Singer Harry Styles' fans head in one direction: to star's home village
The quiet English village where Harry Styles grew up has become a year-round pilgrimage site for fans tracing the pop star’s humble beginnings.
Harry Styles' home village, Holmes Chapel, has become a a pilgrimage site for fans hoping to peek into the singer's early life. (Photo: AFP/Oli Scarff)
Boasting a centuries-old church, quaint pubs and rolling green countryside, Holmes Chapel looks like many other English villages.
But having played a formative part in English pop star Harry Styles' rise to global superstardom, nothing can be as it was for the village near Manchester, in northwest England.
Fans from around the world – dubbed Harries – flock there year-round to pay homage at several sites linked to the Watermelon Sugar singer.
With the ex-One Direction releasing his new album and staging a Manchester concert on Friday (Mar 6), recent weeks have been extra busy.
"I've been looking forward to this day for too long!" Spanish student Elena Garcia, 21, told AFP as she visited this week with two friends.
Like other Styles pilgrims before them, they stopped by the village train station where the ticket office has become a shrine of sorts, as well as the bakery where he once worked.
And, of course, they made their way to a spectacular viaduct where Harries have for years been leaving messages – after Styles wrote his own name there in the 2013 One Direction biopic, This Is Us.
The 32-year-old pop sensation is also famously said to have had his first kiss beneath its 23 arches.
"It was just beautiful," Katharina, 22, another of the trio, from Germany, said of the site known as Harry's Wall. "Having the name on the wall's a big thing."
These days, fans are encouraged to sign and leave behind small slate stones to preserve the 180-year-old viaduct's brickwork.
Styles released his first album in four years, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally on Mar 6.
