Category: Stockport

Stockport Venue 12 – Viaduct Park

Contained within Stockport’s £1billion town centre regeneration is the creation of a modern transport hub and one of the key elements of the scheme was to replace the old, dog-eared bus station which was built back in 1981.

So, in 2024 the new Stockport Interchange was opened with eighteen bus stands that can facilitate up to 164 bus departures per hour. There has been space left in the design to accommodate a metro link tram stop if the proposed metro extension to Stockport ever comes to fruition at a later date.  

Stockport Interchange. Image Credit alamy.com

It is a fine set up and has walking links to the shopping areas and the nearby train station and cycling links to the River Mersey and onto the Trans Pennine Trail. There is also a 17 storey, 196-unit Build to Rent residential building with two floors of basement parking located adjacent.

Above the Interchange is a two-acre rooftop green space, Stockport Viaduct Park which is also available for community events. The whole site was officially opened on 17/03/24 and the following weekend events were set up as part of the Stockport Town of Culture Weekender.

A local musician called John Unwin had an idea to recruit and set up a Stockport Community Steel band. He is a very experienced steel band player and community teacher within this musical art. He arranged some preliminary sessions for February, and a fledgling band was created with their debut taking place at Viaduct Park on 23/03/24.

Gill and I decided to support this local initiative and there were over 50 free events at over 25 separate locations in the town over the two-day shindig including opening up the Air Raid shelters and the newly refurbished Hat Works Museum. We initially landed into Stockport train station before gravitating over to have a proper look at the impressive park. Unfortunately, it was a brutal ‘brass monkey’ cold kind of day, but it was at least thankfully dry.  

Stockport Viaduct Park. Image Credit feeds.bbci.co.uk

There were about 50 band members playing that day and the experienced ones were providing direction to the newer recruits. It was great fun, and they played three extended tracks and perhaps naturally one of them was ‘Soul Limbo’.

That song was originally recorded by Booker T and the MGs in 1968 and features a marimba (similar to a xylophone but with a lower range) solo by Terry Manning who was a renowned recording engineer, record producer and musician across a fifty-year time span working with artists such as Led Zeppelin, Otis Redding, Big Star and Shakira.

It also contained cowbell playing by Isaac Hayes, one of the driving forces behind the Southern soul Stax Records label in the 1960’s alongside writing the musical score for the iconic 1971 film ‘Shaft’ and being the voice of the Chef character in South Park.

There is naturally, as ever a riotous cover version of the ditty by Snuff and the original song derives from the band’s sixth album which also features the title track to ‘Hang Em High’, a Clint Eastwood movie released that very year.

‘Soul Limbo’ is perhaps most famous though for being the recognised theme tune for BBC Television’s cricket coverage and BBC Radio’s Test Match Special. In 1999 the Barmy Army England cricket supporters recorded ‘Come on England’ which was set to the same tune and the sister video featured cricketers Ian Botham and Ronnie Irani, umpire Dickie Bird and somewhat bizarrely Chris Tarrant!     

Isaac Hayes. Image Credit dustygroove.com

The steel pan (or drum) derived originally in Trinidad and Tobago in the 1930’s and was built on the template of African drumming. Basically, anything at the musician’s disposal was used to create the sound including metal objects such as dustbins and plant pots.

An important discovery was then made as the addition of convex dents battered into the sides of a 55-gallon oil drum allowed different musical pitches to be created. I adore the tales of those innovations and always muse on the combination of events that results in these breakthroughs!  

I have always been a fan of the mournful evocative sound of the pedal steel guitar and first heard it via a key proponent of the instrument, Ben Keith. He learnt his trade in the Nashville country music scene in the 1950’s and 1960’s and his first participation on a hit record was on Patsy Cline’s 1961 track ‘I Fall to Pieces’.

Ben played with Neil Young for over forty years, featuring on his iconic 1972 album ‘Harvest’ and also played the part of Grandpa Green in a film called Greendale which accompanied Neil’s 2003 record with the same name. He was inducted into the Musician’s Hall of Fame and Museum four years after his death in 2014.

Stockport Venue 11 – Spinning Top

I am continuing the tale this week of Stockport gigs and will begin wending my way in towards the town centre. However, I will initially take a brief cultural diversion if I may as I have just discovered that a large property called ‘Ferncliff’ on Mauldeth Road  is up for sale. The dilapidated house which contains ten bedrooms, and five receptions rooms is on the market for cash offers around £1.6million! The reason for my referencing is that it was used as the location for the 2019 quirky dystopian Russell T Davies scripted Years and Years TV series.

