Stockport
What to see
You’ll find accounts of Stockport’s tourist attractions with additional information on shopping, eating out etc at What’s On in Stockport, Totally Stockport or Visit Manchester. The local authority website also has helpful events coverage.
Links to specific Stockport attractions include:
● Air Raid Shelters
● Hat Works Museum
● Heritage Trust
● Market Hall
● Plaza
● Robinson’s Brewery
● Staircase House
● Stockport Museum
● War Memorial Art Gallery
Towns of Two Halves
Many towns and cities are built on hills but few give the impression, as Stockport does, of being split-level.
The guide books might plausibly say that Stockport has been continuously settled since the Mezzanine Era. They could quote from the legendary Stockport Stories, or celebrate great local thinkers who elucidated the mysteries of Entresol Theory. Such references would be made-up but justifiable: Stockport is multi-layered.
Its stratification grows on you, like a Whitefriars ‘drunken bricklayers’ vase. It is first obvious from a simple panoramic view to the west. Across a vast building site, the spectacular viaduct conveys the railway towards Manchester like Victorian engineering on stilts. So far, so conventionally exceptional. And the viaduct is apparently Europe’s largest brick-built structure but really, so what? It’s hardly the Pont du Gard, is it?
But if you turn through about 180° across the rooftops towards St Mary’s there’s a different kind of horizon.
And if you then descend to Daw Bank, you’ll find a staircase to the right of the magnificent old Art Deco Plaza. This does suggest France: Montmartre, specifically, as the escalier, its monumental masonry and elegant lighting rise into fresh air, to a level where no street can be glimpsed.
Not far north-east of here, viewed from the improbable St Petersgate bridge, an elegant street known as Little Underbank seems to belong to a completely different town.
You might say the much same for the A6. An ancient signpost confirms that this road passes through Stockport on its way from London (182.5 miles, although of course it doesn’t say .5 – we had fractions in those days) to Carlisle (118.5). Beside it, high above the rest of the town, is what looks like Stockport’s administrative centre: the borough council building, the war memorial/art gallery and a former infirmary.
The layering of Stockport goes underground too. Not only is one of the town’s distinctions its historic air-raid shelters, there is also the matter of the River Mersey.
It’s fair to assume that Stockport owes its existence largely to the Mersey, which is thought to have been fordable at this point. It seems churlish, then, for the town fathers to have culverted the river and built a shopping precinct over it. The Mersey disappears beneath the ill-favored Mersey Square Improvement scheme and re-appears briefly before the Rivers Tame and Goyt head off towards the spine of England.
In other words, Stockport is a town of unexpected interest and simple pleasures. And that’s just as well, for the purposes of my fact-finding visit. By unhappy coincidence several of the town’s set-piece attractions were closed on the Friday morning I chose to look in.
The War Memorial Art Gallery had a lot of scaffolding around its classical Greek frontage. By the time next season starts, however, visiting fans should find it open on Saturdays and Sundays. Similarly, the Hat Works Museum “cannot wait to welcome visitors back to Hat Works soon!” St Mary’s, the oldest parish church in the town, opens when the availability of volunteers permits. The Staircase House, a restored 15th Century townhouse, didn’t open until midday and I needed to be elsewhere.
But the Staircase House is next door to the Stockport Museum. This is an outstanding example of how local history should be celebrated – not least by young schoolchildren dressing up and clearly having a whale of a time shooting a video re-enactment of an ancient battle. The museum does Stockport full justice. There are displays of the kind you’ll see elsewhere (Egyptology is a surprisingly common feature of north-west collections) but also specifically local and timeless exhibits: Strawberry Studios, for example, and the inspiring story of the restoration of a Georgian bridge, and not least a display devoted to the local football team.
Across the road from the museum is the extraordinary Market Hall. This is a lively, colourful treat for all the senses. If you go inside just to look round, prepare to be seduced into trying a local delicacy; unable on a previous occasion to resist Wigan tapas, I was a sitting duck for a Stockport savoury.
If your tastes are more refined, the aforementioned Plaza has a café of Art Deco splendour. Robinson’s Brewery does tours. You won’t ever be short of choices when it comes to eating, drinking and shopping.
One further Stockport distinction that I’ve only learned about subsequently, and cannot therefore confirm first-hand: apparently the railway station has a Platform 0. There’s a picture of it on Wikipedia so it must be true.
Stockport County 2 Rochdale 1
Edgeley Park, 26 December 1989
This is a 2022 update to add Stockport County to Towns of Two Halves, published in 2018. To buy a copy, email info@townsof2halves.co.uk.