Hitler’s henchman visited wine vaults
LISTEN up you perky pensioners, the latest Spring issue of Stockport and District Heritage Magazine is in the shops now, with a front cover picture of the steps by Petersgate Bridge and the Queen’s Head, Little Underbank.
This area of town has just had a massive lottery grant to refurbish the characterful shop fronts and hopefully get the chiming clock and figures on Winter’s repaired and working again.
The bridge was built in 1868 to boost trade to the Market Place after the council bought the manorial rights.
Traders on Underbank were worried that they would be bypassed, but it brought more people into the town via the railway to gawp at a ‘street above a street’ - a subject for early postcard photographers.
One place that was altered when the five arches of the bridge sliced through their buildings was the Queen’s Head, which lost half its premises, where literary figures of the town used to “mellow down their evenings with a bowl of punch.”
Nowadays punch is usually accompanied with a bunch of fives and the literati are reading the Sun.
Next door were Turners Wine Vaults, empty for years, but once a famous wine merchants, where pre-war German wine salesman, Herr Von Ribbentrop, used to visit to get orders before he became Germany’s foreign minister and Hitler’s henchman. Obviously his wide knowledge of the back streets of Stockport helped in formulation of foreign policy.
A shop that has kept its fine Victorian facade is Stage Door on the southern side of the arch, where fancy dress outfits for any occasion can be obtained.
Unlike this shining example, many others have succumbed to cheap and nasty contemporary shop fronts displaying the hideous passing taste of recent decades and these all need to go, whether it’s a sex shop or a tattoo parlour, it can benefit from a conservation makeover.
Many of the buildings in Little Underbank were once Tudor timberframed shops, with later Georgian red brick slapped on to gentrify their appearance in the 18th century.
They have interesting cellars cut out of solid rock, in what is still the ravine created by Tin Brook as it tumbles downhill in its subterranean descent to the Mersey. »»More details of plans for the area can be found in the Stockport Heritage Magazine, Spring issue, on sale in local newsagents, W H Smith, Waterstones, Co-op, St Mary’s Heritage Centre and online at stockport heritagemagazine.co.uk.