by Paul Morley
It was easy to see why his depiction of a lost illusory north was attractive to those feeling wistful about its disappearance and the disappearance of their own youth, which brought with it the increasingly realistic approach of death, but this response missed out on a lot of the bent, troubled wit, reprobate uneasiness and apprehension, the creation of a lurid, devious myth, the strange, tender affinity with inanimate objects where it could seem he loved a broken fence more than a human being. It missed how he set his buildings, characters, gatherings, stories, memories, waterways, Victorian and post-Edwardian yearnings inside a void that was ultimately more modern than anything that came after, however new and fashionable. The void is always of the moment, and never goes out of date, whatever else comes along. (The eleven-year-old me, the short-trousered boy in 1968 Stockport, more at home in the shopping precinct, would not have been thinking any of this about Lowry, who would have seemed a relic, like the viaduct, like the enormous, heavyhearted buildings abandoned around central Manchester, old and irrelevant, and his flat-footed matchstick men stupidly comic. It takes time to get inside the mind of Lowry and the way he got inside time, and inside his mind there isn’t a soothing past to remember, but a confirmation of how the memory plays tricks and of how difficult it is to represent positively the passing of time, and a devastating loss or redirecting of energy.)
Lowry looked at the Stockport Viaduct and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He said that he was haunted by it, the millions of bricks and the ordinary, heroic men who had dug up the clay, baked the bricks, loaded them, unloaded them, cemented them together, and faded into exhausted obscurity, anonymously leaving their masterpiece. For him it wasn’t that it was about and belonged in the past, it wasn’t that it represented the Victorian spirit that built a new society that along the way created and then abandoned millions of people; it was simply its sheer presence, which was both ethereal and colossal, inscrutably dominating the area. Each silent, strong brick demanded attention but then became part of this terrific structure, which could seem both spiritually imposing and unexceptionally familiar and worthy – mighty and matter of fact.
Bricks were a sign of wealth during the Georgian period at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, with landowners and merchants refronting their properties with the recently standardised bricks, nine inches long, four and a half inches wide and two and a half inches thick, to create regular, pleasing patterns. By the mid-nineteenth century, as the manufacture of bricks became like most things mechanised, more bricks were being made and laid than ever before – now a cheap efficient way to build the factories, bridges and warehouses that were increasingly required. The Stockport Viaduct was a demonstration of how the quality, accuracy and density of bricks had improved, and how cement set quicker and stronger, which was vital for the speed of construction that the industrial age demanded.
It was built by the Manchester and Birmingham Railway, and was a key component in linking Manchester and Crewe, as investors explored plans for more lines south of Manchester. Designed by renowned pioneering bridge engineer George Watson Buck, working for Robert Stephenson’s team building the railway, it used 27 semicircular arches each with a span of 63 feet, cunningly and prophetically perfectly wide enough to accommodate a motorway, which over a century later would pass underneath. It rose 111 feet over the River Mersey Valley; it was 2,200 feet long; it took 21 months to build, the first stone laid on 9 March 1839; it was built by contractors Tomkins and Holmes of Liverpool; 600 labourers worked in shifts day and night; it was completed in 1840, four days before Christmas, opened for travel in 1842, and was constructed out of neat layer upon layer of red bricks (11 million of them) set in lime mortar; and it cost £72,000.
The Stockport Viaduct was the largest brick structure in the world at that time, and perhaps this is what touched Lowry, that out of these ordinary blocks something so vast, grandiose and functional could emerge, which made the double-decker buses that drove through its gaping caverns seem so minute. Reports suggest there were three fatalities during the construction – two passers-by hit by falling objects and one worker plunging off the scaffolding. The viaduct was widened by 24 feet in the late 1880s, so that four tracks could be carried over Stockport, meaning that by the time Lowry came to consider it and wonder what it all really meant, there were possibly over 20 million bricks in front of him.
