Book Review – Wilmslow Through Time by Vanessa Greatorex

Wilmslow through time by Vanessa Greatorex (Amberley Publishing £ 9.99)

Wilmslow, home to nearly 40,000 people, including celebrities like Alex Ferguson and Coronation Street’s Bill Roach, it’s the subject of a new book,Wilmslow through time, by Chester historian and author Vanessa Greatorex. Using photographs from 1890 onwards, plus legends, the recent history of the town of Bijou Cheshire is captured in storybook form.

It now houses luxury car showrooms, and the rich and famous (freestanding houses there can cost up to £ 6 million), the city’s former milling factories, and the homes of humble workers earn their money. place in the century of Greatorex images and reviews. Wilmslow’s prosperity and modern conveniences come at the cost of significant visual interference in the form of road markings, cars, streetlights, and telegraph wiring, and some pretty gruesome modern architecture, as the Church Street images show. However, the author is careful to outline the reasons – generally neglect, remediation, or fire damage in previous decades – for new construction and demolition. Overall, the book presents a clear picture of continuity, with key architectural highlights and natural beauty that are preserved over time and form the foundation of Wilmslow’s well-established reputation for exclusivity.

The typically succinct prose of the award-winning Greatorex conveys a host of interesting and indeed entertaining snippets. On the Grove Street Jaw-Droppers page, for example, a 1970 photograph of the only camel to ever walk the streets of Wilmslow is found alongside a recent shot of the equally bizarre-looking Barclays Bank, which the author maliciously describes as more a “beach pavilion than a bench”. A very real sense of personal commitment to the city and its people is evident throughout. The reader cannot help but share the author’s enormous disappointment in failing to locate a strikingly beautiful scene – the ruled line of winter poplars by the river, along with their symmetrical reflection of still water – from a 1905 T. Baddely sepia photograph .

As a thriller writer, I was especially interested in seeing that, really Midsomer assassination In tradition, there is a dark side to the bucolic idyll suggested by photographs like the Wilmslow Carnival pipers and horse-drawn floats with costumed villagers. In 1984, Wilmslow made international headlines as the site of the Lindow Man, whose surprisingly well-preserved body was found in murky common ground on the outskirts of Wilmslow.

Greatorex ends his book with a stunning image of his remains being excavated, complete with the insertion of a pathetic, wrinkled, highborn young man who had been ritualistically murdered and his body thrown into the Wilmslow mud. The shadow cast by his tragedy comes through time: in addition to Lindow Man, excavations unearthed a skull fragment that led local Peter Reyn-Bardt to confess to the murder of his wife in the 1950s. He was convicted, despite that the skull fragment belonged to an Iron Age Wilmslow woman (some archaeologists argue, Roman).

Wilmslow through time it is more than a well presented and highly readable work. It is a labor of love by a highly accomplished researcher and writer whose clear affinity and affection for her childhood landscape is evident in this series of meticulously curated and well-presented anecdotes and images.