In recent years, the ticket office at Holmes Chapel station in Cheshire has become something of a shrine to the village’s most famous former resident.
A lifesize cardboard cutout of the music megastar Harry Styles stands at one side of the small building, while at the other, fans crowd round to sign a guestbook filled with messages to the star.
Since Styles’s global tour last year, the village has become a mecca for his fans – known as “Harries” – so much so that from this week, Holmes Chapel Partnership is running official guided tours.
Setting off from the station, the tours – which last about three hours and cost £20 a ticket – take in Mandeville’s bakery, where Styles once worked part-time and where fans can pose with another giant picture of the singer.
The last stop is Twemlow Viaduct, where the star reputedly had his first kiss, and later returned to write his name on the bricks, caught on film in the One Direction documentary This Is Us.
Phoebe Hodges, 18, and her friend Mia Tesolin, 18, from Canberra, Australia, have joined one of the first tours. They have been travelling around Europe for the past two-and-a-half months and on their way from London to Scotland they have stopped off at their only other English destination – Holmes Chapel.
“Phoebe is a huge Harry fan,” Tesolin said. “We came yesterday, we went to his house.” They found out about the tour in the village, and managed to bag a couple of spots.
“We were very happy,” Hodges added. “I went to his Sydney night last year, it was pretty amazing.”
Sadie Huxley, 15, from Stoke-On-Trent is also walking in Styles’s footsteps – her dad dropped her off at Holmes Chapel station this morning.
“I’ve been a fan of him for a long time now, since I was a little girl,” she said of the star. “I’m quite excited.”
She saw him in Coventry last year and constantly re-watches the videos on her phone, saying “it’s become a daily routine for me”.
Hazel Sutcliffe, 73, the vice-chair of Holmes Chapel Partnership, said that last year they designed a free map of the village to hand out to the ever-growing numbers of Harries – and 5,000 were picked up. However, fans were accessing the viaduct from a dangerous main road, and so the tours were set up with safety in mind – taking Harries through the fields that Styles would have walked through himself.
Sutcliffe first became aware of Styles when he appeared on the X-Factor talent show. “I remember thinking ‘oh goodness, I hope he does well’,” she said.
“I’ve been a customer at Mandeville’s pretty much all my life,” she added, “but I didn’t know he was going to be a global phenomenon, so I didn’t take much notice [of him]. I was just concentrating on my bread and cakes and boiled ham.”
The interest in Holmes Chapel is “having a positive impact for the local businesses”, she said. Many are offering discounts to fans on the Styles tours.
And in quiet periods – such as the days between Christmas and New Year – tourism supports local trade. “I’ve spoken to retailers who said the only people they had coming in were Harries,” Peter Whiers, 67, chair of Holmes Chapel Partnership, added.
Some residents had complained about fans scrawling names and messages to Styles in graffiti on the viaduct. On the tours, fans are given slate hearts to write messages on and leave instead.
“What we’d really love is to sneak [Harry] down here and give him a heart and let him write a message,” Whiers said.
The partnership received more than 150 applications for the job of tour guide during a recruitment drive in April, with at least 30 of those from overseas including by people from Minsk, Buenos Aires and California.
In the end 11 part-time guides were recruited, mostly from the local area. The youngest is 16-year-old Ben McCormick, who attended the same school as Styles.
He said: “I’ve been a fan since I was six years old, when I started primary school. Since I’m local I thought it would be a really good experience. It’s created a really good mood around the village that everyone can get involved with.
Last year, the ticket office at Holmes Chapel station was threatened with closure, but it was saved – to the relief not only of older passengers buying paper tickets, but also the legion of Styles fans from Japan, Ecuador, Canada and beyond, who have passed through its doors.
The station manager, Graham Blake, 62, has been in the job for 25 years. He passes the books full of messages on to Styles via his dad, Des.
Blake remembers Styles taking the train to London every week when he was on X-Factor. “It’s a little village,” he said. “Everybody knows everybody.”
Tickets for the tours went on sale on Thursday; by Friday about 5% of them had gone. With the station marking the start of the tour, Blake’s guestbooks are likely to get even fuller.
“People ask me if he’ll read the messages. I say of course, he will.”