Scafell rock formation in the Lake District
Perhaps Lowry kept returning to it because he imagined what it was like out of context, not taking trains over Stockport to and from London and Manchester but nonchalantly floating free of its location, a mesmerising combination of the ordinary and the spectacular. He kept sketching it, sizing it up, rolling his imagination over its bricks, embracing the image, working out why it was he was so fascinated, as if he would eventually work out what it was, and perhaps, tied up in the bricks and their arrangement, there might be some clue as to the mystery of the universe itself. Maybe he noticed in its isolated immensity something of the loneliness he felt – ‘Had I not been lonely none of my works would have happened.’
It is as well so matter of fact, as if once the bricks were placed exactly where they were meant to be, and the arches were completed, and the railway laid over the top, and the trains could travel high over the town of Stockport, over the river, over the mills and warehouses lining the river, then that was it, job done. Lowry could identify with that sense of getting on with things, in the order they were meant to be, according to decisions that seem to have been made above and beyond anyone’s control.
‘It often appears in my pictures,’ he said, as usual giving little away. ‘As I make them up, I suddenly know I must bring in the Stockport Viaduct.’ Why remains a mystery, and perhaps that mystery is connected to the mystery of the viaduct itself, the result of so much effort and commitment and ingenuity but also just there, where it is, doing its job, for as long as it takes. The fact that an 1840 act of Parliament ensured that all trains crossing the viaduct, in and out of the north and south, stopped at Stockport meant that it was never indifferently passed over on the way to somewhere else. The viaduct kept Stockport in the middle of things even when it was sliding out of history.
Four years after it was built Friedrich Engels is in a train crossing the viaduct, with a clear view over slumping cavernous Stockport, which he seems pleased to be seeing from a distance.
There is Stockport, too, which lies on the Cheshire side of the Mersey, but belongs never the less to the manufacturing district of Manchester. It lies in a narrow valley along the Mersey, so that the streets slope down a steep hill on one side and up an equally steep one on the other, while the railway from Manchester to Birmingham passes over a high viaduct above the city and the whole valley. Stockport is renowned throughout the entire district as one of the duskiest, smokiest holes, and looks, indeed, especially when viewed from the viaduct, excessively repellent. But far more repulsive are the cottages and cellar dwellings of the working-class, which stretch in long rows through all parts of the town from the valley bottom to the crest of the hill. I do not remember to have seen so many cellars used as dwellings in any other town of this district.
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If you look at photographs of how the deep-set centre of Stockport looked in 1964, it seems still arrested in the rickety and smoky post-Industrial Revolution northern 1930s. Engels would have recognised it as the same foul place he had seen from the viaduct. It had been taken for all it was worth, all its local facilities and resources drained, its natural energy squeezed and shaken until there was nothing left, used, abused, coated in filth and sundry deposits, and left to if not rot then fend for itself. Stockport in 1964 looked as if it was about to waste away into the dampness that once made the hats that now in a hatless town mingled with the dust and muck that was getting too thick to ever wipe away.
Lowry loved hats, flat or bowler, bonnet or school cap. Hats topped off his north as much as smog, fog, smokestack, clock tower,
church steeple, umbrella or sloping shoulders, although sometimes, oddly but perfectly, a kerb or a boot, a smoked-down fag, a bottom step or the curve of the street would top things off. He loved his own hat, the homburg that carried and deflected the weight of the world, but as once-solid formalities broke down in the post-war transformation of duty, aspiration and expectation, it came to represent conservatism, cracked class divisions, old-fashioned values, a disreputable character, fusty professionalism, and was becoming as much an explicit comic symbol as a prized sign of status and self-worth. Exiled by his attitudes from the changing world, Lowry kept his hat, comic, quirky, defunct or not; Stockport, on its last legs, choking on the smoke, needing to change with the world or sink from view, chucked its away. As one-time home of the hat, in a nineteenth-century world where every man and boy wore one – round, high, broad-brimmed, brimmed, not brimmed – or a cap made out of folded paper if they couldn’t afford one, this was quite a statement.
