THE “VILLAGE OF HAZEL GROVE.”

The place by degrees became a little settlement of residences built by Manchester men who loved the country, and some of these country houses may even yet be seen in the long street, looking very much out of place amid their new neighbours: notably a large stuccoed house with a tablet bearing the date 1761, and the initials H. J. M. “Bullock Smithy” then no longer served. The name was too redolent of cattle-drovers, and so “Hazel Grove” was invented. On the front of the great white-faced “Red Lion” inn may be seen carved the legend, “Village of Hazel Grove, 1796,” but this does not appear to have been cut until 1836, and the old road-books go on calling the place by its older name until coaching and Cary were both snuffed out.

Some pathetic relics of a bygone day still remain, chiefly in the names of houses and side-streets. But “Cherry Tree Lane” nowadays contains no cherry-trees, and no Jargonels or Bons Chrétiens grow in the garden of “Pear Tree Cottage.”

But still, for a little way ahead, it is only the main road that is so urban. Open fields, a little sickly, it is true, extend on either side, behind the fringe of houses; and away to the left, nearly two miles off, Bramhall Hall, one of the finest of the ancient timbered halls of Cheshire, may be found.

It is interesting, with an interest almost pathetic, to journey on to Manchester and to notice how the urban undertone of the road grows to be the dominant note: how the wayside fringe of bricks and mortar widens and the meadows give place first to brickfields and finally to grey streets. You pass from place to place and think them all one: from Hazel Grove to Heaviley, and thence to Stockport, Heaton Norris, Heaton Chapel, Levenshulme, Grindley Marsh, Longsight, and Ardwick Green, finally coming into Manchester by the infernal din of the thronging traffic at London Road railway station.

A STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

I am a southerner. It has been borne in upon me, on this progression to Scotland, that I am journeying to what is, to all intents and purposes, a foreign land; and on the way to that country across the Border I encounter a growing strangeness. Leicester is the ultimate place on this road wherein the Londoner finds himself on equal terms with the inhabitants. At Derby he notices a slight change; but on approaching Manchester, he finds himself on the threshold of another order of things. He notices a suppressed energy in even the least active, and an abundant vitality everywhere; and he finds a strange accent and strange new expressions. For example, even on the land-agents’ notice-boards, here, on the outskirts of Manchester, there will be seen a something incomprehensible to the stranger from the south: as thus “This Land to be Let, or Sold on Chief.” This strange term, “on Chief,” which looks like a variant of “Freehold,” is really a species of ground-rent: the landowner “selling” his land, yet with the odd reservation of a perpetual “Chief Rent”; by which if he does not precisely achieve the impossible feat usually described as “Eating your cake and having it too,” he certainly does seem to approach that marvel.

The suburban road is here sufficiently broad, and approaching Stockport, where the fine modern church of St. George looks along the vista with its great bulk and graceful spire, it is even imposing, but the prevalent grey atmosphere dims and flattens everything; obscuring details, like an impressionist painter. The great church of St. George, in the newly formed parish of that name, was built in 1897, at the enormous cost of £90,000; borne entirely by one person. With a rather touching, but misplaced, confidence it is surrounded by trim lawns, and an almost rural-looking vicarage rises close by; but the stone-work of the church shows signs of turning black, the earth is growing dank and stale, and the lawns are by degrees going bald.

STOCKPORT

Stockport, in its local patriotism, would probably resent being lumped with “Manchester,” and Manchester itself might object, but to the passer-by, ignorant of local divisions, it is all one with the great city, although the town is not even in the same county with it; the river Mersey here dividing Stockport in Cheshire, from Manchester in Lancashire. Cheshire, in its most characteristic condition, is the Cheshire of the cheese-farms in the great fertile plain, where mild-eyed cows stand knee-deep in pastures; and a great manufacturing town is entirely out of sympathy with such idyllic scenes. I give you my word there are no idylls in Stockport: only a road where the granite setts are greasy; the pavements thronged with busy people and the girls of the cotton-mills; the sky smoky, and the air filled with distracting noise. But to see a less crowded and less noisy Stockport would be a sorry thing, for it is the wealth-producing commerce of the place that makes it what it is, and the times when the railway-lorries cease to crash and rumble along the streets, and when the waggons, laden with mountainous heights of grey shirtings, are no longer seen on their way from the cotton-mills to Manchester warehouses, will be troublous times for not only mill-hand and manufacturer, but for every one.