The North

by Paul Morley

  I might be choosing Stockport as exactly where the north begins for entirely personal reasons, but it does seem a gate through which, from the south, you enter the north and head on to Manchester, where you will definitely have made it to a northern centre, according to history, and out of which you head to towards London, because the railway line that goes from Manchester to London soars over the sunken centre of Stockport across a businesslike nineteenth-century viaduct that one day might be all that remains of the town and its people.

  Stockport became my town, my centre of the north, but there are other places it could have been, where someone else would feel they were at the very centre of the north, a north within the north, with its own colours, anatomy and character, its own lords, thugs and landmarks, views, wrecks and skeletons in the cupboard – Bury, Wakefield, Sunderland, Southport, Grimsby, Oldham, Wigan, Lancaster, Workington, Huddersfield, Carlisle, themselves split into smaller areas, and then even smaller areas, named and numbered, fenced and familiar, filled with vanished lives and forgotten voices, wrapped around each other, inserted into each other, containing their own system of borders and boundaries that you would come across as you grew up, and crossed, and recrossed, as you made progress further and further into your life, walking for miles, living through days.

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  1837

  Economic depression spread fear of unemployment and short-time working among industrial workers in Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, particularly among those employed in declining handicraft industries such as wool combing or calico weaving. The proposal to introduce the Poor Law Amendment Act into these areas increased anxiety since, if passed, workers would be forced into the dreaded workhouse in periods of distress rather than receive a small ‘dole’ from the Poor Law guardians.

  Before 1837 Monks Coppenhall was a small hamlet in the Cheshire countryside, its inhabitants making their living from farming. Crewe did not exist, and the population was about seventy. However, the Grand Junction Railway had decided the fields near Crewe Hall should be the site for its railway hub and locomotive works. In 1837 the railway station was built and called Crewe: the town was named after the station, not the other way round. Crewe was chosen after Winsford, seven miles to the north, had rejected the GJR proposal, as had the landowners in Nantwich, four miles away. The first train arrived at 8.45 on 4 July 1837. The town really took off when the Grand Junction Railway built its workshops in 1843. The first steam locomotive was built at Crewe the same year – the Tamarlane, No. 32. A celebratory ball and banquet was held in its honour. Two years later No. 49, Columbine, a Standard six-foot locomotive, was rolled out. Between 1843 and 1958 a total of 7,331 locomotives were built at Crewe, more than at any other railway works in the country.

  1835

  Why should Lancashire, specifically Manchester, have been first in the world in the race towards industrialisation? One reason for the rise of the north, advanced at the time, and widely supported ever since, was favourable geographical circumstances.

  The natural and physical advantages of England for manufacturing industry are probably superior to those of every other country on the globe. The district where these advantages are found in the most favourable combination is the southern part of Lancashire, and the south-western part of Yorkshire, the former of which has become the principal seat of the manufacture of cotton . . . The tract lying between the Ribble and the Mersey is surrounded on the east and north by high ranges of hills, and also has hills of some magnitude in the hundreds of Blackburn and Salford; owing to which cause the district is intersected by a great number of streams, which descend rapidly from their sources towards the level tract in the west. In the early part of their course, these streams and streamlets furnish water-power adequate to turn many hundred mills: they afford the element of water, indispensable for scouring, bleaching, printing, dyeing, and other processes of manufacture: and when collected in their larger channels, or employed to feed canals, they supply a superior inland navigation, so important for the transit of raw materials and merchandise.

  In addition, easily accessible coal ‘animates the thousand arms of the steam-engine, and furnished the most powerful agent in all chemical and mechanical operations’. Lancashire has ‘ready communication with the sea by means of its well-situated port, Liverpool’ and ‘the acquired advantage of a canal communication, which ramifies itself through all the populous parts of the county, and connects it with the inland counties, the seats of other flourishing manufacturers, and the sources whence iron, lime, salt, stone, and other articles in which Lancashire is deficient, are obtained’. Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, 1835.

  ‘Being in a straight line between Sheffield and Wakefield, both ancient and important towns, Barnsley derived advantage from the trade between them, as well as being on the routes between Chester and Doncaster, and Rotherham and Huddersfield. But the great cause of its prosperity was the early establishment of manufacturers. Wire-works were in existence here in the time of James I. The ride from Barnsley to Wakefield is one of the most picturesque in the kingdom. The town has obtained the name Black Barnsley, supposed by some to be a corruption of Bleak from its exposed situation, being built on the slope of two or three hills each 350 feet above sea level; by others said to arise from the appearance of its neighbouring moors, its ancient wire-works, its coal-mines, smoke-stained houses and its iron-works.’

  Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes appeared in various forms in 1810, 1820, 1822, 1823 and 1835; the full title of the definitive expanded fifth edition published in 1835 is A Guide through the District of the Lakes in the north of England, with a Description of the Scenery, &c. for the Use of Tourists and Residents. Alternating between practical information and rhapsodic stanzas, the ultimate Romantic poet muses upon such sublime sights as the ‘almost precipitous sides of mountains with an intermixture of colours, like the compound hues of a dove’s neck’. Wordsworth’s guide drew so many tourists that Matthew Arnold later recalled ‘one of the pilgrims, a clergyman, asked him if he had ever written anything besides the Guide to the Lakes’.

