Tag: Stockport Town of Culture Weekender

Stockport Venues 13 and 14

In March 2024 Gill and I decided to have a gander at the events contained within the Stockport town of Culture Weekender. After some Steel Band action at the Viaduct Park, we continued up the A6 to reach the Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery located on the corner of Wellington Road South and Greek Street.

The gallery is this very year celebrating its centenary as it was initially opened on 15 October 1925 by Prince Henry. At the time, the local residents decided against a singular traditional war memorial and instead built this as a place of reflection and healing and to commemorate those lost in the First World War. They have a constant rotation of events and there is currently a special exhibition to mark the anniversary with items of hope featuring artworks from local artists, and it is titled ‘Beautiful Things’. 

Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery. Image Credit onestockport.co.uk

It is a neo classically designed building with ‘Rocky’ style steps leading up to the entrance and it achieved Grade II listed status in 2007. It has a marble paved hall and fluted Greek columns and contains four individual gallery spaces. There are plaques inscribed with the names of the 2200 World War 1 casualties and further plaques have been added since to include the later 20th century conflicts.

On the day of our visit there was a highly sobering exhibition in place containing health workers testimonials on their reflections of the realities of working on the front line during the recent pandemic, it brought tears to your eyes!

In the memorial hall at the rear there was a local musician with a fine voice called James Holt who was playing some acoustic tunes. I thought he sounded and looked familiar, and I later confirmed that I had seen him previously at the Tribeca venue in Manchester as part of one of the Dot to Dot festivals. Despite a pretty good memory of previous performers, it is an ongoing occupational hazard when witnessing the artists again in a completely different setting from the first time I encountered them.

Just off the M60 and within walking distance of the town centre there is a large retail park called Portwood. It has the usual ‘delightful’ retail outlets but has been enhanced recently with the addition of an M&S Food Hall, though a second mortgage is sometimes required to shop there!

Also, there is a branch of Dunelm where shortly after we relocated I had to navigate the traffic to make two visits in one day, as I had a ‘middle age shout out’ of having to return some curtains as I had measured them incorrectly.

Whilst I was searching through the tsunami of choices the curtains must have read my rare grumpy mood and all decided in unison to collapse on the floor around me, causing me to utter the phrase ‘For F£$%’s Sake’ rather loudly before stomping off in a ‘Piers Morgan leaving the ITV Studio’ style strop to the nearest lavatory to calm down. Not my finest moment, but undoubtedly my finest ‘Dunelm’ moment!

Arden Arms. Image Credit pubgallery.co.uk

As you head back into town, you cross the main drag at what surely has to be the slowest pedestrian crossing in the whole of Cheshire and if you swing a left on Millgate adjacent to Asda you reach Stockport Arden Arms. This Grade II listed olde-worlde pub was built in 1815 as a replacement for Ye Blew Stoops, a coaching inn that dates all the way back to 1650. It is believed to be the oldest hostelry in the centre of Stockport and there used to be five large inns in that vicinity, but the Arden Arms is now the sole survivor.

There must have been some nefarious activities being undertaken there back in the day as it used to have a secret passage that enabled punters to flee from any danger and which led them through a tunnel to the nearby St Mary’s Church. I cannot envisage anyone taking that route would then have stopped a while in the church to repent!

The story goes is that the original builder of the Arden Arms, George Raffald Junior, used to hide in the nearby trees to catch any would-be burglars and the cellar was used to store bodies during influenza outbreaks. The original stables that date back to Ye Blew Stoops days can still be seen in the beer garden.

Arden Arms beer garden which the stage normally located at the end of the room. Image Credit facebook.com

My initial visit there was to grab some lunch, at which point I identified that they stage live music every weekend. Thus, in September 2024 Uncle George and I made a pilgrimage there on a Saturday night and discovered that the small indoor pub opened into an unexpectedly large and very impressive outdoor space, with half of the area being covered in front of the stage. Thankfully it was dry and reasonably mild on our visit, but I did think that the heated sheltered space would be a godsend in the winter months.

On stage were Blues with a Feeling, a Manchester five-piece blues band named after a track of that name performed by Little Walter. They provided a pleasing blast of 1960’s Chicago blues inspired sound.

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.