I grew up in a suburb of Stockport and when I was younger, Stockport town centre was, to put it politely, ‘angin. It could have been described using a lot of words beginning with f and s, but ‘fashionable’ and ‘sought-after’ weren’t among them.
However, this is no longer true. The wider transformation of Greater Manchester in my lifetime has been massive. Stockport is now regularly described (both ironically and unironically) as ‘the new Berlin.’ I know someone not from Greater Manchester who was interested in moving to Edgeley because it had nice coffee shops. Manchester city centre, which once emptied after office hours, is now packed with flats, bars, students, cranes, hotels and people who voluntarily pay £8 for a pint. It’s even pretty difficult to get Stockport County tickets these days too.
These are the sorts of sentences that would have sounded like jokes when I was growing up. As Jack Peacock pointed out recently, Stockport finished 12th in the original 2003 Crap Towns, but the Sunday Times named it the best place to live in the North West in 2024. There’s no Gail’s Bakery in Stockport town centre yet, but give it time.
Why did Greater Manchester recover when so many other post-industrial cities struggled?
