Harry Styles fans from all over the world are heading in one direction – to pound the streets of Holmes Chapel looking for sites associated with the world-famous singer.
But the village has traffic problems, with repeated calls for measures to make the roads safer – and now Holmes Chapel Partnership has produced a special walking map for Harry Styles fans, known as Harries.
The fan-map is included in a new range of maps of walks and cycle routes around the village for both enjoyment and to help get people fit, and shows safe walking routes to Twemlow viaduct, where the singer reportedly had his first kiss, his former home, and his favourite Chinese restaurant where he took Taylor Swift.
The global superstar, who spent his formative years in the village, attending Hermitage Primary and Holmes Chapel High schools, is currently on a UK tour and fans are flying in from all over the world to see him. They are also taking the chance to visit the village he lived in, with hundreds turning up via train to see the Home of Harry.
The map suggests getting to Holmes Chapel by train and starting the route at the station and heading along Station Road and Sandiford Road, heading for Hermitage Lane, crossing over Hermitage bridge and turning right onto a footpath, which follows the river Dane to the viaduct and Harry’s Wall – where Mr Styles scrawled his named during the This is Us biopic.
Fans are then encouraged to retrace their footsteps back along the river Dane and over Hermitage bridge, along Hermitage Lane and Hermitage Drive to join up with Macclesfield Road near to Mandeville’s Bakery, where young Harry had a part-time job.
Inside the shop there is a life-sized placard of Mr Styles, pictured when he visited during his X-Factor days. Fans can buy bags for life, tea towels and wooden spoons as keepsakes. They can also buy the same style of loaf he is pictured with.
From Mandeville’s it’s off to Fortune City Chinese restaurant on London Road which Mr Styles remembers smelling from his nearby bedroom window and he has said in interviews that it was his favourite Chinese. He was pictured there with Taylor Swift in 2012.
Mr Styles, now 28, shot to fame aged 16 on The X Factor TV talent show when he was still a schoolboy, with a part-time job in the bakery. He entered individually but was soon teamed up with three other hopefuls and the rest, as they say … saw them go in only one direction.
