12-13th February 2020
Later today you’ll get tourist Northwich and tourist Runcorn, but first here’s tourist Chester.
Yes, it’s my holiday snaps. I know you love them.
The Limes B & B comes highly recommended at retiredmartin Towers.
Chatty staff, clean rooms, hot shower, good WiFi, free sweets, ten minutes walk to the station and Brook St.
Chester, as you’ll know, is famed for its violent non-league battles with Wrexham FC, which once consumed the entire policing budget of West Cheshire Police in a single lunchtime. I’ve no idea what the missing words are below.
Talking of skirmishes, I upset a few locals with my unfair comparison of Chester’s walls with York.
In truth I was only attempting to reignite the Cheshire-Yorkshire war of 1332.
Chester suddenly made sense this week in a way it hasn’t always done.
Brook Street, just to the north of town, is a little marvel, with Polish dumplings, vinyl LPs, Roman tiling,
the wondrous Moss Coffee,
and a decent pub or two.
I resisted the hipster drinking vessels in the tat shop.
There’s only two rules for visiting;
a) Avoid race days (i.e. all of May thru September)
b) Visit the same day as me as the blue skies help.
Loads of pubs, as I might find out if I join the Old Codgers on their Day Out on Friday 24th April.
The nice lady in the Big Hand had tipped me off about Chester Market, a surprising down-to-earth place with a cheese stall run by a City fan (only 8 of us left after Friday, of course), a miniature Chester,
a bargain Thai café,
and That Beer Place, where I had a lovely if inadvisable Pomona before catching the train to LiVARpool that night.
No doubt the Two Mudges will nip in here for a quick “Comfy in Nautica” come April; you’ll know how crafty they are.
Then they can walk it off by jogging round the walls to the doughnut hut under the clock.
I did.
retiredmartin 
I’ve done a city walls poll on Twitter 😉
For my money, it’s Chester, as the walls are more complete and have better views.
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Berwick 😉😉😉
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Well I work in the shadow of the York walls, and have run the Chester Round the Walls Race about a dozen times, so I weighed things up and came to the same conclusion as Mudgie. Though York’s are longer and have quieter sections which are fairly pleasant. It was a few years back but the walls in Derry stick out in my mind for their width. Can’t forget Conwy either.
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Derry for me. Just add a couple of Sam Smiths pubs.
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It’s a long time since I visited either city, so can’t really say one way or the other. 🙂
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Don’t know how you resisted the Grapefruit and Wormwood offering.
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“ten minutes walk to the station” but the wrong side for all the proper pubs.
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Ten minutes matters.
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I hope you haven’t been to Runcorn and not told me Martin, as the least popular person on beer twitter I am going to start feeling quite rejected
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Second least popular person, surely, after the person who said tasters were a vile affectation.
Yes, Kirsty, I waited for you to go to work and then slinked into town. I have good things to report next up.
NB As someone once told me, you should never meet your heroes. Sound advice, I should never have arranged that pint with BRAPA back in 2016.
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What ARE those things in my long black.
Looks like something Dr. Pimplepopper might be able to diagnose !
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I thought Aliens.
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