Where tourists seldom tread, part 3: five towns with hidden histories

This trail through our industrial, ghostly past includes a haunted motorway and old dye works repurposed as cute cottages
Part one | Part two

Heritage tourism should be about crisis and decay as well as conservation. As Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley write in Edgelands, their psycho-geographical field guide, “England … offers the world’s most mature post-industrial terrain.”

We were first to turn the engines on, and the lights out. It’s a pity we don’t make more out of our working-class ghost past. In many countries, regions are packaged to curious visitors through trails typically themed around wine or a foodstuff or a path taken by invading forces or someone notable. Where is the UK’s textile trail, its cider-making highway, its salt road and its coal circuit? The towns below, scintillating on their own terms, also serve as access points to the hidden histories of contemporary Britain.