Bolton
What to see
You’ll find accounts of Bolton’s tourist attractions plus shopping, eating out etc at Visit Bolton.
Specific local attractions include:
● Bolton Aquarium
● Bolton Heritage Trails
● Bolton Museum
● Bolton Steam Museum
● Hall i’ th’ Wood
● Shree Swaminarayan Sidhant Sajivan Mandal
● Smithills Hall
Towns of Two Halves extracts:
● “The bet was simple: who could abide his leg in boiling water the longest, the Swan regular or the man from Rochdale? In the picture the Bolton man is calmly smoking a pipe. He looks a little like George Washington in Howard Chandler Christy’s Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, except that his right leg is in a bucket up to mid-calf level.”
● “Most teams had a hard man in those days: Roy Hartle, the right-back, was Bolton’s. Sure enough, his nickname was Chopper. He died only a couple of years ago at the age of 83. I wonder if many left-wingers sent flowers?”
● “Bolton Aquarium concentrates on freshwater tropical fish. The most decorative tank, for my money, contained Law’s Malawi Cichlid in its blue-and-black Inter Milan stripes and the Neon Yellow Malawi Cichlid; but the most exotic were Henle’s Spotted River Rays, which lay around on their sandy bed like so many carelessly discarded bonnets, occasionally ruffled as if by a breeze.”
These are taken from the 2019-updated Bolton chapter of Towns of Two Halves, published in 2018. To buy a copy, email info@townsof2halves.co.uk.