Ideas above your station (Timperley, #44/99)
Exploring a suburb - sorry, village - that seems to be obsessed with its own identity.
Each weekend, when it gets to the time where I'm writing up my day's travels on the Metrolink, there's a few subjects I often tend to fall back on. Pointing out inaccurate signage is one of them. Observing the peculiarities of domestic architecture another. But the topic I frequently resort to when discussing the places I visit is class.
It's a very British trait I suppose, the tendency to read into everything in terms of how it relates to often outdated notions and signifiers of economic and social classification. Either that, or this project is in fact a secret Marxist endeavour, spreading class consciousness throughout the proletariat via the unlikely means of a twice-weekly web publication about trams. You'll have to decide.
But my destination for today - Timperley - is a location where the pervading narrative can simply only be explored through a class lens.
For those not familiar with the area, Timperley is on the Altrincham line, which runs from the city centre, through the less salubrious parts of Trafford, and then down through what used to be Cheshire before reaching the terminus. A journey along this branch is like a tour through a cross-section of the British class system - the fact that Greater Manchester’s only proper Waitrose is down this end of the region tells you all you need to know.
But Timperley isn’t quite Altrincham. It’s a couple of stops short of the posh end of the line, and the suburb brushes up against Wythenshawe and Sale which serve to bring it somewhat down to earth. As such it’s got a bit of an identity crisis, a glaring clash of styles.
The first thing to note when you leave Timperley’s tram stop is that you’re not in Timperley. Not the main bit anyway. To get to the high street, you’re facing a mile-long walk down Park Road. It’s a wide and generously tree-lined thoroughfare, so not unpleasant, but there is a slight sense you’ve been mis-sold.
Your first actual sign you’ve definitely alighted in the right place comes with the arrival of the Timperley Stove & Fuel Centre. It’s all woodburners and Agas round here, not an electric three-bar fire in sight. Naturally the shop’s colour scheme matches the upscale items sold within; beneath a smart redbrick exterior is a shopfront kitted out with a nice and simple grey and white sign lit by coaching lamps. Which makes their choice of typeface even more curious.
Comic Sans might have been excusable - maybe they only had the default fonts that come with Powerpoint to choose from. But no, this is something slightly different, something which I’m sure they believed would add a quirky handwritten touch to their sign, but that looks more like there was some mix-up at the signwriters with an advertisement destined for a creche.
A short while after the fireplace shop and you’re finally in Timperley proper. Your arrival is heralded by a sign that’s certainly seen better days.
Most of the village’s activity is centred around the crossroads. Oh yeah, I said ‘village’. Everybody round here seems to insist it’s definitely not a suburb or just another area of Manchester, no, we are a village don’t you know. Its name was derived from the Old English ‘timber leah’, meaning a clearing in a forest, though nowadays the village is contiguous with all the other towns surrounding it, no grand woodlands standing between the ‘village’ and Europe’s largest council estate of Wythenshawe.
But even Timperley’s amenities seem to want to stress the village-ness. There’s Timperley Village Eyecare (an opticians, to me and you); Village Dental; Village Osteopaths. Like the folk from round these parts who insist on writing CHESHIRE at the bottom of their addresses and refuse to acknowledge the existence of Greater Manchester, it’s almost comical how feebly pretentious some people can be.
But then the illusion can only go on for some long. The biggest shop unit belongs to Iceland, a chain that no-one could ever accuse of being nouveau riche. There’s vape shops and betting shops that wouldn’t be out of place on any other high street. And if you’re imagining every person round here is a Hyacinth Bucket type, think again. The triunvirate of hoodlumish youths congregating in a bus shelter looked to be up to no good to me. And the pair of men going pub-to-pub with a bagful of various wares that had fallen off the back of a lorry were more Onslow than Richard.
If you didn’t appreciate a paragraph of outdated references to 90s sitcoms, you’ll likely not be a fan of this one either. Because Timperley has a comedy pedigree all of its own, boasting two famous exports. The first, and certainly the most famous, is Caroline Aherne. The much-missed star and writer of The Royle Family lived in the area until her untimely death in 2016. Her early work as sarky chatshow host Mrs Merton originated on a 1987 album created by Chris Sievey.
He’s probably better known as Frank Sidebottom, the squeaky-voiced Timperley resident famous for his suit, tie, and oversized papier-mâché cartoonishly-painted head. The character was somewhere between John Shuttleworth and Alan Partridge, and was reasonably popular in the north west for a while, despite the strangeness of appearance that seems out of kilter with popular styles of comedy both then and now.
Much like Aherne, he’s sadly no longer around. His final appearance was in The Salutation in Hulme back in 2010, and after his death a campaign was launched to build a statue. Unveiled in 2013, it’s the most striking feature on Timperley’s main crossroads. Naturally, given the whole ‘brightly coloured bulbous head’ thing it’s eye-catching and unexpected - but all the more charming. It’s too simplistic to try and write Timperley off as ‘snooty Cheshire town full of wannabe wags’. There’s so much more to it than that.