  1832

  Lewis Carroll, real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was born on 27 January and grew up in the Cheshire village of Daresbury, of which parish his father was incumbent until he was eleven years old. The village is about seven miles from Warrington and its name is supposed to derive from a word meaning oak – there are plenty of oak trees in the area. A canal passes through an outlying part of the parish, and the bargemen who frequented this canal were a special object of Dodgson’s pastoral care. The young boy would have seen the local cheeses, which were fashioned into various animal shapes, one of them a grinning cat.

  The development of the railways encouraged reform of the corrupt electoral system. People could more easily visit villages and hamlets with barely any population but representatives in Parliament and see for themselves how absurd it was that a town as large, and getting larger, as Manchester had no representation while the slumbering parish of Newton-le-Willows with a population of less than 3,000 had two MPs. As a result of the 1832 Reform Act (which nevertheless ignored many iniquities which would inspire the Chartist movement), Manchester gained its first two members of Parliament, Mark Philips and Charles Poulett Thompson. According to historian Asa Briggs, ‘Manchester enhanced its national reputation as a centre of social disturbances, even as a possible cradle of revolution.’

  Founded in 1832, Durham is England’s third oldest university. It would have gained its royal charter some two centuries earlier, had it not been for the opposition of Oxford and Cambridge.

  Thomas Sharples opens the Star music hall in Bolton in 1832. The great majority of the Lancashire-dialect poets, composers, singers and reciters who appear in the Star are drawn from the local working population. Some of them are possibly home weavers. Their songs not only draw on traditional folk tunes but also deal with town and factory life.

  1831

  The fac
tory system that became so important in Manchester was still absent in Sheffield. ‘The manufacturers for the most part,’ wrote one visitor in 1831, ‘are carried on in an unostentatious way, in small scattered workshops, and nowhere make the noise and bustle of a great iron works.’

  1830

  It all – the cogs grinding, the coal burning, the steam ejecting, the pistons pumping, the wheels turning, the train chuffing, leading to the control and organisation of time itself, the linking of cities, the joining of remote places, the opening-up of coasts, mountains and beauty spots, the building of mighty stations, bridges and viaducts, and the transformation of a dislocated nation into a less scattered community – started at 10.40 a.m. on 15 September 1830, at the Edge Hill, Liverpool end of the recently completed Liverpool to Manchester railway line. The journey took just two hours, half what it had taken in a horse-pulled stagecoach. By boat the journey took a minimum of thirty hours. Eccles station opened the same year, making it one of the stops on the first inter-city passenger route in the world.

  ‘. . . everything in the factory . . . happens with admirable precision and neatness and at the same time with great speed . . . it seemed . . . as if all these wheels were . . . really alive and the people occupied with them were machines . . . [Manchester] this famous great factory town. Dark and smoky from the coal vapours, it resembles a huge forge or workshop. Work, profit and greed seem to be the only thoughts here. The clatter of the cotton mills and the looms can be heard everywhere . . . We visited one of the biggest cotton mills. A steam engine in the basement powers almost all the innumerable wheels and spindles which are fitted on many floors built one above the other like a tower . . . in all of them we saw some women knotting together the yarns which rarely tore off from the constantly turning spindles, putting nappies on children and winding the yarn which had been spun. In one hall the still unspun cotton was cleaned; it lay on large tables in big square pieces looking like cotton wool; a number of women and girls armed with a thin stick in each hand were happily thrashing it.’ Arthur Schopenhauer, 1830.

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  Stockport can be divided into nine main parts. There is the most affluent area, its wealthiest suburb, large houses lining leafy lanes, a plush, nicely busy village centre. Bramhall (1) – nook of land where broom grows, the Old English word halh meaning secret place near water – lies to the south of Stockport’s city centre, reaching to the border with Macclesfield. When, in 1969, the twenty-three-year-old Manchester United superstar George Best asked an architect to build him his dream boutique-era post-Bond bachelor-pad home in Bramhall, his only stipulations were that it should have a sunken bath and a snooker room. Situated in Blossoms Lane, it was a split-level building encased in glass with a flat roof, and came complete with underground garage for George’s E-Type Jaguar. It had all the latest gadgets including underfloor heating, electric curtains and a TV that retracted into the chimney breast.

