Goostrey is a village and civil parish in the unitary authority of Cheshire East and the ceremonial county of Cheshire, England. It is in open countryside, 14 miles (23 km) north-east of Crewe and 12 miles (19 km) west of Macclesfield. The parish contains the Lovell Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory, a UNESCO World Heritage site. At the 2011 census, it had a population of 2,179 in 956 housesholds. It contains 24 listed heritage assets and one scheduled monument. The parish also includes the hamlets of Blackden, Blackden Heath and Jodrell Bank.
Goostrey
St Luke's Church, Goostrey
The Bog Bean – the village green at the centre of the village
The Lovell Telescope looking skyward, taken from Station Road, Goostrey, near the livery stables
The Lovell Telescope is a radio telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory, near Goostrey, Cheshire, in the north-west of England. When construction was finished in 1957, the telescope was the largest steerable dish radio telescope in the world at 76.2 m (250 ft) in diameter;
it is now the third-largest, after the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia, United States, and the Effelsberg telescope in Germany.
It was originally known as the "250 ft telescope" or the Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank, before becoming the Mark I telescope around 1961 when future telescopes were being discussed. It was renamed to the Lovell Telescope in 1987 after Sir Bernard Lovell, and became a Grade I listed building in 1988. The telescope forms part of the MERLIN and European VLBI Network arrays of radio telescopes.
The Lovell Telescope
The Mark 1 under construction. Credit: Jodrell Bank.
The Mark 1 under construction. Credit: Jodrell Bank.
The Lovell telescope mid-resurfacing in 2002.