From the archive
21 Aug 2026
Every Saturday, Peter Dickinson drives the best part of a two-hundred-mile round trip from Worcestershire to a half-timbered station above the River Dee in North Wales, where he volunteers as station master. The building he unlocks dates from 1865, was designed to match the Chainbridge Hotel across the water, and is now Grade II listed. The old first-class waiting room serves tea. The booking office and general waiting room are being taken back, piece by piece, to their Great Western Railway appearance of a century ago.
Berwyn Station is the kind of place the railway age left behind. The line closed in the 1960s, and volunteers spent nearly fifty years reopening a ten-mile section between Llangollen and Corwen, with heritage steam and diesel trains returning to Berwyn in the mid-1980s. Some of Peter's team were there for the original tracklaying, four decades back. He describes himself as the present custodian, and says the station belongs to the community rather than to him.
This summer the station joined Cool Off in Culture, a network of almost four hundred venues offering respite in extreme heat. Berwyn has no air conditioning and, Peter argues, should never have any: fitting modern cooling units into a Victorian building would betray the restoration. It does not need them. On its viaduct, with the river and canal alongside and trees all around, a breeze moves through even when the valley is stifling, and the old building stays naturally cool.
The station keeps finding new reasons for people to come. A shuttle called the Berwyn Explorer, launched in February 2026, runs between Llangollen and the station and will return next year; in 2028 a small four-wheeled German railbus from the 1950s will take over the service. Walkers, cyclists and canoeists already use Berwyn as a gateway to the Dee Valley. Now, when the heat closes in, so can anyone who simply needs to sit somewhere cool with a cup of tea.
An old, unmodernised building is often the coolest room in a heatwave: its position, shade and moving air do the work without a compressor. If you run such a place, register it with a cool-spaces network and open the doors on hot days - the cost is an afternoon and a kettle.
Julie's Bicycle · Read the source