Mark Steel’s In Town

Wilmslow

Wilmslow, in Cheshire, is ridiculous. It’s known as ‘the Knightsbridge of the North’, but if Harrods tried to set up a branch there it would be refused planning permission as it would lower the tone of the area. When I first arrived to survey the place for one of the radio shows, I was slightly sceptical of its reputation as a haven for the prime of new money – its population couldn’t just be soap stars, ex-criminals and Premier League footballers; there aren’t enough of them to fill a whole town.

To start with I went to Alderley Edge, where the cream of the area’s over-privileged twattery is said to live, and popped into the post office for a stamp. In the window, just as you might see in any post office, were dozens of little cards, which would normally advertise ‘Pram for sale’ or ‘Carpenter – no job too small’. But in this window the first card I saw said, ‘Ring me if you need a butler.’

And that seems to be Wilmslow’s essence. As you enter the main street there’s a vast Aston Martin showroom, which boasts that it sells more cars than any other branch in Britain, including the one in Mayfair. I went inside, and it was hard to adjust, because none of the normal car-buying etiquette applies. If you circle the DBS 6.0 Volante model, throwing it the half-interested semi-scowl you’re supposed to adopt when sizing up a car for sale, kicking the tyres and scornfully looking under the bonnet as if to say, ‘You’ll be lucky if anyone takes this off your hands,’ and ask disparagingly, ‘How much you asking, mate?’, you’ll get the reply, ‘One hundred and ninety-one thousand, five hundred pounds sir.’

The salesmen are so ‘high class’ they don’t even bullshit you. ‘They call this a four-seater, but I don’t know what size of person would fit in those back seats,’ one told me, adding, ‘But one feature we do offer with these models is the option of customising the upholstery to match the colour of your hat.’

With not a hint of disdain, or that he was thinking ‘Don’t waste my time, serf, you couldn’t afford the fucking wing mirror,’ he demonstrated how the speakers have sensors that automatically move when you get in, adjusting themselves to the direction and height of your ears. Then he perkily told me that one of his customers keeps his car in the garage, sits in it each evening listening to classical music, and never takes it anywhere.

Mostly the High Street is full of beauty salons, dozens of the things, as if the residents leave a beauty salon, walk fifty yards and go, ‘Oh my God, my nails haven’t been done for nearly a minute, they’ll be corroding,’ and dive into another beauty salon.

Each of these emporia needs a unique way to market itself. One, called ‘Esthetique’, has a subheading on its sign that says ‘Beauty – wellbeing – science’. So presumably as they’re manicuring your toenails they’ll tell you that according to quantum mechanics the varnish they’re using has no fixed resting place in the universe. Another has a board outside that says ‘3D eyelashes’. I can see why that would be useful, as it’s so irritating when bits of your body are only in 2D. Those normal eyelashes, you go to brush them and your hand passes straight through them, the awkward two-dimensional buggers. What a delight it must be to have eyelashes that seem like solid objects, rather than looking as if they’ve been projected by film onto your eyelids, though presumably when you’ve had the 3D eyelash treatment you have to hand out special glasses to everyone around you, or the effect doesn’t work.

There’s an endearing old tailor’s shop on the stretch of road to Alderley Edge, full of tape measures and dummies wearing semi-sewn suits, and crisp folded shirts packed on mahogany shelves. In the window was a purple smoking jacket, seductively eccentric. Once you’d put it on, whoever you were, you would surely start flowing with witticisms about the nature of women and reciting captivating anecdotes about your trip to Bermuda with King George VI. ‘I’m just, er, out of interest, asking, er, about the cost of that purple jacket, please,’ I enquired of the immaculately grey, slightly theatrical tailor.

‘Ah, indeed, the purple jacket,’ he purred. ‘That is stitched with such exquisite precision by my dear friend who goes by the name “Dashing Tweeds”. Do you know him?’

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘If you peruse the lining you catch a sense of the inner strength of the cloth, and up close you can feel it almost breathes with pleasure. It will never lose its shape, that item, sir.’

‘Roughly, er, roughly how much?’ I asked, as if the price was just an incidental piece of red tape I had to clarify to satisfy the bureaucrats in my office.

‘That particular item is priced at £1,800,’ he said. ‘Plus VAT.’

‘Hmm,’ I said, as if I was barely interested, and if anything that was disappointingly on the low side, but he must have been able to read in my eyes that every bit of me was going, ‘FOR A FUCKING JACKET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’

But mostly Wilmslow’s money is about property. Football stars such as Wayne Rooney, Peter Crouch, Rio Ferdinand, Cristiano Ronaldo and David Beckham have all bought land there, along with Andrew Flintoff and an assortment of Coronation Street actors. And invariably, once the deal is settled, the first thing the happy buyers do with the new house is to knock it down. Then they’re free to build a modern structure in its place that doesn’t have the embarrassment of being second-hand.

