Hopes historic rectory may be saved as homes
ADECISION is expected this week on the redevelopment of St George’s Grade II rectory, which has lain derelict and vandalised for about 15 years.
The arts and crafts style house, built for the vicar in about 1879, was abandoned in favour of a more modest home, and a plan to extend St George’s School over the site was mooted but turned down.
Now developers want to demolish the rectory and build houses but Historic England have now objected to the rectory being knocked down.
A persuasive case for retention of the rectory adapted into housing units, with other houses in the grounds, has been presented on behalf of Stockport Heritage Trust and Stockport Building Preservation Trust by John Fidler, a retired conservation director of English Heritage.
St George’s was born in controversy when leading parishioners, Wakefield Christie-Miller of Christy’s Hatworks, Arthur Sykes of Edgeley Bleachworks, and Major George Fearn of Bell’s Hempshaw Brook Brewery, fell out with the vicar of nearby St Thomas’s over his plans for a high altar.
They applied to the bishop for permission to build another church, St George’s, on lower church principles, but with a much grander architectural plan.
It opened in 1897 at a cost in today’s terms of about £8m stumped up mainly by George Fearn with help from the others.
The first vicar was Canon John Thorpe, subsequently the grandfather of Jeremy Thorpe, ex-Liberal leader, and also of my ex-boss at the Stockport Advertiser, John Christie-Miller.
The late Ray Preston wrote (Heritage Magazine Vol 3 No 12) that in the 1940s he went as an apprentice joiner to help fix a sash window at the rectory, and was told by a maid who brought his mug of tea of an ivory handled flick knife she had buried in the garden that morning.
It had been used in a fracas in which an RAF serviceman had been stabbed to death by an American GI she had met, and her boyfriend had asked her to get rid of it before he was arrested.
Such are the little folktales which add colour to Stockport life!