Graceland, the Cavern Club and … the Twemlow Viaduct. The Grade II-listed structure, built in 1841 to carry the new Manchester-Crewe railway line, seems an unlikely end to a new music heritage tour.
But Harry’s Home Village Tour is an unlikely tourist attraction in an unlikely location. The Cheshire village of Holmes Chapel is where the former One Direction singer, Harry Styles, attended school before finding fame on TV programme The X Factor in 2010. It was besieged by some 5,000 Harries (the name for his obsessive fans) last summer after fans started sharing images of the village on social media. Local community group, the Holmes Chapel Partnership, saw an opportunity. It has now recruited 11 tourist guides from more 150 global applications to lead groups around Harry’s teenage stomping ground.
I’d come to the east Cheshire village, near Crewe, Macclesfield and the Jodrell Bank Observatory, for a preview of the tour that launches on Saturday. For Harries, this is more of a pilgrimage than a tour. For parents, paying £20pp and often tagging along behind teenage pilgrims, it’s more of a long walk with time hanging around village shops, traipsing through a suburban housing estate and a muddy yomp through fields, avoiding stampeding cows en route.
There are just six stops, however the non-accessible route still takes around three hours to complete with no toilet, nor refreshment breaks, along the way. The design is somewhat confusing but based around a traffic-free approach to the conclusion, the Twemlow Viaduct, where the “Watermelon Sugar” singer reputedly had his first kiss.
The age range of the newly recruited tourist guides spans teenagers to a retired former primary school teacher. One, who is currently studying at Manchester Metropolitan University, hails from New Jersey. Some are local people with memories of the young Harry, who lived in Holmes Chapel during his formative teenage years, until finding fame on X Factor aged just 16.
Others are superfans keen to share their enthusiasm for his oeuvre, even if they are a little sketchy on the history of the village, with its 15th-century church and clutch of Georgian properties built by the local landowner, Thomas Bayley Hall. The Old Red Lion pub at the heart of the village served as a coaching inn on the turnpike road to London before the coming of the railway in 1842.
The star turn, it transpires, is also the youngest guide: 16-year-old Ben McCormick, who plans to study media at a local sixth-form college this autumn. He has clearly done his homework and his easy manner, despite the dayglo-pink tabard he was sporting, engaged the crowd.
Some guides seemed less comfortable with questions beyond the One Direction canon. “Harry has always been part of my life growing up in Holmes Chapel,” said Ben with a winning smile. “I’ve also come to understand the village in a new way by delving into its wider story.”
We started at Holmes Chapel train station, chatting with stationmaster Graham Blake, who collects scrapbooks of messages from visiting fans to pass onto Harry’s father (neither of his parents now live in the village but remain in Cheshire). From there, we walked into the village to collect tour maps and write messages on slate hearts at a local hardware store, then onto the village bakery, W Mandeville, where a giant cut out of a fresh-faced Harry, a former Saturday boy, accompanies the bustling trade in flowery baps.
The trail then leads into open countryside, crossing the River Dane via the Hermitage Bridge, for the final stretch to what has become known as Harry’s Wall (the tour doesn’t visit his former family home, not his old school, sticking to more rural paths).
When we finally arrived at the Twemlow Viaduct, which had a starring role in the 2013 One Direction documentary This Is Us, it looks like a cross between the sometimes graffiti-covered grave of Jim Morrison in Paris’s Pére-Lachaise cemetery and an alcohol-free teenage festival. The messages range from “My mum loves Harry” to the more philosophical, “You bring me home”.
While the official tour prioritises a safer route to Harry’s shrine, some people are clearly still taking the short cut, albeit one using a busy main road. Among them are 21-year-old Aimee and her 13-year-old sister, Lily Mae. “We’ve always wanted to come here,” said Aimee, whose dad had driven them from Birmingham that morning. “We saw the community of fans drawn to this place and wanted to feel part of it.”
After visitors have placed slate messages to Harry at the foot of the viaduct – the idea being to stop future visitors sprawling graffiti across the industrial-heritage monument – some sit meditatively before the shrine.
After three hours, I was desperate for a coffee and a sausage butty at the Village Kitchen, one of the local businesses offering fan deals back in the village, but first I fell into conversation with 52-year-old superfan Andrea McGillivray. She lives locally and was one of the first visitors to test drive the new tour, having sat in the ITV studio audience the evening Harry first auditioned. “We’re happy to share Harry and his message of kindness with the world,” she said, clutching a slate-heart message to her idol and sporting a “I Hiked to Harry’s Wall” sweatshirt from the new merch range.
Unlike the slick tourism industry built up around Elvis and The Beatles, the Harry’s Home tour still feels something of a work in progress — but Holmes Chapel will never again be as it was.
For Andrea, she felt closer to her idol wandering between the semi-circular arches built by Victorian railway engineers. “I’ve asked for the One Direction song, “Story of my Life”, to be played at my funeral,” she told me.
“My boyfriend,” she added, “is very understanding.”
Tours run Saturday mornings from 8 June and weekdays from July-September; tickets £20pp, hcpartnership.org.uk; Trains from Manchester Piccadilly take around 40 minutes, or 10 minutes from Crewe. visitcheshire.com.