Mark Steel’s In Town. Mark Steel

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      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.

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