeling signs direct customers through a subway under the motorway to access the Eastbound shop and cafe. The motel - closed, boarded up, surrounded by a summer’s green growth, its approach pathways coned off to visitors. The vast swathes of concrete car park - virtually empty, for most users of this area now pass straight through to the petrol station at the far edge, its only extant commercial site. So the grass is beginning to grow through the slabs in the roadway which once bore a great volume of traffic.

Burtonwood Westbound: a victim of geography, perhaps - why stop at a services so close to the end of a motorway, so near a major city, so near your destination (except perhaps to do as I did there once - to take a short nap after feeling sleepy at the wheel)? Burtonwood Westbound is also a victim of infrastructure - once Junction 8 was completed (only a couple of years ago) it made Burtonwood Eastbound accessible from both directions, removing the need to double-up on service facilities.

The creation of Junction 8 made Burtonwood Westbound an unlikely victim of the end of the cold war. For Junction 8 was pencilled in but never built until the USAF decided that any potential crisis had passed and so there would be no future need to utilise the Burtonwood stretch of motorway in its previous role as an aircraft runway. Burtonwood Westbound looks in a sorry state (and smells like an outdoor toilet, which it obviously now is, I guess particularly at night when it’s poorly lit) but perhaps we should be thankful that its decay marks the thawing of US-Soviet relations; we should celebrate the cracks in its pavements as unlikely markers of a new era in international diplomacy.

What will happen to Burtonwood Westbound, I wonder. And I wonder this hopefully after a good afternoon stroll around Sutton Manor Wood with Glen (aka Pippy), who does contract work for Warrington-based TEP Environmental Partnership. Spends the small hours of her mornings standing in ditches counting bat numbers, or recording sightings of rare newts on sites earmarked for industrial or commercial development.

The joys of Sutton Manor Wood are many: plentiful trees of numerous varieties, good paths, easy slopes and rises, old railway lines to follow and waterways to investigate, and the ‘summit’, not very high, but at 270ft above sea level high enough to command good views across the hills of North Wales and West Lancashire, back to the Pennines. Standing there we followed the course of the Mersey from the industrial jumble of Warrington Bank Quay past Fiddler’s Ferry power station and the crags of Helsby. We identified the masts of Winter Hill, the rise of Rivington Pike. And as we stood, the M62 traffic hissed away beneath us at the base of the hill.

As every local knows, Sutton Manor Wood stands on the site of the colliery where many of them and generations of their kinsfolk worked. So the trees stand on old spoil heaps, the summit is where a pithead stood, overlooking an industrial plain which was once peppered with mines. The old colliery entrance gates have been preserved as a dramatic reminder of the tough work which brought this whole settled area into being. The wood has been developed by Pippy’s colleague Francis Hesketh and it’s becoming a pleasant, living arena for varieties of flaura, fauna and human beings. And next year it will begin to emerge in the national consciousness as it has been selected as one of the sites in Channel 4's Big Art Project. The consequence of this will be the creation of an artwork potentially as large and certainly as iconic as Antony Gormley's celebrated Angel of the North.

The Angel and the hill on which it stands have established a deep connection with the nearby A1 and those who pass by on it. The M62 passes closely by the foot of the hill on which the completed Sutton artwork will stand, meaning that a sculpture there is certain to become another of the transPennine motorway's great sights, something to catch the breath on the way in or out of Merseyside.

Comments

[Phil Smith]

John,
now I'll never be able to see a motorway without thinking of it as a cold war runway
best wishes,
Phil

[Phil Smith]

John,
now I'll never be able to see a motorway without thinking of it as a cold war runway
best wishes,
Phil