Stockport

I don’t really know if Stockport’s trying to be a city or a big town, and you get the idea that it doesn’t have a clue either.

See, Stockport’s the bit that missed the toilet — bounced off the rim, the M60, the Manchester ringroad that is — and settled into the carpet halfway between the Pennines and the Cheshire set.

Stockport was where you shopped before you grew up and found Manchester. It’s a parallel world of discount shoe shops and roadsweepers and pastries, and most people wandering about it look fit to die any moment. It’s not really anything at all, which is why it doesn’t know what it is, and the second you leave you forget everything you did there — which is why you end up going again.

Like most of the North West it’s grey and distorts time, and you pay through your arse to park.

Stockport’s where I remember most things about my mother and father together. I remember buying trainers and shoes and wellington boots with them — ones that flashed and others that didn’t. I remember the sizing machine in Clarks that always seemed a small error away from completely mangling my feet. I remember getting my legs cracked for hiding in the suits section of Marks and Spencer while Mum tried her best to hold everything, family included, together.

I doubt Stockport’s ever gleamed — it’s not a paragon of new North West or future anything — and there’s not very much to thrill trade-unionists and industriophiles save a museum of hatting and other heritage-y things like tall brown call centres and car showrooms. What the council won’t tell you about is having your car broken into, and at weekends it’s some kind of grim safari with kids whose music taste and style is three years behind central Manchester.

But having said that, and because of the Victorians and silk factories and the water supply and the second world war, it has some positives, and the only one is the viaduct.

Stockport Viaduct on paper is nothing if not an abortion of a structure. But actually it’s just immense and beautiful and made out of bricks. You can’t see it from space but bless them they tried. It stands astride the M60 and backdrops the whole place — sums up history and stagnancy in big fuck-off italics, and it makes the Stockport Pyramid — the town’s other landmark object — look pathetic, pretentious and ever so try-hard.
And if all that’s left you lost for inspiring images, well, it’s practical too — come to Manchester on a train and you’ll go over it.

Fact: When a pilot threw his plane at the place in 1967 and killed seventy-odd people, I think he did his best to miss it.

Stockport Viaduct is over a hundred feet tall and it’s absolutely everything the Pyramid isn’t. The Pyramid, well that’s just this awful great blue glass thing just screaming out for another bad pilot. All it does is summarise how shit roads look by sitting and rotting in the middle of a massive roundabout, lording it up.

It’s a Jabba the Hutt of a building, or it’s the poor wife of the businesses who’ve fed its growth — and now it can’t go anywhere or leave the house because it doesn’t know what it’s for. It’s highly visible like a McDonalds sign, like a bomb going off, and it’s a lecture on the failings of 90s redevelopment. I think it’s even got a bank’s name on it, which says more than I’ll bother to.