So, picking up from beyond Heaton Chapel train station, this leads you to Wellington Road North which astonishingly runs you later on into Wellington Road South, who would credit it! It is more commonly known as the A6 and the route of a Manchester institution, the 192 bus! Transport has run down this route from Hazel Grove to Manchester city centre since 1889, commencing with horse drawn trams before it was later numbered as the 192 in 1969.

The 192 Bus. Image Credit flickr.com

The buses are astoundingly regular and there are even night services at the weekends, and it is recognised as the busiest route in the country with 9m annual passengers and in 2008 became the first in Britain to have solar-powered on-street ticket machines. In 2013 a local singer called Dave Hulston devised a whole album in commemoration called ‘Willow and the 192’ which spawned a one-off festival called ‘192 Accoustifest’ at the M19 bar in Stockport.

There must be something in the local water supply as Elbow in their track ‘Great Expectations’ reference the 135 Bury to Manchester bus and the Manchester Blog winner, also in 2013, was penned by philosophy PHD student Geoff Stevenson who was musing about his travels to Manchester University aboard the 43 bus from Wythenshawe.      

Now obviously when you move to a new area you want to try and darken the doors of all the public houses at least once to tick them off, I am assuming that is a standard aspiration for anybody, or maybe just me! In this regard, plans were afoot to have a sally down and visit the four A6 Heaton Norris hostelries on the outskirts of Stockport, but this was scuppered by the pandemic.

By the time I managed to make the pilgrimage in 2024 with Uncle George in tow, the number of available pubs had halved. The first closure was the Hope Inn that had a microbrewery enclosed within which produced their own brand of Fool Hardy ales. It reopened fleetingly post-covid but then was struck by lighting and then closed for good and has now reopened as a branch of the Mother Hubbard’s fish and chip chain. They now have 19 sites, including one in Dubai with the first opened by Coronation Street’s Stan and Hilda Ogden in Bradford in 1972 and the price then for fish and chips was a paltry 45p!

The Railway pub. Image Credit Jimmy Crossthwaite

The other pub was the Railway where they used to have Jazz gigs every Sunday and Tuesday and rather poignantly the chalk board outside is still showing details on the gigs that were scheduled for March 2020 before the sudden universal closures. At least the jazz gigs survived by relocating to the Moor Club in Heaton Moor.

However, the ‘jewel in the crown’ the Magnet Free House was most definitely open and is a real ale pub renowned across the area. It was originally a coaching inn built in 1840 due its close proximity to the now long gone Heaton Norris train station before latterly refurbishing into its current format in 2009. It is a terrific boozer with around 25 ales on tap and numerous staff serving behind the small bar. It was packed on a Saturday teatime, and we decamped to the decent size beer garden outside where they also had a pizza oven in full operation.

It also has the accolade of being named as one of the 12 ‘best boozers’ in the UK by National Geographic in 2024 with their ratings based around an aversion to loud music, Sky Sports and ordering with QR codes. Gill and I have visited since and worryingly discovered there is a bus stop outside that provides a bus route close to home! Further down the hill is the Midland which is a lot less interesting where me and the Uncle played some woeful darts, Luke Littler we were not!

After you cross the River Mersey and begin to climb up again you reach Stockport Spinning Top. The venue is situated under the Garrick Theatre, where I saw Mike Harding thirty odd years ago, and first opened its doors in 2014. They have had comedy nights in the past and also showcase local original artwork on the walls which is then available to purchase.

The Spinning Top. Image Credit useyourlocal.com

They have live music taking place there four times a week, mainly in the rock vein. They appear to have a lot of cover bands playing but also have occasional original acts and I can find records of the late 80’s popsters The Distractions playing there in 2017. On the same night we visited the Magnet we made our debut visit to the venue.

It was a fairly spartan lay out with the bar to the right and the stage to the left. The band performing were Paytron Saint, a three piece alt-rock band who hail from the Amber Valley in Derbyshire. They formed in 2018 and have released a slew of singles so far, mainly recorded at their own Chicken Coop studio. They were fully acoustic on the night, and they were very enjoyable.