by Paul Morley
The densely populated neighbourhood of Victoria (8), to the west of the centre of Stockport, contains dowdy but proud Edgeley, tree-lined Davenport and the baggy in-between Cale Green. In the far south-east of the borough towards Glossop (9) lies the ‘gate-way to the Peak District’, a beginning to the north in this book, a rubbing-together of Cheshire and Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and Tameside with northern Derbyshire, midway between Manchester and Sheffield, a fluid area inside all those places but also on the outside, where goldsmith Sir Edmund Shaa, martyred priest Blessed Nicholas Garlick, novelist Hilary Mantel, TV personality Stuart Hall, designer Vivienne Westwood and property developer and soft pornographer Paul Raymond were all born and/or brought up, Ludwig Wittgenstein lived in the springs and summers of 1908 and 1909 (at the Grouse Inn on chilly Chunal Moor, where he tested meteorological kites) and L. S. Lowry died. Over the Tameside border are humdrum Romiley (spacious woodland clearing) and amorphous Bredbury, birthplace of famous 1970s comic impressionist and Golden Garter regular Mike Yarwood.
Before I left Stockport, I would know and have visited all of these places for one reason or another. Before I was allowed to leave, it seemed I had to tick each place off and get a sense of the interlocking pattern of human behaviour and how people crowded together interact in places and streets that have different names yet share an essential spirit, richer and more focused at its centre, less specific further out, until it fades away altogether, and becomes something else.
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1818
Emily Brontë was born on 30 July at Thornton, Bradford, Yorkshire, fifth of six children. Her mother died of cancer in 1821. In 1824 she attended the newly opened Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. Along with her sisters Maria, Elizabeth and Charlotte, she experienced a harsh regime – frequently cold and with poor food. In June 1825 Emily and her sisters were taken away from the school for good. Their father was a quiet man, and often spent his spare time alone, so the motherless children entertained themselves reading the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare, Virgil and John Milton, played the piano, did needlepoint and told each other stories. Emily’s imagination developed early under the influence of her surroundings – sky, animals, plants, rocks, soil and water – but also around the contrivances of fictional worlds. Her world of Gondal, developed with her older sister Charlotte and younger sister Anne, was a faraway place peopled with medieval-like and romantic characters – kings and consorts, princes and princesses, generals and rebels, implacable foes, irreconcilable traitors and flawed lovers – in land- and sea-scapes filled with castles, cathedrals, dungeons, warships and forest battles.
1817
Edwin Waugh was born on 29 January in a small cottage by the Old Clock Face Inn in Toad Lane, Rochdale. His father was a clog- and shoemaker, and the family, though working class, enjoyed a reasonable income. However, following the death of his father from a brain tumour at the comparatively young age of thirty-seven, when Edwin was only seven years old, the family fortunes plummeted and for a time he and his mother lived in a cellar. At twelve he became an errand boy for a printer, and two years later was apprenticed to another printer.
1815
Preston was the first provincial town to have gas street lighting. In May 1815 the Preston Gas Company was formed and the three main streets, Church Street, Fishergate and Friargate, were lit. The pipes used were army-surplus musket barrels stuck end to end. A major reason for the interest in gas lighting was its possible use in illuminating the mills so that longer hours could be worked. Two years later the trustees of the gas company threatened to cut off the gas as they had not paid their bills.
1811
The last time a convicted prisoner’s hand was branded with M for malefactor at Lancaster’s Crown Court.
By 1811 there were more than four million steam-mule spindles in over fifty mills in the Manchester district alone. As a result of the improved technology, raw cotton imports soared and the price of cotton yarn plummeted, while cotton textile exports rapidly outstripped those of woollen cloth. Cotton cloth sold well because it was cheap and light, but also because it could be brightly coloured and patterned like the much more expensive silk.
1803
The Lake District is considered by many the birthplace of rock climbing in Britain, if not the world. (George Mallory, born in Mobberly, Cheshire in 1886, who began climbing on his clergyman father’s church in Cheshire, the mountaineer who when asked why he wanted to climb Everest replied ‘Because it’s there,’ developed his skills in the Lake District.) The earliest climbers were shepherds who somehow negotiated the crags wearing hobnailed boots. Poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, who made an unplanned descent of England’s second highest mountain, Scafell, in 1802, helped to popularise both the Lakes and the sport of climbing. (Coleridge had made it up Scafell via a relatively safe route, and then chose the most difficult way down, relishing the danger, deliberately frightening himself as he tumbled from ledge to ledge, sometimes falling twice his own height.) In his poem ‘The Brothers’ William Wordsworth featured the sheer and intimidating Pillar Rock, in one of the most remote valleys, which Mallory later climbed without assistance, giving his name to what was known as the hardest route in Britain.
