The Four Heatons History Tour by Phil Page and Carole Page
The Four Heatons’ History Tour began to take shape during the Covid lockdown of 2020. Like everyone else, my husband, Phil Page, and I were confined to our local area with not much to do for exercise but tramp the streets. And that’s what we did, every day. We had lived in the Four Heatons for many years and so knew the area well, especially as Phil is the Local History writer for a small, circulating, free magazine, Moor Magazine. At first, we enlivened our walks by focusing on front gardens, driveways, styles of gates or front doors, trying to spot details we hadn’t noticed before, as well as inspiration for our own home improvements! That soon lost its charm, however, and so we actively started to seek out routes, alleyways, ginnels and paths that we were less familiar with. That was much more interesting and we began to get a sense that we were discovering our local area anew through our efforts to ‘make the familiar strange’.
Having lived in the Four Heatons for most of our adult lives, we were aware that we were gradually and inevitably, joining the ranks of ‘older residents’ as many young couples and families moved in. It was this awareness and the constraints of lockdown, that gave us the idea for our first project: to formalise our aimless ramblings into coherent walks which included local landmarks. These short walks could engage families, couples and solitary walkers in a purposeful route which explored the history of their local area through the familiar buildings and features they saw every day. We had already come to realise how important regular walking was for our own mental health and well-being, but we had also discovered how strong our attachment to the area was. This process of mapping the area through walks had made us realise how much our knowledge about the place we lived in, contributed to our sense of identifying this place as ‘home’.
The walks were fun to write. We would set out armed with a camera and notebook to jot down the route with all its twists and turns, and record key features visually, so that others could follow easily. Sometimes I would be scrawling notes as I walked, occasionally onto a rain-spattered notebook with frozen fingers. Paths were sometimes muddy and overgrown, especially down by the river; ‘Wear wellies or sturdy shoes!’ I would write as we splashed on our way. The walks were uploaded onto the Moor Magazine website and, occasionally, as we were engaged in recording a new walk, we would spot people consulting their phones, half way through a walk we had uploaded a couple of weeks earlier.
When Amberley Publishing agreed to publish our walks as part of their History Tour series, the next task was to present our series of disconnected ramblings as a coherent tour around the Four Heatons. That presented a different challenge requiring the mapping of a walkable route around key landmarks. I found this particularly interesting as personally, I have always loved a book that begins with a map. As you turn the first few pages and the map is revealed with the route you might take, it provides a visual trailer for an anticipated journey. What will you discover? What are the stories behind these locations? From here on in, the map becomes the reference point to be returned to as the journey progresses. In this way a map roots you in a place in history and time, whilst engaging you in action and discovery.
The History Tour encompasses all of the four areas of the Heatons, a locality that originally comprised of fairly poor agricultural ground to the north of Stockport and the southern edges of Manchester. The name ‘Heaton’ is derived from the Anglo-Saxon for a farming enclosure on a heath or high ground. The identity of each area began to develop in the 1700s when the building of St Thomas’ Church on Manchester Road resulted in the area becoming known as Heaton Chapel. In the mid-to-late 1800s the bleaching, printing and brick-making industries, reliant on good water supplies, gave Heaton Mersey a separate identity, whilst Heaton Moor flourished with the coming of the railway, making it accessible and popular with many wealthy Victorians who built their grand houses in the clean air with spectacular views across the Cheshire Plain. Despite the industrial developments in Manchester and Stockport, Heaton Norris remained largely agricultural, not losing its last farm until the 1980s. Phil and I can remember walking down to Norris Hill Farm to say hello to the cows, when we first moved into the area!
In putting together the Four Heatons History Tour, what struck us both most forcibly, was not what had been lost over the centuries, but what had remained. There is undoubtedly a lot more traffic and a number of the grand old properties have been demolished to make way for modern housing but there is still a strong sense of the civic pride and thriving community that the Victorian era brought in its housing, public buildings, green spaces and shopping arcades. It remains a very popular place to live, with modern families welcoming the easy transport connections to places of work and industry, whilst enjoying the vibrant bustle of independent shops, cafes, pubs and entertainment in its leafy streets, much as their Victorian counterparts did. And the view across the Cheshire Plain remains just as spectacular.
The Four Heatons History Tour by Phil Page and Carole Page is available for purchase now.