Stockport looks to its cranes …………

If you live in the twin cities, it is easy to overlook that Stockport has its share of cranes which betoken major development.

So I am grateful to Andy Robertson who had “an hour or so to kill last week” while visiting Stockport and filled the time with taking pictures.

Now those who know Andy’s work will testify that he has been a prodigious collector of the transformation of many bits of Greater Manchester.

It starts with a series of photographs of buildings that look in danger, moves on to recording their demolition, the site clearance, and the first weeks of the builder’s breaking ground and then follows the rise of another new high rise set of offices or residential accommodation.

It means that over the last three decades he has amassed a unique portfolio of images which historians will judge as a major contribution to showing how Manchester, Salford, and Stockport as well as Trafford and all points beyond have changed.

And as ever to use that simple observation “look to the skyline, count the cranes and judge the commercial prosperity of the area”.

Of course we may ask who is the beneficiary of such developments, do they deliver prosperity for all and does the new architecture enhance or merely act as a blot on the landscape?

Certainly, the landscape of Manchester and Salford is now dominated by new build which reach to the sky, overshadow all that went before and are no longer on a human scale.

I wonder if this is the future for Stockport.

We shall see.

Location; Stockport

 Pictures; Stockport looks to its cranes, 2023, from the collection of Andy Robertson