Mark Steel’s In Town. Mark Steel

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СКАЧАТЬ the Wilmslow residents were seeking: they wanted a separate world from the people they employed. They saw themselves as members of a new class that had made money without having to inherit it. While they may not have wanted to adopt all the manners of the aristocracy, they did want to create a cultural gap between themselves and the hordes they employed, who they saw as inferior. For example, in the 1850s Henry Gibbs wrote in Autobiography of a Manchester Cotton Manufacturer about a fire that burned down the factory he ran: ‘The women were, of course, the first to escape. But why did they not walk out quietly, with calmness and dignity? There was really no need for them to make such a helter-skelter exit, with their rolling eyes, hair loose and arms unnecessarily used in the act of dragging each other from the place of destruction. “Shame,” I cried, for the noise they were making, to which they took no heed.’

      Because you certainly wouldn’t get his class of person behaving in such an uncouth manner; they’d calmly burn to death, without rolling their eyes.

      Throughout Wilmslow, houses were built to cater for such people, and while they didn’t have media rooms, they had billiard rooms and servants’ quarters and a million rules of etiquette created to distance their owners from the riff-raff. According to Manchester Made Them, by Katharine Chorley, who was brought up in one such Alderley Edge house: ‘The downstairs lavatory, for instance, was sacrosanct to the men of the family and their guests, the upstairs reserved with equal exclusiveness to the females. Woe betide me if I was ever caught slinking into the downstairs one to save time. Conversely, the good breeding and social knowledge of any male guest who was suspected of having used the upstairs toilet while dressing for dinner was immediately called into question.’

      The Manchester nouveaux riches settling in the area were described by the older landed Wilmslow types as ‘Cottontots’. They devised a system for introducing women newly arrived in the area into the right circles. According to Manchester Made Them, ‘A wife or daughter with nothing to do was an emblem of success, like a large house or garden.’

      Perhaps unsurprisingly, Katharine Chorley writes: ‘A socialist was unthinkable in Alderley Edge company, and had he got there he would have been treated with a mixture of distrust, contempt and fear.’ At the very least a socialist would run into even more difficulties than normal, as the master of the house grunted angrily, ‘Sir, I fear your proposition to diminish the gap between rich and poor should have been made prior to the serving of dessert, as advocacy of the overthrow of capitalism after the meat course is strictly forbidden.’

      Dessert might have presented another quandary for socialists. Chorley wrote of the manager of a Manchester bank, ‘When he and his wife gave dinner parties, they presented dessert on a solid gold plate.’

      A special girls’ school was established to teach the female offspring of this tribe how to eat off gold plates, and be a proper lady. One regular lesson was on how to keep your back straight in a ladylike fashion, so, ‘After midday dinner, we had to lie flat on our backs on the floor for ten minutes, to straighten our spines so we could hold ourselves well, while the mistress in charge read to us from the Daily Telegraph.’

      I’d like to see Davina McCall make that fitness DVD. ‘Now, keep that spine as straight as you can and take deep breaths in time to the letters page, and … “Sir: When one regards the hordes of feral youth that blight our city centres” – AND STRETCH – “one is forced to conclude” – KEEP THAT BACK STRAIGHT – “that the time has surely arrived” – DEEP BREATHS NOW – “when we must return” – KEEPING THAT TUMMY TIGHT – “to the virtues of corporal punishment” – AND RELAX.’

      In their way, like much of Victorian Britain, the settlers of Wilmslow were establishing tradition. And none of it is different in essence from the craving for 3D eyelashes and sports car upholstery to match your hat.

      But a glance beyond the shopfronts suggests that can’t be all there is to Wilmslow. In the inevitable pedestrianised precinct, outside Costa Coffee stands a man selling the Big Issue, and he seems to be there every day. Maybe people walk past him whispering to themselves, ‘Isn’t it dreadful? That poor man has hasn’t even got a second home.’

      Or perhaps he’s an art installation. But there’s a side of Wilmslow that he represents, like the Colshaw estate, owned by the council before it was sold off and chunks of it boarded up, where one attempt to clean it up involved removing 104 dumped cars, discarded by joyriders. Or maybe the council misunderstood, and they were all Aston Martins that they assumed had been dumped as they hadn’t moved for years, but actually they all had labourers sitting in them listening to Shostakovich.

      Many people in Wilmslow worked at AstraZeneca pharmaceuticals, where three hundred were laid off in 2008, or at Worthington Nicholls air-conditioning plant, which laid off one hundred. It’s unlikely that they all had a butler to hand them their coats as they left work for the last time and say, ‘Your P45, sir.’ The local postmen picketed the sorting office during a strike, in which fifty of the fifty-four staff supported the action.

      The young of the area can display classic small-town frustration. Frisko Dan is a local rapper who led a local march in 2010, in support of a ‘Robin Hood tax’ to reduce inequality. Another hip-hop crew managed to rhyme ‘living in Cheshire’ with ‘feel the pressure’.

      The average weekly wage in Wilmslow in 2007, according to a report from the Office of National Statistics, was £772, compared to the poorest area of the North-West, the Manchester district of Gorton, where the average was £403. That would seem to confirm the image of Wilmslow as an exclusive enclave for the elite. But you could also interpret those figures as suggesting that the gap between rich and poor areas is much less than might be imagined. Because while the average company director makes fifteen times as much as the average of his employees, investment bankers and the real rich can make more in bonuses in a single year than the people who clean their office earn in a lifetime. So you might expect the difference between Wilmslow’s average and that of a poor borough of Manchester to be much wider.

      This should be even more likely when you think that that average must include Wayne Rooney and friends. If you took a few dozen comically rich superstars out of the statistics the gap would be smaller still. Every rich area has its working-class quarter, just as every poor town has a rich bit. The divide between rich and poor is much less a conflict between areas than one within areas.

      Perhaps an area can seem to be dominated by wealth more than it really is, because a handful of rich people have a disproportionate bearing on the look of a place. The shops will cater for them, because they’re the ones who have the money to spend. A country road on which ten millionaires live is an area swimming in wealth, whereas ten people on the minimum wage wouldn’t fill a single house converted into bedsits. The restaurants, beauty salons and purple-jacket shops tend to the needs of the richer section of the community. So you end up with a place that, in some ways, must be even more frustrating to live in if you’re on a low income. Because on the way to work you have to pass an Aston Martin showroom and a shop selling jackets for £1,800 plus VAT, and even if you’re driven to burglary you’re likely to get walloped with a bat signed by Andrew Flintoff.

       Wigan

      A few miles from the media rooms and glass floors of Wilmslow is the slight contrast of Wigan, where I sensed that the old couple hunched in the tea bar in the indoor market didn’t trust us. All around were the props and costumes you’d lay out if you wanted to make a film set in 1971, maybe involving a detective trying to get information out of a trader who sold knocked-off kettles. Above each stall was an old green or brown board with the owner’s name painted by hand, in the sort of font used for Olde English Marmalade and by companies who want to convince you the stuff they stew in a vat in an industrial estate in Kent was made by a farmer’s wife with a rolling pin, who says, СКАЧАТЬ