You see yon precipice – it almost looks
Like some vast building made of many crags,
And in the midst is one particular rock
That rises like a column from the vale,
Whence by our Shepherds it is call’d, the Pillar.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century York was the sixteenth largest city in England; at the end it was the forty-first. In Yorkshire Bradford, Halifax and Huddersfield outgrew the county’s capital, which remained at heart a market town. In 1803 across the Pennines Manchester was still a small town of some 600 streets, bordered by fields and meadows.
Part Five
The five colours
No matter what the illusion created, it is a flat canvas and has to be organised into shapes.
David Hockney
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Stockport Viaduct – deposited above Mersey Square across the recessed centre of the nine districts of the town – was something of a church for L. S. Lowry, one that he didn’t worship inside but simply worshipped. He didn’t go inside the houses, mills and factories he painted; he saw the north from above, from outside, from the perspective of one in control, interested not in the intimate workings but in the power, the presence, of the land and what had been placed on it since the first hiss of steam, the first assembly line, in the pace of life set by machines and the impact that had on reality and the lost souls engaged with whatever the land had become. The viaduct connected one lost paradise and a new, dangerous paradise, and it spanned his imagination, taking him from the smallest corner of his life to the end of the road.
The viaduct was so old and massive I didn’t see it at all when I lived there. Like the ponderous Victorian buildings stonily haunting Manchester city centre, its solid largeness somehow slipped outside my vision. The viaduct over the Tame was out on its own, splendidly and a little surreally isolated among shimmering, sweeping acres of open country, but this one, at the heart of town, bigger, mightier, carrying far more traffic to and from Manchester, to and from London, was somehow simply a part of the landscape, as if it was there before humans arrived, lodged in the ground, a native part of the land. You couldn’t miss it, but, being a teenager worried about the oddest of things, I did miss it. I took it for granted. It was just an awful lot of bricks, and bricks were everywhere. Bricks were all around; bricks brought with them the walls, towers, factories, unlimited terraced houses and tunnels that hemmed you in and blocked out the light. Bricks made up the obstacles that you had to avoid and break through.
I’ve come to find Stockport Viaduct through the paint and guarded passion of Lowry. In his work, which was his life, he returned to it again and again, elevating it to a ubiquitous sculptural symbol of the beginning and end of prog
ress, as if to cross it, to stand under it, is to take your place in a determined march towards something that will ultimately be the end of the journey. He treats the lowly brick as the foundation of civilisation, and sees the viaduct as a tremendous community of bricks that are strongly individual yet all joined together. The viaduct is often there in his paintings, in the background, even when his subject is not Stockport. It was always part of his north, of his mind – the Stockport Viaduct was the structure that connected his mind with the north, leading from one place to the other with hypnotic regularity.
The viaduct is there in the background of a compounded Lowry painting of the spare, smeared, fenced-in northern landscape as never was but of course really was, because he painted it so, in the same way he painted all those burdened, crooked people, living inside hutches, strokes of black amid white space, letters transmitting messages about their predicament and the grey past, broken down by time, beyond help, people belonging to iron, coal, clay, brick, deformed by effort and routine, occupying their hometowns as a necessary evil, all that they know, and can know, doing their jobs, trapped between simplicity and nature and the new age of science, calculation and mechanisation.
Chetham Library where Marx and Engels worked
Lowry’s painted people make you wonder if he had read this description of mill workers by a medical worker in 1833: ‘. . . their complexion is sallow and pallid – with a peculiar flatness of feature, caused by the want of a proper quantity of adipose substance [fatty tissue] to cushion out the cheeks . . . their stature low – the average height of four hundred men, measured at different times, and different places, being five feet six inches . . . their limbs slender, and playing badly and ungracefully . . . a very general bowing of the legs . . . great numbers of girls and women walking lamely or awkwardly, with raised chests and spinal flexures . . . nearly all have flat feet, accompanied with a down-tread, differing very widely from the elasticity of action in the foot and ankle, attendant upon perfect formation . . . hair thin and straight – many of the men having but little beard, and that in patches of a few hairs . . .’ P. Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England, 1833.
For Lowry the modern world begins with the building of Stockport Viaduct and ends not long after, as the Victorians grandly, recklessly rebuilt their world from the sewers below to the spires, bridges and chimneys above, combining extravagant self-promoting flair and finery with the plain and utilitarian. Joining the underground tunnels and the gliding triumphant high are the scale and bravado of the viaduct, the very symbol of Victorian engineering flair, industrious ambition and the determination to get things done and create buildings that would last for ever. Shops, hospitals, concert halls, memorial halls, factories, warehouses, mills and schools rose in Stockport as the nineteenth century progressed and the town expanded around the river and up the surrounding hills and slopes, and dominating even those epic structures was The Viaduct. All that organised brick and space making it clear that, from the south, by train, to get to Manchester, where it was all happening, you had to cross this town. Stockport was important. Stockport was here. It was going nowhere, but it helped you get somewhere.