So along the roads that surround Wilmslow are lines of skips and teams of builders catering to this demand. Trades such as interior designer flourish in this environment, more than they probably would in Moss Side, so the place abounds with the likes of Dawn Ward, who designed the Rooneys’ pad. Her proudest creation, she revealed, was a glass floor in a hallway, which enables anyone standing on it to see the snooker table in the room below. I bet one day we’ll all have them, and will look back on the days when if we wanted to know the score of the snooker match downstairs we had to walk down the stairs, with the same incredulous pity we feel now when we learn of villages in Uganda where they still have to fetch water from a well ten miles away.

Every one of these properties boasts a ‘media room’, as if anyone needs a special separate room for when they’re reading a paper or watching the darts. They’ve clearly got so many rooms their owners have to invent purposes for them, which all the others will then want. So there are probably arguments, with Mrs Rooney going, ‘It’s not fair, how come the Flintoffs have got their own particle collider? I want one.’

But it would be hard to beat the estate agent’s leaflet I saw, from ‘Property Confidential’, that oozed pride as it announced the sale of a ‘luxury bungalow’ for £1.75 million. The property included, it said, a swimming pool and sauna, and added, ‘This luxury bungalow also boasts an additional feature – a second floor.’

Occasionally some of the older locals initiate a spot of official grumbling about their area being converted into a Cheshire Dubai, but they don’t seem to have the will to carry it through. For example, some residents complained that Cristiano Ronaldo’s 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 a ‘Robin Hood tax’ to reduce inequality. Another hip-hop crew managed to rhyme ‘living in Cheshire’ with ‘feel the pressure’.

The average weekly wage in Wilmslow in 2007, according to a report from the Office of National Statistics, was £772, compared to the poorest area of the North-West, the Manchester district of Gorton, where the average was £403. That would seem to confirm the image of Wilmslow as an exclusive enclave for the elite. But you could also interpret those figures as suggesting that the gap between rich and poor areas is much less than might be imagined. Because while the average company director makes fifteen times as much as the average of his employees, investment bankers and the real rich can make more in bonuses in a single year than the people who clean their office earn in a lifetime. So you might expect the difference between Wilmslow’s average and that of a poor borough of Manchester to be much wider.

This should be even more likely when you think that that average must include Wayne Rooney and friends. If you took a few dozen comically rich superstars out of the statistics the gap would be smaller still. Every rich area has its working-class quarter, just as every poor town has a rich bit. The divide between rich and poor is much less a conflict between areas than one within areas.

Perhaps an area can seem to be dominated by wealth more than it really is, because a handful of rich people have a disproportionate bearing on the look of a place. The shops will cater for them, because they’re the ones who have the money to spend. A country road on which ten millionaires live is an area swimming in wealth, whereas ten people on the minimum wage wouldn’t fill a single house converted into bedsits. The restaurants, beauty salons and purple-jacket shops tend to the needs of the richer section of the community. So you end up with a place that, in some ways, must be even more frustrating to live in if you’re on a low income. Because on the way to work you have to pass an Aston Martin showroom and a shop selling jackets for £1,800 plus VAT, and even if you’re driven to burglary you’re likely to get walloped with a bat signed by Andrew Flintoff.

Wigan

A few miles from the media rooms and glass floors of Wilmslow is the slight contrast of Wigan, where I sensed that the old couple hunched in the tea bar in the indoor market didn’t trust us. All around were the props and costumes you’d lay out if you wanted to make a film set in 1971, maybe involving a detective trying to get information out of a trader who sold knocked-off kettles. Above each stall was an old green or brown board with the owner’s name painted by hand, in the sort of font used for Olde English Marmalade and by companies who want to convince you the stuff they stew in a vat in an industrial estate in Kent was made by a farmer’s wife with a rolling pin, who says, ‘Right, that’s today’s cherry pies for Marks and Spencer in St Albans sorted, now I’ll just take round the vicar’s gooseberries and I can get on with Mrs Finlay’s plum crumble portions for Budgens in Exeter.’

These signs usually suggest that you’ll be offered a small dish of hand-picked olives stuffed with low-fat organic Tuscan soil at £30 an ounce, or stilton mixed with conkers packed in the sort of fancy box you’d use for a wedding ring. But in Wigan they don’t need to artificially recreate the chic individuality of pre-industrial shopping. These stalls really have been there for a hundred years. If any designers for farmers’ markets were to wander in they’d clap their hands and shriek, ‘Oh, how rustic! It’s so authentic!’

There are countless racks of kids’ dresses, and shirts for four quid, and a record stall with a range from Hot Chocolate to Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Top of the Pops albums. There’s a stall selling sherbet by the ounce and stuck-together pear drops, and a café with rickety chairs that belong in a primary school, that only sells lobby, which is a stew with potatoes that looks as if it’s been made at a camp by scouts.