Manchester; Sunday, 12 November, 2006

Another day that I’m late out of the hotel, though this time it was caused by my typing up the previous days being late out of the hotel (isn’t it amazing how IT has transformed our lives…)

Off the Piccadilly, again, this time instead of heading north to Lancaster it was time to go south to Chester. The county town of Cheshire, possibly one of wealthiest counties in the UK, it’s the kind of city that the guidebooks can’t help but moan about because it’s besieged by tourists (I’m sure there is an irony in there, but it’s late and I’ve just had two pints!) Chester could be summed up in one concept. Take York and slap it down on the west coast near the Welsh border.

Ancient city walls that stretch, almost unbroken around the city, Check. Roman city with Viking credentials, Check. Castle that has been replaced by a Georgian palace which is now a court, Check. Large river, Ouse in York, Dee in Chester, Check. The only difference is that York is a little to far south to have had its history affected by rampaging Scots. Chester and the Welsh are a different story.

Chester station is conveniently located the best part of a mile from the city centre, thankfully my ticket included free bus transfer. When buying the ticket it explains there is a bus every 6 minutes, they forget to add the condition “Mondays to Saturdays” on Sunday there is only a bus every 30 minutes, not that the 15 minute wait for the next scheduled bus put me off waiting. In the end I would probably have been better off by walking into the city centre.

Arriving in Chester city centre the first thing I saw was the open top bus tour. Chester’s is a little different. Whilst many other cities use old buses (i.e. things that were plying the streets as the number 36 about 25 years ago) Chester is possibly the only city that uses a vehicle that looks like something out of the 1920’s. The vehicle is actually a converted truck made to look like a 1920’s London omnibus. Therefore it’s not open top by conversion, but more from the original design!

The tour takes in much of the city centre, travelling up most of the roads in the centre of the city, in some cases more than once, before crossing the river Dee to the other side of the river through Chester suburbs before returning back over the Dee to the city centre. The tour guide gives a running commentary on many of the buildings and sites that the bus passes.

After taking the bus tour I walked down to the Cathedral and had a look around. After the Romans and then the Vikings, Chester became an almost exclusively monastic city, with seven monasteries in operation at one point. The Cathedral is the remnants of one of these monasteries. After having looked around the cathedral I walked through the grounds past the separate bell tower (built in the 1970’s to stop the bells from destroying the structure of the Cathedrals tower) onto the city walls.

These are one of the main features of Chester and form an almost complete circuit of the city. The line they follow is the same that the Romans laid out to protect their fortress, now nearly 2000 years later with a few minor changes, and several rebuilds they remain pretty much the same and allow stunning views over the city centre, at stages soaring above the main shopping streets and over the canals and railway tracks.

Walking around the walls takes some time, and by the time I got back to the area near the Cathedral it was already starting to get dark, and most things were closing, so I walked to the bus stop, realised I had missed the bus by 5 minutes and walked on to the railway station (for the record it did take longer than the wait for the bus on the way in, which sort of justified the laziness!)

Just over an hour later, I was walking back towards my hotel in Manchester and dinner.