We are a local community action group who look after our station.

Access for All – our primary campaign is to get National Rail and Northern Rail to install step-free access for the station.

Work Parties – the next Work Party will be on Saturday 22nd September 2018. All welcome. For more details click here.

JOIN US AT FoHS

We are very proud to have been the first “Friends of a Station” group in the whole of the UK, and we are still going strong. When we were founded in 1996, the outlook for the station seemed bleak; we believe that our efforts have turned that situation round completely, and we are consistently one of the Best Kept Stations in the area.

Working in cooperation with National Rail, with Northern Rail and with the local community and business, our primary aims are:

To make changes for the better at the station where we can (the many “Handforth” rail sign-posts, “Art In A Box”, annual Christmas Lights, keeping the station tidy, and so on).
To campaign and lobby the relevant authorities for improved access to the station, and for other areas where we can’t make the change ourselves.
To represent the users of the station.

Several of the community initiatives at this station were developed after visiting European and Scandinavian Railways on a “Churchill Travelling Fellowship”. This is a travel grant from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust – click here for more information.

As you can read elsewhere on this website, the station has seen a remarkable turnaround in fortunes over the past 22 years. This is due primarily to how well FoHS works in partnership with the local community, with businesses and with the rail industry.

JOIN US AT FoHS

Handforth Rocks !

September 13, 2018 by - hugh

The Handforth #LibraryRocks Event was a Great Success

In Partnership with the Friends of Handforth, the Library held a Handforth Rocks event in mid August, when local children came in their droves to decorate their own pebble. (This pebble-decorating is a craze taking off up and down the country.) The fifty pebbles collected on Criccieth beach by library members were in short supply for the children keen to participate in this event. One kind parent hurried home and stripped her rockery of more pebbles, to make sure that no child was disappointed !

Most children opted for leaving their decorated pebbles as entries into Handforth Station’s Rock Art competition. They were displayed for 3 weeks at Handforth Train Station’s Art Box Stop (located to the left of the ticket office). The Friends of Handforth Station and Handforth Library staff (considering also all the social media reviews on the #LibraryRocks hashtag) selected a stand-out rock as the winner (see below).

Northern Rail donated two family explorer weekend passes as prizes. All participants were entered into a free prize draw and one lucky winner was selected at random and received their prize shortly after the event. The other pass went to the art winner (see below). The rocks were also on display at Handforth library, after which some participants collected their own rock. Any rocks not collected were spread on local walks for children to seek out.

The rocks were fascinating to look at, and there was strong evidence of the influence of Bees and Fruits.

And the winner was … Jamie Abernethy (7) from Handforth, who is pictured below displaying his J-rock (seemingly inspired by Australian Aboriginal Art).


Two girls showing their skills	Jamie Abernethy displaying his winning rock	A bunch of boyz getting down to work in the library

Some of the resulting rocks, on display at Handforth station