Commerce is typified in the statues that decorate public buildings by a woman of noble proportions, clothed in classic dress, and in her face a majestic calm; but that is an abstraction. Commerce as understood here—and indeed everywhere—is a matter of telegrams and telephones, of bales, packing-cases, and feverish hurry; and I suppose—if you must feminise—the nearest real human beings to that classic convention are the mill-girls and the typists. For the rest, commerce is what you perceive here; a polluted river, darkened by factories, bridges, and railway viaducts; and great goods yards, advertisement hoardings, banks, and the hundred-and-one kinds of buildings in which the business of the twentieth century is carried on.
The tall railway viaduct that spans the Mersey and goes high over the steep and grimy streets leading down to it, is impressive in its very bulk and in the smoky atmosphere that reveals it only in a broad flat effect; and, in the same way, the towering buildings that have no beauty of detail, gloom down upon you with an ogreish aspect that transcends their ugliness and elevates it into the region of horrific romance.
That such a place can ever have been the site of a castle wherein dwelt the glittering creatures of chivalry is scarce thinkable: and yet there was such a stronghold. But the very ruins of it were cleared away so long ago as 1775. They were very scanty, and no sort of use to Prince Charles, when he passed here, going and returning in the ’45. His Highlanders, we learn from one of the diarists of that time, “were very rough as they went through Stockport, and took Mr. Elcock and 2 or 3 more with ’em, with Halters about their necks.”
OLD TOWN HOUSE OF THE ARDERNES, STOCKPORT.
Those good old times again, when England was Merry England. What fun!
But these good Stockport people were not strung up, after all, and returned later in the day to the bosom of their families.
A relic of an older Stockport that knew nothing of cotton-mills or other factories is to be found in the street called Great Underbank. This is the old timbered town house of the Ardernes of Harden and Tarporley. This ancient family resorted hither in the long ago from their various country seats, and called it “coming to town.” The Manchester and Liverpool District Bank now occupies the fine old place.
The “White Lion” was an interesting old inn, but it has gone down before Stockport’s growing commercial greatness. It was the house, according to usually received accounts, where the following tribute to the management was to be seen, inscribed on a window-pane by some dissatisfied guest of nearly a century and a half ago: