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Archiver > CHESHIRE > 2008-11 > 1226051017


From: Gordon Adshead <>
Subject: Re: [CHS] Descriptions of Stockport
Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:43:37 +0000
References: <3C9CA6BCBF8A4513BBDBC2D574500FFF@JanePC>
In-Reply-To: <3C9CA6BCBF8A4513BBDBC2D574500FFF@JanePC>


At 23:17 06/11/2008, you wrote:
>Does anyone know if there's a description of
>Stockport (any era) similar to that of Charles
>Booth's London in the 1800's? Obviously not on
>his time and area scale! Doing Sociology many
>years ago - I'm sure I read something similar -
>(can't remeber the author - could be Booth) on
>Salford and the conditions the poor lived
>in. I'm sure I was told a description of many
>areas in England had had to have a similar description.

Just as an idle aside
I was taught at school that when in 1745, Bonnie
Price Charlie passed through Stockport on his way
South to Derby, that he was heard to remark
"what a delightfully pretty valley this is !"
Best Gordon

#################################

Engles of course was very scathing about the
squalor of the way the cotton town had developed in the mid 1800's
My ancestors built mills in Staleybridge between
1810 and1850, so the following notes are quite hard hitting:-

In list of Mansions and ResidencesÂ… A harsh
critic refers to them :- "as a body, the
manufacturers are wealthy - clever - and have
extensive business connections, but their
political interest is the most feeble of that of
all branches of commercial industry, for they
have allowed their accumulated wealth to entomb
them. They have huge factory-like houses within
the sound of their machinery, dinners of puzzling
variety, equipages, servants, everything of the
costliest and best:......but where are there any
indications of a refined and generous
liberality? The yearly stagnation of their
incomes generates nothing but a noxious desire to
have a higher chimney or a bigger mill than their neighbours ".

(and below from) F Engels "The Condition of
the Working Class in England" Published In Leipzig in 1849; in UK 1892 :-

" A mile eastward lies Stalybridge, also on the
Tame. In coming over the hill from Ashton, the
traveller has, at the top, both right and left,
fine large gardens with superb villa-like houses
in their midst, built usually in the Elizabethan
style, which is to the Gothic precisely what the
Anglican Church is to the Apostolic Roman
Catholic. A hundred paces farther and Stalybridge
shows itself in the valley, in sharp contrast
with the beautiful country seats, in sharp
contrast even with the modest cottages of Ashton!
Stalybridge lies in a narrow, crooked ravine,
much narrower even than the valley at Stockport,
and both sides of this ravine are occupied by an
irregular group of cottages, houses, and mills.
On entering, the very first cottages are narrow,
smoke-begrimed, old and ruinous; and as the first
houses, so the whole town. A few streets lie in
the narrow valley bottom, most of them run
criss-cross, pell-mell, up hill and down, and in
nearly all the houses, by reason of this sloping
situation, the ground-floor is half-buried in the
earth; and what multitudes of courts, back lanes,
and remote nooks arise out of this confused way
of building may be seen from the hills, whence
one has the town, here and there, in a bird's-eye
view almost at one's feet. Add to this the
shocking filth, and the repulsive effect of
Stalybridge, in spite of its pretty surroundings, may be readily imagined. "

[Reminds me of the old Lancashire adage "Where
there is muck , there is brass"]
Gordon +Z




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