Mark Steel’s In Town. Mark Steel
house was ‘offensive and insensitive’, and began the process of demanding a local referendum to change the area’s planning rules. But the plan was scrapped because a referendum was considered too expensive, probably because they’d insist on a solid-gold ballot box.
Nowhere in Wilmslow seems immune to the pervading local ostentatiousness. The Barnado’s charity shop on Alderley Edge High Street is full of Gucci shoes and Armani coats that don’t have prices on them, and you have to ring the bell to be allowed in, as the stuff’s so valuable.
The chip shop has a notice on the menu saying, ‘We often get celebrities in our chip shop. We would be grateful if you would respect their right to eat their meal in privacy.’
It wouldn’t be surprising to find a ‘Grand’ shop, for throw-away household items like ironing-board covers and dishcloths, where everything costs only a grand.
Even crime has its Wilmslow aspect. The Wilmslow Express reported: ‘A mum of two turned have-a-go hero and hit a burglar for six with a cricket bat. The bat was used in the Ashes series by the England squad, and her husband bought it in a charity auction.’ In Wilmslow you can’t attack burglars with any old bat, it’s got to be one worth thousands of pounds for its historical significance. She was probably wandering round the house going, ‘What shall I attack him with? I couldn’t whack him with that tatty old broom, what on earth would he think?’
The Live Cheshire magazine that lies on tables in the cocktail bars and beauty salons has headlines such as ‘Why Mustique is a Must’, and ‘Justin Timberlake and Madonna Swear by it, and Now it’s Come to Cheshire. It’s Hyberbaric Oxygen Technology Skin Treatment’.
While the footballers and soap stars are the most prominent characters fuelling this bizarre fountain of new money, there’s a sub-layer of financiers and bankers; and that, you’d think, must be that: the place is no more than a monument to the triumph of bonuses over talent, a creation of pure Thatcherism.
Except that the Wilmslow spirit goes back further than that, and its fondness for the 1980s goes back to around 1850. This was when Manchester became the heart of the most dynamic phase of the Industrial Revolution, the centre of the world’s cotton and clothing industries, the biggest urban setting on the planet. But it was also squalid, the waste of its citizens slopping merrily down the streets, the smoke creating constant darkness. And the managers and owners of the factories didn’t want to live amidst the gunge they were helping to create. They needed somewhere far enough away that they couldn’t smell the place, but near enough that they could get to work every day. The perfect spot was Wilmslow.
Its Alderley Edge wing was virtually created for that reason. It was barely inhabited at the time, but the railway company did a deal with the Trafford family (of Old Trafford fame), who were the main landowners of the area. Anyone who bought a certain amount of land there would be provided with a lifetime first-class season ticket. Within a few years the first railway commuter town had been created.
But it wasn’t just respite from the soot and sewage of Manchester that the Wilmslow residents were seeking: they wanted a separate world from the people they employed. They saw themselves as members of a new class that had made money without having to inherit it. While they may not have wanted to adopt all the manners of the aristocracy, they did want to create a cultural gap between themselves and the hordes they employed, who they saw as inferior. For example, in the 1850s Henry Gibbs wrote in Autobiography of a Manchester Cotton Manufacturer about a fire that burned down the factory he ran: ‘The women were, of course, the first to escape. But why did they not walk out quietly, with calmness and dignity? There was really no need for them to make such a helter-skelter exit, with their rolling eyes, hair loose and arms unnecessarily used in the act of dragging each other from the place of destruction. “Shame,” I cried, for the noise they were making, to which they took no heed.’
Because you certainly wouldn’t get his class of person behaving in such an uncouth manner; they’d calmly burn to death, without rolling their eyes.
Throughout Wilmslow, houses were built to cater for such people, and while they didn’t have media rooms, they had billiard rooms and servants’ quarters and a million rules of etiquette created to distance their owners from the riff-raff. According to Manchester Made Them, by Katharine Chorley, who was brought up in one such Alderley Edge house: ‘The downstairs lavatory, for instance, was sacrosanct to the men of the family and their guests, the upstairs reserved with equal exclusiveness to the females. Woe betide me if I was ever caught slinking into the downstairs one to save time. Conversely, the good breeding and social knowledge of any male guest who was suspected of having used the upstairs toilet while dressing for dinner was immediately called into question.’
The Manchester nouveaux riches settling in the area were described by the older landed Wilmslow types as ‘Cottontots’. They devised a system for introducing women newly arrived in the area into the right circles. According to Manchester Made Them, ‘A wife or daughter with nothing to do was an emblem of success, like a large house or garden.’
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Katharine Chorley writes: ‘A socialist was unthinkable in Alderley Edge company, and had he got there he would have been treated with a mixture of distrust, contempt and fear.’ At the very least a socialist would run into even more difficulties than normal, as the master of the house grunted angrily, ‘Sir, I fear your proposition to diminish the gap between rich and poor should have been made prior to the serving of dessert, as advocacy of the overthrow of capitalism after the meat course is strictly forbidden.’
Dessert might have presented another quandary for socialists. Chorley wrote of the manager of a Manchester bank, ‘When he and his wife gave dinner parties, they presented dessert on a solid gold plate.’
A special girls’ school was established to teach the female offspring of this tribe how to eat off gold plates, and be a proper lady. One regular lesson was on how to keep your back straight in a ladylike fashion, so, ‘After midday dinner, we had to lie flat on our backs on the floor for ten minutes, to straighten our spines so we could hold ourselves well, while the mistress in charge read to us from the Daily Telegraph.’
I’d like to see Davina McCall make that fitness DVD. ‘Now, keep that spine as straight as you can and take deep breaths in time to the letters page, and … “Sir: When one regards the hordes of feral youth that blight our city centres” – AND STRETCH – “one is forced to conclude” – KEEP THAT BACK STRAIGHT – “that the time has surely arrived” – DEEP BREATHS NOW – “when we must return” – KEEPING THAT TUMMY TIGHT – “to the virtues of corporal punishment” – AND RELAX.’
In their way, like much of Victorian Britain, the settlers of Wilmslow were establishing tradition. And none of it is different in essence from the craving for 3D eyelashes and sports car upholstery to match your hat.
But a glance beyond the shopfronts suggests that can’t be all there is to Wilmslow. In the inevitable pedestrianised precinct, outside Costa Coffee stands a man selling the Big Issue, and he seems to be there every day. Maybe people walk past him whispering to themselves, ‘Isn’t it dreadful? That poor man has hasn’t even got a second home.’
Or perhaps he’s an art installation. But there’s a side of Wilmslow that he represents, like the Colshaw estate, owned by the council before it was sold off and chunks of it boarded up, where one attempt to clean it up involved removing 104 dumped cars, discarded by joyriders. Or maybe the council misunderstood, and they were all Aston Martins that they assumed had been dumped as they hadn’t moved for years, but actually they all had labourers sitting in them listening to Shostakovich.
Many people in Wilmslow worked at AstraZeneca pharmaceuticals, where three hundred were laid off in 2008, or at Worthington Nicholls air-conditioning plant, which laid off one hundred. It’s unlikely that they all had a butler to hand them their coats as they left work for the last time and say, ‘Your P45, sir.’ The local postmen picketed the sorting office during a strike, in which fifty of the fifty-four staff supported the action.
The young of the area can display classic small-town frustration. Frisko Dan is a local rapper who led a local march in 2010, in support of