Lowry looked down from above, from a distance, turning his views of what had happened to the land into maps of despair and visions of the tension between hope and hopelessness. The expanses of town, filled with those recently released from office, factory, school, home, not quite sure what they were expected to do next, caught by the watching Lowry in a moment of indecision or blankness, not knowing he’s watching, not knowing he’s among them, looking like them but someone else.
The people who lived around me in Reddish, and in Longsight, Levenshulme, Edgeley, Denton, Gorton, Burnage and Heaton Chapel, close by but in their own worlds, were to me like the people in a Lowry painting. I was aware of them, saw them moving about, talked to them, did much the same things they did, but I never got close to them, to understanding their succinct or battered uniqueness. They were all heading in the same direction – heading to and from the same place, apparently part of a collective, a community sharing the same resources and lack of resources, enjoying the same occasions and events, the same celebratory dates on the calendar, the same fun and games, the same gossip and news, the same rain that threatened to dissolve them into phantoms, scuttling up and down the same hills, nipping to the same corner shops under drooping canvas awnings sheltering them from wind and rain, and occasionally sun, where the doors made the same assertive noise as they opened – but they were all deep in their own minds, in their own lives, next door to each other in time and place, but far, far away from each other in how they read and experienced their environment, lost in their own bodies, which, according to Lowry, were mere smears, wrinkles, expressions of sensation, obedience, desperation and posture set against a backdrop of brick, road, workshop, field and emptiness.
George Stephenson
This was the world Lowry grew up in. He didn’t find himself amidst Swiss mountains, or French fields, or Caribbean islands, or Norwegian fjords, isolated and apart from clustered reined-in people compelled to deal with claustrophobic streets and freezing nights. The indomitable Victorian railways, canals, roads, mills and factories were all in place by the time he was a teenager, soon to be supplemented by equally solid but seeming lighter, even fancier, Edwardian bricks and decoration. His surroundings were man-made and often mighty, sometimes at the edge of the sinister, with the polluted, poisoned often equally sinister moors, rivers and hills around the edges. In the middle, stranded, ghostly vivid, were the workers, wives and husbands, children, loners, malingerers, ordinary people and occasional animals, who seem to ache being so close to where the action is and isn’t.
Lowry was born in the Victorian era, only child of estate agent Robert and Elizabeth on 1 November 1887 in respectable Victoria Park, east of the Wilmslow Road in Rusholme, then well outside the built-up areas of Manchester. Rusholme was a pleasant place to live, a positive result of Manchester’s increasing wealth, home to the great and good and the new breed of energetic self-made men, filled with substantial out-of-town houses and villas, shaded by pretty avenues of trees, birdsong heard more than industrial rumble. The city eventually swamped the independent elegance of Victoria Park but never completely washed it away. The Lowrys were proud members of the lower middle class. They kept themselves to themselves, and an internal dynamic developed between the three of them, based around Lowry’s mother’s love for him and resentment of her husband.
Lowry started drawing at eight, leaving school at sixteen. By 1904 he had drifted into work as a claims clerk at Manchester Insurance Company, and he used some of his earnings to pay for private art tuition. He studied in the evenings at the Manchester Municipal School of Art under French Impressionist Pierre Adolphe Valette, who arrived in Manchester in 1905, earning a living designing greetings cards and calendars. Valette fell in love with northern England, the resonant dampness as well as the people, and his speciality became atmospheric scenes of Edwardian Manchester, spotting glistening enigmatic beauty amid the hustle, brick and smoke where few others did, locating the young, urgent city in a Monet mist moving between past and present. Lowry was not too sociable, a little on the outside of things, and it seems he was not too precise at representing things as they were or seemed to be, but not necessarily abstract. He was liberated by Valette’s careful demonstration of Parisian paint and brush techniques, which could reflect and illuminate details, people, landscape and buildings without the need for soulless pedestrian accuracy. The preoccupied people lurking at the edges of Valette’s loving sombre pictures of a Manchester in the middle of just another day, underneath indistinct bridges, with towers, spires and steeples receding in the crepuscular distance of time and space, figures indirectly inherited from Van Gogh’s radiantly suggestive impressions of sun-scorched reapers alone in their world, would emigrate into Lowry’s universe, shrink into themselves and develop their own obscure but revelatory personalities. (Other sources f
or Lowry’s way of seeing, and choosing, things, as a kind of historian of social endurance – the sixteenth-century Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s landscapes, real and invented, merging scenes and activities in one painting rooted in Hieronymus Bosch, where he scattered peasants finding ways to cope, in the cold, alone in a vast universe, searching for purpose, indulging in everyday rituals of work, play and worship; a 1906 painting by the obscure E. E. Smith, Stockport from Brinksway, Cheshire, when the town was still just filling itself in, countryside beginning to disappear beneath street and factory, where the great viaduct swoops in the middle distance across the valley behind numerous mis-shapen terraced houses, windows giving them comic personality, while tall chimneys above squat factories matter of factly belch smoke and a few straggly individuals stagger along pavements next to untarmaced, carless roads.)