Stockport in 1964 was, knowingly or not, awaiting the giant blade of renewal. Lugubrious double-decker buses stubbornly pushed through its dreary preserved gloom, following routes set in stone during the Industrial Revolution which now seemed to do nothing much but go round in circles. People went this way, people went that way, but there was no sense that they would ever be able to go another way, a surprising way. The buildings, filth and duty left behind by the century-old surge of activity and adventure meant there was nowhere to go but this way and that way and sometimes meet in the middle. And along the way there was the pub, the office, school, the factory, tired shops, a television set, a radio programme, a day trip, a football match, a film matinee, a night out, an inevitable return to the this way and that.
Wellington Road, which had been built as long ago as 1826, crossing the lowest part of the river valley by means of an eleven-arched viaduct 50 feet above the river, still performed its original function of ensuring traffic avoided the steep slopes and narrow streets of the historic town centre. It had been named after the Duke of Wellington, when he was still something of a hero because of his defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. (The old Etonian Tory prime minister would soon become unpopular, certainly in industrialised, expanding Manchester, for his government’s stubborn resistance to political and social reform. He expressed initial hostility to the idea of railways, considering cheap travel and the subsequent emancipation of ordinary people could lead to revolution. ‘It will only encourage the lower classes to move about,’ he said.)
The bypassing of the centre of Stockport – a forerunner of twentieth-century road schemes – was controversial, but it was seen as an important way of improving transport links between Manchester and Buxton, and beyond that to London. Before Wellington Road, Hillgate was the main route into and out of Stockport, the core around which the town centre developed during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As an important coaching route, Hillgate was studded with inns, houses, shops and early signs of industrial activity. The streets laid out at right angles to it contained factories and terraced housing, some arranged in steeply sloped steps set into the hillside. By the 1960s Hillgate was an accumulation of Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian structures embedded in a medieval market town so that from step to step you skipped through time.
After Wellington Road was built, development of the centre had slowed down: old buildings stayed where they were, and it was never as radically redeveloped as other areas nearby, which by the 1960s were blighted by industrial decline and lethargy. In the Hillgate area, where Lower led to Middle led to Upper, the past was never rubbed out, lanes and alleyways were never widened or destroyed: some views of rooftops, gutters, lamp posts, railings, chimneys and steps were much as they’d been a hundred years before, and ultimately, dominating everything whether you could see it or not, was the gigantic viaduct dwarfing the Wellington Road bridge that carried trains over the Stockport gorge into and out of Manchester.
The bus square built to the east of Wellington Bridge in the early 1900s near the river was then joined by a new shopping precinct called, with a touch of the futuristic, Merseyway, an awry, slum-clearing sliver of boiled-down Brasilia slotted amongst the shabby remains of eighteenth-century streets and industrial endeavour.
Merseyway transformed the town centre and made it all seem almost contemporary, slyly encouraging locals to think positively about their surroundings, but its minimalist clock tower was not the sort of blackened edifice L. S. Lowry was interested in. If he had ever entered Merseyway, where shops had been turned into mere containers of goods, he would have instantly disappeared in a glum puff of smoke.
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1804
The Rochdale Canal was the first canal to cross the intimidating barrier of the Pennines, linking the industrial areas of Huddersfield, Bradford, Leeds and Halifax with Manchester and Liverpool. Within months, the 50-ton Mayflower, a seagoing vessel, was taken across the Pennines from Hull to Liverpool. The canal’s 32-mile route was finally completed after various sections were opened in 1798 and 1799, five years after construction began. The Rochdale runs from Sowerby Bridge in West Yorkshire and passes through Hebden Bridge and Todmorden before skirting around Rochdale and Oldham meeting the Bridgewater Canal at Castlefield Junction in Manchester. To get over the Pennines without the need for tunnels meant that it had to climb 350 feet to a summit of 600 feet in just 14 miles after leaving Sowerby Bridge on the eastern side and then fall over 500 feet through Failsworth and Chadderton into Manchester on the western side. It required 92 locks including the deepest lock in the UK at Tuel Lane. There were also 100 bridges, two major aqueducts and only two short tunnels. In its first few years the most popular cargo was timber, salt, cement, wool, grain and coal, and a load of about 35 tons could be dispatched by barge from Todmorden in the evening and be in Manchester by the following morning.
