Bury
No reason to expel Bury from Towns of Two Halves. It’s still there, a short bus ride from Rochdale or Bolton. If you have business in that neck of the woods and an interest in railway heritage, transport, sculpture, the Fusiliers or an award-winning market, Bury’s where you need to be.
What to see
You’ll find accounts of Bury’s tourist appeal below or in the Towns of Two Halves book (and of 91 other places: order it now for £8 from info@townsof2halves.co.uk). For additional information plus shopping, eating out etc there’s Visit Bury.
Links to Bury places of interest include:
Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre
Bury Market
Bury Transport Museum
East Lancs Railway
Fusilier Museum
Irwell Sculpture Trail
The Bury chapter in full
“Bury,” I was planning to assert boldly, “is the South Kensington of north Manchester.” But the association of ‘south’ and ‘north’ is confusing and clumsy. Besides, the comparison is unjust and should perhaps be the other way round: the number of museums, galleries and heritage sites per square kilometre in Bury may be higher than anywhere else in the country, South Kensington included.
The immediate prospect from the Metrolink station isn’t promising unless you happen to be looking for a bus-stop. Still, if you’ve got that far you’ve already learnt a valuable lesson about Greater Manchester’s tram network. If you feared there would be a stop every 100 metres, and more delays at contrary traffic lights and roundabouts, you now know better. Beyond Manchester Victoria it is effectively a suburban commuter railway, and the trams swish along briskly between stations. Confirmation that they are proper railway stations is found at Bury Transport Museum, where the old London Midland Scottish crimson lake station nameplates decorate a wall.
Transport is a dominant theme in Bury. The Transport Museum is free and run largely by volunteers who give it a friendly, personal touch. It has everything from early bicycles to a collection of buses, with advanced technology in a series of interactive displays.
The layout is simple: a central display area with vehicles, engines, rolling stock etc, flanked by two ‘platforms’ with smaller displays, models and a reconstruction of a goods manager’s office.
For me, the colours were the most evocative aspect of the museum: the crimson lake of the LMS livery, the two-tone Yelloway coach and the cowslip yellow of the old Manchester bus-stop signs, which told you which side to queue. Would the bus have hurtled past if the queue formed on the wrong side? Or, worse yet, no queue formed? Who’d want to risk it?
The coach, incidentally, contains the Yelloway Motorcoach Museum, which may be the cutest such attraction in the UK. Another highlight is the working model of the Bury section of the East Lancashire Railway as it was in the 1940s – the model itself is almost 30 years old, and age lends it a certain credibility.
The East Lancs Railway itself is just across the road, at Bury Bolton Street station. The line runs 12 miles from Heywood in the east to Rawtenstall at the northern terminus. Steam engines and diesels pull multiple units or corridor carriages through the industrial past. The railway operates a regular timetable throughout the year: weekends through the winter, and Wednesday to Sunday (plus Bank Holiday Mondays) from April to September.
The other focus of museums in Bury is Moss Street, where the Fusilier Museum and the Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre are across the road from each other.
The Fusilier Museum houses the collections of the XX Lancashire Fusiliers and the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. There are more than 300 years of military history here, but the museum is as much about individuals, and not always soldiers – one display celebrates the devotion of a wounded officer’s wife. The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers marked its 50th anniversary in 2018.
This is Bury’s Cultural Quarter. When did ordinary English towns begin to have quarters? The answer may be Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, said to date back 200 years. London’s South Bank is now referred to as a Cultural Quarter by estate agents, which looks like a case of gilding the lily. But Sheffield takes the biscuit, with five quarters and six more districts that might be mistaken for quarters. A Cultural Eleventh doesn’t sound quite so trendy and French; in fact it sounds like the last kid to be picked in a playground football match.
The Art Museum & Sculpture Centre is a worthy focus in the Cultural Quarter. It has some great British artists of the past: Turner’s Calais Sands at Low Tide, Constable’s Hampstead Heath, two Epsteins including a bust of George Bernard Shaw; and some spectacular modern pieces. In May 2018 the ground floor was occupied by a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Irwell Sculpture Trail, produced by a group called Brass Art. A lamp circled an assemblage of moulded figures around a 19th century pagoda in bone and ivory, casting mesmeric shadows on to the walls.
In the museum section of the building, a class of primary school children was listening to a lively presentation on life in Bury during the war. In the next room, recruitment posters asked especially for men with a trade. A general appeal for recruits to the artillery promised training “at Lytham St Annes, where everything possible will be arranged for their comfort”. It sounded like the senator’s line in The Outlaw Josey Wales: “They were decently treated, they were decently fed and then they were decently shot.”
Other things to see in Bury:
* The statue of Robert Peel, born in Bury, twice Prime Minister and regarded as the founder of the Conservative Party. According to one story, the statue once adorned public conveniences and the great man’s hand gesture indicated the men’s entrance.
* The only visible remains of Bury Castle are foundations in Castle Square, in front of the Castle Barracks and Armoury.
* Bury Market regularly wins awards. It was the National Association of British Market Authorities’ Market of the Year in 2006 and has picked up more national and regional awards since then.
Bury 0 Stoke City 2
Gigg Lane, 26 December 1961