  Nearby, in Bramhall Park, there is another sort of architectural gem, this one set amid nearly seventy acres of woods, landscaped park, terraces and lakes, perched between two valleys containing meandering streams that feed into the Mersey. Bramhall Hall is one of the grandest examples of the black and white timber-framed manor houses that Cheshire is famous for, and one of the most important timber-framed mansions in Britain. The manor dates back to Anglo-Saxon England with the present house dating from the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries and sensitive refinements added in the nineteenth century. The earliest documentary reference to the park is found in William Webb’s itinerary of Cheshire around 1620. He noted ‘From Stockport, near another water called Brame [Lady Brook] which takes beginning easterly among the hills in and near Lyme Park, we come to Bramhall, a very fair lordship, demesne and fair house, of the great name of Davenport, of Bramhall, the owner whereof, now Sir William Davenport, knight, Mr Sergeant Davenport’s eldest brother, to which house lies a park, and all things fit for a worshipful seat . . .’ In the late nineteenth century the area became a favourite place for workers in the Stockport mills and factories to visit – a half-hour walk from the stifling factories and hours of back-breaking hard work they could find green fields and clean air, birds and wildlife.

  Both the Best whimsy and the imposing stately home with its grand hall and rare wall paintings have Stockport postcodes, and prove that there is more to Stockport than met Lowry’s eye, but they are definitely of the Cheshire side of Stockport.

  In the far west of Stockport, three miles from the town centre, is Cheadle (2), including Cheadle Hulme, Cheadle Heath and Heald Green, spreading towards the border with the less delicate Manchester, a vital stopping point on the way to the city during the Industrial Revolution. Also reaching to the Manchester border, to the north-west of Stockport town centre, are the four Heatons (3): Heaton Mersey (at the smarter end, like its neighbours Didsbury and Chorlton-cum-Hardy) plus Heatons Chapel, Moor and Norris (at the more basic end towards Reddish).

  To the east of Stockport’s centre on a hilltop moorland sits convivial Marple (4), almost as affluent as Bramhall, closer to north Derbyshire than Manchester. (Miss Marple of Agatha Christie fame was named after Marple on the Manchester–Sheffield line, when Christie was delayed at the station. In 1975, at Goyt Mill in Marple, built in 1865, once the largest one-room weaving mill in the country, employing over 300 men, women and children, one Roy Brooke created a machine that put words on a screen while music was playing, so that you could sing along to your favourite songs. Few cared or understood, and it wasn’t until someone in Japan picked up on the idea and gave the machine a name – karaoke – that the less memorably titled Roy’s Singalong Machine really took off. This means karaoke was invented in Stockport.)

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  1829

  In October the news spread around England that a mechanic fairly obscure outside the north-east had achieved what had previously seemed impossible. At Rainhill, near Liverpool, in the presence of an eager awe-struck crowd, in a competition sponsored by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway to find the best type of locomotive, George Stephenson with the assistance of his son Robert drove his Rocket steam engine over a prepared length of railway at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour. They were required to traverse the track twenty times back and forth, which made the distance about the same as a return trip between Liverpool and Manchester.

  The L&MR had been formed to ensure that the increasing quantities of finished cloth being manufactured in Manchester could be swiftly delivered to the nearest deep-water port of Liverpool for export, and the raw cotton being delivered to Liverpool sent quickly to Manchester. George Stephenson, after some argument about the route and his qualifications as a self-taught engineer, was appointed to build the line. At the 1826 inquiry into the construction of the railway, in the face of considerable opposition and disbelief that he could actually do what he said he could, he attempted to convince a sceptical and technologically unschooled Parliament using not only highly complex language that verged on the apparently nonsensical but also speaking in his local Northumberland accent. To the sneering and profoundly uninformed southerners needing to be convinced, his north-east burr added a further layer of the incomprehensible. He was trying to persuade aloof, unmoved and technologically ignorant Parliament to allow him to propel manic-seeming forty-ton iron engines across untested man-made structures at speeds that defied logic while speaking in what was not yet known as Geordie. At first, Parliament refused permission. Eventually they relented, passed the act necessary for construction to begin, and George Stephenson was finally given the seemingly impossible job of making it all happen.

  1825

  The Stockton and Darlington Railway opened in the north-east. Built primarily for carrying freight, it reduced the cost of transporting coal from eighteen shillings to eight shillings and sixpence per ton. It quickly became apparent that large profits could be made by building railways.

  1824

  What is generally acknowledged as Britain’s first horse omnibus serv
ice was started by John Greenwood, keeper of the toll gate at Pendleton, Salford, between Pendleton and Market Street in Manchester. So successful was this service that it was not long before Greenwood became the proprietor of several more omnibuses. Records show that by 1850 sixty-four omnibuses were serving the centre of Manchester from outlying suburbs, run by various companies.

  Hylda Baker and Jimmy Jewel

  1823

  Stockport is described by a visitor as ‘an irregular, ill built, badly lighted, dirty place, which no traveller ever passed through and wished to see again’.

  1822

  Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes first appeared as a separate volume in 1822, as A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England. The edition of 500 copies sold out immediately, and a new edition of 1,000 copies was produced the following year. This included an account of an excursion up Scafell Pike, and another of a trip to Ullswater. Wordsworth wrote that early settlers had found the Lake District ‘overspread with wood; forest trees, the fir, the oak, the ash, and the birch had skirted the fells . . . Not so interested in skirted fells, the industrialists turned the timber into charcoal and other fuel, while the granite, limestone, sandstone and slate left behind by 500 million years of geological processes were mined for building materials . . . For this, for everything, we are out of tune.’