Stockport

The last leg of my train journey took me away from Manchester on an empty London-bound Avanti, past the twin colossi of the stillborn Coop Live and Man City’s moodless arena, through scruffy greenish belt, and into Stockport – or on to Stockport, as arrival is by means of its mighty viaduct.

Towns close to large cities can seem invisible, lost, swamped. Almost 300,000 people call Stockport home, but for the unhappy drivers on the M60 ring road, only the viaduct, overhead, declares something significant thereabouts. Built with 11m bricks at the dawn of the railway age, it’s long and sturdy rather than beautiful, but it adds a dash of drama across the gaping canyon of the Mersey. When you’re on it, everything else looks shabby and unplanned, as if the town ran out of ideas after all the bricklaying. When you’re off it and down below, it’s the thing you most want to look at – but it teases and frustrates, as you never get to see all the span-arches, can’t walk the length of it, and Stockport council has allowed a firm called Capital & Centric to develop Weir Mill, which actually means: erect a 14-storey tower violating the view of the viaduct for everyone else.

LS Lowry drew and painted it several times. An undated, atypical oil, The Viaduct, features the structure low down in the background and two rows of terraced cottages and, centre and much larger, a pub, towards which three men are resolutely walking. The earth is off-white, frozen-looking, as so often in Lowry’s works. Three options face the three men: home, escape, alcohol. Alert to the fact it’s impossible to take it in at a sweep, Lowry used it as a backdrop for his 1955 high-angled composite Industrial Landscape. The Viaduct once belonged to Alec Guinness, and was stolen to be used as currency in drug deals; it was later recovered. Industrial Landscape was bought in 1959 by the Lefevre Gallery for 295 guineas and sold in 2012 by Christie’s for £1,273,250. The viaduct, along with the elegiac sound of whistling trains, had a brief but central role in Tony Richardson’s 1961 film of A Taste of Honey. Jo (Rita Tushingham) tells Geoff (Murray Melvin) she is pregnant. He tells her you can get rid of babies and lots of other unwanted advice about the right thing to do and how she’ll be judged by others. She bridles, declaring, “I am an extraordinary person.” Geoff is won around and they run through an arch, as he shouts, “We’re unique, unrivalled, we’re bloody marvellous!” The scene is now available as a Taste of Honey postcard.

I take a roundabout route to the town centre. Stockport’s architecture is a muddle of grand redbrick and pale stone buildings and newer municipal bits and pieces. Stopford House, built in 1975, is clad in deep-grey aggregate precast panels of varying coarseness. It’s a slab of a building. Is this cool brutalism? Or thug-ism? It was the police station in Life on Mars. A sign on the A6 sign reminds me I’m six and a half miles from Manchester and 182.5 miles from London. Buxton and Chester are also marked. Stockport tilts towards its Roman past and rural environs. New signage points one way towards the courts, council and police, and in the other for the town centre shops. I only get my first glimpse of the viaduct after 15 minutes.

Look at first and second floors in Stockport and you see some signs of Victorian attention to detail. It was a textile town, with specialist mills for hats and silk-throwing, some of which survive. The most arresting building is the Plaza, an art deco theatre designed by William Thornley in 1929 and built in 1932-3. The faience-tiled facade is high and flat, echoing the cliff face to which the structure is bolted; two fluted pilasters shoot towards the sky. Inside, they’re playing jazz and old time showtunes. The teashop-cum-restaurant on the first floor has period decor, gold and green. I am taken aback by the genteel atmosphere and standard of conservation. Originally built as a Super Cinema, the Plaza was a bingo hall for a spell, and closed completely in 1998. A charitable trust and army of volunteers raised £3m to set in motion a recovery plan.

Brenda, a waitress, tells me, “If it wasn’t for the volunteers, it wouldn’t be like this. It would be a Wetherspoon’s probably. I’ve been here 20-odd years since it reopened and I started out pulling six-inch nails out of the wall. We’ve torn up carpets. You name it, we’ve done it.”

It was 11.40am, so I deferred on the champagne celebration tea and opted for leaf tea (with a strainer, milk, no silly lemon) and smoked salmon and scrambled eggs. It was fully booked for lunch. Another friendly volunteer, Tommy, showed me the auditorium and the Mighty Compton Organ, with its glass panels depicting a stylised sunburst.

The sun was out so I skirted the shopping centre. The Underbank area, the smart retail area during the 19th century, feels slightly medieval; it has the shadows, textures and human scale lacking in 20th- and 21st-century Stockport. It’s a little ghetto of hip, cool and independent: a bakery, coffee, barbers, a speakeasy owned by a minor rock star. Stairways connect it to the Market Place above. Overlooming is Robinsons Brewery on Lower Hillgate, a handsome fortress of ale-making decorated with a unicorn for the Unicorn Inn that William Robinson bought in 1838. The plant is being wound up. Cranes hover. Expect a co-work space, apartments, offices or a mix of these. Nearby another stairway creeps. Coopers Brow. I take it.

The stairways have made me think of another painting and nearby I found Crowther Street, where the steps tempted Lowry – whose natural tendency was receding flat planes and marionette people in profile – to depict a curving perspective. Though, even on that painting no one is really looking at us or each other. I photographed the steps and ascended to make my way slowly back to the station.

In 1983, Frankie Vaughan released a single titled Stockport in response to a newspaper competition. It’s a well-crafted if silly effort (all proceeds went to a charity), with a sub-Sinatra refrain: “I’m going back to Stockport/ There’s nowhere that can beat it/ That’s right, I tell you, Stockport/ You want me to repeat it/ Well, it’s S.T.O.C.K.P.O.R.T/ Stockport, Stockport that’s the place for me.”

The song was recorded at the Plaza by a mobile unit from the local recording studio, Strawberry, owned by 10cc. The same engineers worked with Joy Division and Happy Mondays. A deep sense of place seeped into both bands’ music. The former channelled the viaduct and Lowry’s white wastelands. The latter’s songs evoke the clutter of the town under the hesitant, cloud-chased sun. Manchester is fatigued and fat on Factory-themed nostalgia, gastro-hedonism and mega-venues. Perhaps Stopfordians can stop Fordism mass production and Stockport can put on its felt hats and silk gloves once again.

Things to see: Staircase House, Hat Works Museum, Stockport air raid shelters, St George’s Church, Rare Mags