Waterside-Turnpike
 |
left - Turnpike, Leigh right - Waterside Arts, Sale |
cultural venues by public transport
words & photography by
Tom Taylor
I’m standing outside the Waterside arts centre in Sale with the Bridgewater canal behind me. It’s a modern building attached to Sale town hall, home to the Robert Bolt Theatre and the quaint Lauriston Gallery. Trips to the Waterside were a fairly regular feature of my childhood, usually to see shows at the theatre or for the occasional birthday party.
It’s only a 20 minute walk from the house where I grew up and the tickets were usually relatively cheap, at least in comparison to city centre venues. I’m lucky that there was space and funding dedicated to a cultural venue in my town. Other towns across Greater Manchester are not as fortunate and, for many, transportation costs must always be factored in when accessing arts or culture.
The spider-web of Metrolink stops only stretches so far and ticket prices are often prohibitively expensive. Last March, Andy Burnham announced that buses would be brought back into public control in what he called “the biggest shake up to Greater Manchester’s transport network in more than thirty years”. In his speech after being re-elected mayor, Burnham talked about a London-style transport system, with integrated ticketing across buses, trains and trams.
It remains to be seen just how “London-style” navigation around the city will become, with some questioning if we will ever see comparable £1.50 fares across the city region. As the Metrolink system grows and buses improve, I hope that towns and villages in Greater Manchester will feel more connected to each other. Yet, I know there is a version of the next five years where the city centre grows ever more dominating as a cultural focus point.
I want to make a journey from the Waterside to another gallery called The Turnpike which is in Leigh. Two creative spaces in satellite towns – one I know well and the other I have often wanted to visit.
Guided by my phone, I jump on the nearby met and head, rather predictably, into the city centre. I found the bus stop I need to catch the V1 Vantage to Leigh outside Manchester Art Gallery. I wait there with an elderly man who intently watches passers-by use a nearby bin, almost daring them to drop some litter so he can scold them.
 |
| guided busway |
Buses come and go and when the V1 finally arrives, the man is still there, watching. I like to think he’s not waiting for a bus at all. The seats are faux leather and there are usb ports on the back of each seat. It’s maybe a quarter full and I’m sat upstairs.
We leave Manchester and enter into Salford where there is a lot of construction work taking place. I see a row of scooters lined up on the pavement near Salford University. Someone is eating a seemingly bottomless bag of crisps, so I stick my headphones on. We pass through Worsley and Walkden into Ellenbrook and onto the guided busway.
The busway opened in April 2016 at a total cost of £122m and facing much local opposition because some thought it would increase congestion. One Salford councillor called it the ‘Misguided Busway’. It’s really quite something to those unfamiliar with guided busways – imagine a railway line but concrete strips instead of the rails.
I think it’s pretty neat but that probably says more about me than it does the busway. Anyhow, it takes me into Leigh town centre and then it’s a short walk to The Turnpike. It’s closed due to the pandemic, but I spent some time admiring the architecture and snapping a few photographs.
I’m not sure what I set out to prove on my journey from the Waterside to the Turnpike. But I hope that as Greater Manchester stumbles awkwardly forward in an endless pursuit for growth, transport connections between our towns improves. In five years’ time, maybe it will cost less than a tenner for me to spend the day in Leigh.
article originally published in STAT - ISSUE 05
Tom Taylor is a journalist, photographer and founder of Salt Magazine.