About the book
Stockport
From Above: Yesterday & Today is a new book
of historic and modern aerial photographs of
Stockport.
With
several hundred images, the book gives a new
perspective on the town, allowing people to view
the area’s famous landmarks from a vantage
point that they may never have seen before, as
well as views of areas that have changed almost
beyond all recognition.
The
historic photographs from the Archives of
Stockport Heritage Library show a remarkable
urban landscape that has all but vanished in the
intervening years. Superb black and white
photographs, the earliest of which dates back to
1926, show the vast factories and mills that were
once littered the landscape and the appearance
and disappearance of major landmark buildings.
Highlights
include a fascinating series of images of the
River Mersey in Stockport town centre, with
pictures taken before, during and after it was
covered over by the building of the Merseyway
road, which was later redeveloped into the
Merseyway Shopping Centre. There are also
pictures of Mersey Square from the 1930s before
and after the Plaza Theatre was built, images of
the lost community at Portwood - which was once
dominated by the cooling tower of Stockport power
station and street after street of terraced
housing - and also landmarks such as the
magnificent Town Hall, which stood out as a
beacon of white surrounded by buildings blackened
by decades of industrial activity (see below).
And
it's not just the town centre; the historic
collection also covers the suburban areas, when
many were just developing from rolling fields and
country lanes into the modern areas that we now
know. There are historic photos of all of the
major districts, including Bramhall, Cheadle,
Cheadle Hulme, Edgeley, Gatley, Hazel Grove, The
Heatons, Marple, Reddish and Romiley.
The
Images:
The
old images in the book come from the archives of
Stockport Heritage Library, with most from the
1920s and 1930s, and also a selection from the
1950s. The modern images have been taken by Webb Aviation of
Bramhall in Stockport. Flying out of Barton
Aerodrome, Webb Aviation’s superb
colour photographs present the town in a new
light, and allow comparisons to be made with the
old images. Where possible we have attempted to
take new pictures that match the old ones as
closely as possible, providing us with the
opportunity to see for the first time the many
changes that have occurred over the course of the
20th Century.
Before this book, modern aerial
views of Stockport were hard to come by due to
the presence of the flight path to Manchester
Airport directly above the town. We have
undertaken the largest ever aerial survey of
Stockport for this publication, with over 800 new
aerial pictures taken over many flights to
compliment the 300 historic views in the Library
archives. Visit the Gallery
page
for a sample of some of the new photos.
Stockport Town Hall - 1933 |
Barnes Home, Heaton Mersey - 1934
(Now demolished) |
Areas
Covered:
All areas of Stockport are covered
in the book, as well as the neighbouring SK12
postal area, which includes the villages of
Disley and Poynton, and also Lyme Park and Lyme
Hall, which all have a long history with
Stockport. Indeed, Lyme Hall was owned by
Stockport before being bought by the National
Trust.
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