a secret, and I don't blame them. It's wonderful, and once again I thought how lucky I was to live here.

Southport hides from the coast, so it comes as a bit of a surprise to find it appearing in front of you. There was an interesting bit of sculpture, blowing in the wind, which on closer examination turns out to be a marker for the end of the Trans-Pennine Cycle Route. It was a bit of a thrill, being at the end of the route. On the other side of the country, near Hull, there's another of these markers; I imagined the excitement of seeing both of them at opposite ends of a journey.

Take the road inland, past the Moroccan fantasy of the Casablanca club and the closedup Pleasureland, and you come to a Morrison's supermarket. When the CLC railway line closed in the Fifties, they turned the old station building into a bus terminus, pulling up the platforms but leaving the rest of the building intact. It was all in a bit of a state though, and Morrison's turned up and bought the land for one of their faux-Victorian supermarkets.

On the plus side, they saved the frontage of the old Southport Lord Street station, and for a while it was an office development. Now it's empty, and only gets use as a cut-through to the supermarket.

There's still an impressive clock tower on the street, though of course the clock doesn't work. A board promises a luxury hotel development "to be completed in 2008"; in