Halton is an artificial coupling, created in 1974, of two English County Boroughs – Widnes and Runcorn. These two towns, linked by three bridges, are on opposite banks of the River Mersey between Liverpool and Warrington. The next few pages will show some views from both towns, but mainly from the Widnes side of the river.
On a previous page of my photobook, I posted images of the area in and around Hale village, which is adjacent to Widnes on its Liverpool side. I took the shot above early one frosty morning in March 2016 from Pickerings Pasture – a sort of mini-country park in Halton but sits along a well-surfaced path between Widnes and Hale.
You can see from my images that both side of the riverbank are home to industrial concerns.
On that March morning, I parked my car at Pickerings Pasture and did a there-and-back walk as far as I could towards Spike Island. From there, I would be able to see where construction had begun on the new Mersey Gateway. At the viewpoints above though, I was probably only about halfway towards the first of two bridges I would first need to pass beneath.
In January 2022, I returned to Pickerings Pasture, later on a brighter morning, to take some more photographs. The image above looks back towards the Pickerings Pasture car park from a point further along the path in a different direction – towards Hale.
I’ve mentioned the bridges a couple of times already but, in the shot above, you see the first picture of them, and I took this and the one below from the Pickerings Pasture side.
What you see in the two shots above are, firstly, the railway bridge, then parallel to it, on its far side is the Silver Jubilee Bridge which will be the subject of a future post. In the background, on the left of the photo, you may be able to make out two of the ‘sails’ of the Mersey Gateway.
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