Portwood – 2023

Where are we?

We once were lost, but are we saved?

A remnant from a discarded photographic album locates us in Cornwall.

The Ordnance Survey places us at the heart of the Industrial Revolution.

Now we are in the shadow of Tesco Extra and a recently opened Porsche dealership.

As of 2022, the supermarket chain had a brand value of roughly 9.91 billion US dollars.

Porsche Automobile Holding SE net worth as of January 2023 is 16.51 US dollars.

By the side of the River Tame and the M60 Motorway

The 19th-century industrial concentrations in the above-named urban areas resulted in the Tame being a much polluted waterway. As well as industrial pollution from the dyes and bleaches used in textile mills, effluent from specialised paper-making cigarette papers, engineering effluents, including base metal washings from battery manufacture, phenols from the huge coal-gas plant in Denton, rain-wash from roads and abandoned coal spoil heaps there was also the sewage effluent from the surrounding population. Up to two-thirds of the river’s flow at its confluence with the Goyt had passed through a sewage works. The anti-pollution efforts of the last thirty years of the 20th century have resulted in positive fauna distributions.

Wikipedia

There is a plot of land to the left of Porsche which remains undeveloped, I often walk around this area, what would have once been for myself and others the place of childhood high jinx.

Now it is the domain of the fly-tipper, the home of the homeless, a war zone for a species which has declared war upon itself.

A desert of detritus, interpolated with tangles of brambles, seas of teasels and the ubiquitous buddleia.

This is the unofficial showroom for the unofficial Anthropocene Epoch – always crashing in a different car, during increasingly unseasonal weather, the superabundance of abundance.

It seems that the sun may set on us, before the sun finally sets.

Let’s take a peep at Portwood.

Game over.

Vehicle use affects our whole quality of local life. Traffic can be dangerous and intimidating, dividing communities and making street life unpleasant, whilst air pollution and traffic noise can make urban living uncomfortable.

Environmental Protection UK

The impacts of mass consumption are: Misuse of land and resources, exporting pollution and waste from rich countries to poor countries, obesity due to excessive consumption, a cycle of waste, disparities and poverty.

Global Issues

Portwood Stockport 2021

We have previously taken a look at Portwood as was – let’s take a giant leap forward to today.

The industry to the east has gone west – no more bees and alligators, instead there’s Tesco and Porsche.

Why make when you can buy?

Meadow Mill has long since ceased to spin and weave – currently undergoing adaptation into modern residential living.

I though, have always been fascinated by the rough ground that now seems so left behind.

Where once I found a weathered book of lost photographs.

This is a scarred and neglected landscape, even the developer’s sign has given up the ghost.

There are brambles, buddleia, rough grass and teasels amongst the rubble.

The remnants of roads, kerbed and tarred, strewn with hastily dumped detritus.

Puddled and forlorn.

Enter beneath the M60, where the Tame and Goyt conjoin to become the Mersey, a dimly lit passage home to the itinerant aerosol artistes.

All that remains of the long gone mills – the concrete base.

Detritus tipped and strewn, amongst the moss.

The remnants of roads going nowhere.

Surrounded by cars going nowhere.

Contemporary architecture creating cavernous canyons.

A landscape forever changing, caught between expectation and fulfilment, paradise forever postponed.

This horror will grow mild, this darkness light.

John Milton

Fred Perry Way – Stockport To Hazel Grove

Second time around – having once cycled the whole way in 2009.

I’ll do anything twice or more – so here we are again, this time on foot.

Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start – in the middle, the section from the town centre to Hazel Grove.

Maps are available here for free – we declined the offer, deciding to follow signs instead, many of which were missing or rotated, the better to misinform and redirect – such is life.

We are mostly lost most of the time, whether we like it or know it or not.

We begin at the confluence of the rivers Mersey and Goyt – which no longer seems to be a Way way, the signs having been removed, and proceed down Howard Street, which seems to have become a tip.

The first and last refuge for refuse.

Passing by the kingdom of rust – Patti Smith style.

Passing under the town’s complex internal motorway system by underpass.

Where help is always handily at hand.

Whistling past the graveyard – the site of the former Brunswick Chapel where one and hundred and fifty souls lay lying.

Onward down Carrington Road to Fred’s house.

Through Vernon Park to Woodbank Park – with its heroic erratic.

Almost opposite the entrance to the museum, now set in shrubbery, are the foundations, laid in September 1860, of what was to be a forty metre high Observatory Tower. Despite a series of attempts, funds for the tower could not be raised and the ‘Amalgamated Friendly Societies of Stockport’ eventually had to abandon the idea.

Historic England

Out east and passing alongside the running track.

Lush meadows now occupy the former football field, twixt inter-war semis and the woodland beyond.

Out into the savage streets of Offerton where we find a Buick Skylark, incongruously ensconced in a front garden.

The only too human imperative to laugh in the face of naturalism.

We have crossed over Marple Road and are deep in the suburban jungle of mutually exclusive modified bungalows.

Off now into the wide open spaces of the Offerton Estate – the right to buy refuge of the socially mobile, former social housing owning public.

People living on Offerton Estate have been filmed for a programme entitled ‘Mean Streets’ which aims to highlight anti-social behaviour in local communities.

MEN 2007

The next thing we know we’re in a field, a mixed up melange of the urban, suburban and rural, on the fringes of a Sainsbury’s supermarket filling station.

We cross the A6 in Hazel Grove and here for today our journey ends

Ignoring the sign we went in the opposite direction.

As we reach the edge of Mirrlees Fields – the site of the only Fred Perry laurel leaf logo emblazoned way marker.

The Fields are currently designated as a green space and are not available for residential development. But MAN would like to overturn this designation for over one third of the Fields.

MAN Energy Solutions UK is the original equipment manufacturer of Mirrlees Blackstone diesel engines.

Before the Blackstone MAN came in 1842 – the fields were all fields.

To be continued.