City Life March 2001 life's a beech PJ Anderson meets the man behind a cyber labour of love devoted to Chorlton. Lawrence Beedle was drinking in what is now The Nose, when he and three friends had the notion of a website dedicated to Chorlton. www.beechroad.com has been up for three years now: "It was one of those three pint ideas," Lawrence remembers. "It seemed like a good idea at the time. There was a flurry of activity to start with, but it all kind of died away when people dropped out because they had other lives to lead." Nowadays, sponsorship from Chorlton Workshop allows beechoad.com to be quirky, contentious and a little bit mad, of odd little tangents drifting along rediscovered paths: there's a game of racing the dustmen to your wheelie bin, enough snapshots of Lenin visiting Chorlton to convince us that someone connected to the site is something of unreconstructed leftie. Lawrence himself is keen on local history, which accounts for the site's obsession with old things. "The local history stuff gets the least number of hits - the least amount of interest." Best bit of all are the panoramas and local e-cards including some shops, the chippy, The Horse and Jockey pub. It's almost like being there. You can almost smell the joss sticks. You can virtually wander around Beech Road, Chorltonville, and even the water park. Lawrence offers a complicated of how this was achieved, but no explanation as to why he chose at one point to focus on an old pipe. Admitting to a day job in computers, Lawrence records 5,000 bits per week, mostly from people at work, although some browsers are from further afield - much to his confusion: "Why the hell people from Poland and Argentina are looking at the site, I don't know! Maybe they're expats, or whole heaps of countries you'd never imagine would be interested. It wouldn't mean much unless you're coming to Chorlton would it?' In fairness to its Polish fans, does the site accurately represent Chorlton? 'Chorlton's not one homogenous group of people is it? There are people like me who wear hats, eat hummus and go to the Cornerhouse, and there's another tot who go into The Spread Eagle for cheap pints.' Lawrence strives to reflect a diverse community: "different people contribute in different ways. The main point of the site is community. If you don't use your local shops, if you don't use the local services if you don't vote for or against your local councillor, then you might just as well live in a Barratt home. Local shops and local businesses employ local people...' Lawrence is by now scaring me - are we 'having trouble here? Lawrence laughs, realising that he's come over all Royston Vasey. 'It's not so you don't touch the precious things it's more... what am I saying?' Something like check out the precious, things on this bijou local site? "You could say that, yes."