1803
Manchester scientist John Dalton, born in 1766 in a tiny thatched cottage in the village of Eaglesfield, Cumberland, starts using symbols to represent the atoms of different elements. He is one of the first scientists to note that all matter is made up of small particles, or atoms.
1802
‘. . . we were afraid of being bewildered in the mists till the Darkness should overtake us – we were long before we knew that we were in the right track . . .’ Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals, January 1802.
It was during a visit on a stormy day to Gowbarrow at Ullswater on Thursday 15 April 1802 that William Wordsworth was inspired to write what is perhaps his most famous and evocative poem, ‘The Daffodils’. William had been accompanied by Dorothy on the excursion to the lake. She apparently wrote a description of the place on the spot in her journal: ‘They tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake.’ William is reported to have relied upon her description when composing the famous poem.
1800
Aged fifteen, Thomas De Quincey entered Manchester Grammar School and learned some important literary lessons while he was there, reading the early works of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and other English Romantic poets who would greatly influence his own writing. He became so miserable and bored he ran away after eighteen months, undertaking a ‘pedestrian excursion’ through Wales, often sleeping rough to save money. De Quincey disliked the upper schoolroom, an immense building 96 feet long and 36 feet wide, with a ceiling between 20 and 30 feet high – ‘though of ample proportions, the room was dreary’ – and complained that ‘the external walls, which might have been easily and at little expense adorned with scenes from classic history, were quite bare’. In his recollection, ‘nothing relieved the monotony’.
William Wordsworth, in his Preface to the second edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, asserted that the rise of technology had blunted the mind ‘to a state of almost savage torpor’.
1799
Everyone with ambition wanted to come to Manchester; it was the place to make your fame and fortune. Archibald Pre
ntice, later to become a reformer and journalist, describes how, at the end of the eighteenth century, he persuaded his Scots employer to concentrate his trade there. ‘He said, “We have coal, and industry, and shrewdness, and intelligence here.” “Yes,” I replied, “you have, but you have not centrality; you are in a corner; you have nothing; you have nothing but Glasgow and Paisley here; Manchester has about a dozen of Paisleys – Wigan, Preston, Blackburn, Bolton, Bury, Rochdale, Ashton, Stockport, and numerous fast-growing villages, all increasing in importance, and likely, some time or other, if fair play is given to their industry, to form one enormous community.” After a long pause, he asked, “When can you go to take a warehouse?”’
In December 1799 William and Dorothy Wordsworth moved into Dove Cottage in Grasmere.
1795
Sir Thomas Percival, a Manchester physician, leads a group of doctors who form the Manchester Board of Health to supervise textile mills and recommend hours and working conditions. Their report led Sir Robert Peel to introduce the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802. Children were only permitted to work twelve hours per day (considered an improvement), walls had to be washed and visitors had to be admitted to factories to make suggestions.
1792
By the time of his death on 3 August 1792 industrial innovator Richard Arkwright had established factories in Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Lancashire and Scotland, and was a wealthy man.
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Suddenly, Stockport went all 1965, as if this once-thriving hat-making area, this ruined kingdom of mills and entrepreneurial adventure now struggling beside an embattled almost eastern European mid-sixties Manchester and its deteriorating inner suburbs, could swing a bit, as if the local council was terrified that the town was the very symbol of the end of an era, of a town sinking into its past.