Simon English
England Revisited

On a sleeper against the corner of the brickworks south of Stockport between Cheadle + Bramhall.

On a stick put up on capped and restored rubbish tip south of Stockport. When I was here in 1971 this was a working brickworks, one of half a dozen on maybe 80 acre site extracting clay and firing the bricks, each works with its own shed and chimney. What a change. All bar one of the sheds and chimneys has been demolished and the whole site levelled. Finding the point where I put the flag on a railway sleeper against the kiln shed took quite a bit of enquiry and three visits.

It appears that the clay pit must have been worked or become uneconomic. The chimneys and kilns were demolished and the site used as a household waste dump. This must have been done on a cellular planned way with sections done then capped with clay and topsoil leaving a watercourse running through the centre. There is a ditch running round the site. Further in, every 25 yards ten foot pipes stick out of the ground venting gas and stop methane leaking into the surrounding houses.

Within the site there are three of four what appear to be stumps of chimneys, presumably to vent gas. Dotted about the surface are buried gas monitors. In the middle of the whole area is a big gas burner. I do not think that it is generating electricity as at other landfill sites.

The vegetation here is fascinating. It comes in such a variety that it appears that there is more going on here than just opportunists and colonizers moving in. The boundaries have had an amenity planting of trees but the in the open grass within amongst the brambles and mares tail there were clovers, broom, several vetches, woundwort, thistles, melilot, rosebay, golden rod, marjoram, reed mace and Orchids, There were oak saplings, silver birch, sallow and Mountain Ash. Honey bees, bumble bees and different butterflies on the flowers, different ants and snails in the grasses. Unlike many other points I visited where there were pheasants were in profusion, released from pens for the autumn shoot, here there was a pair wild in the city. Either this place of land reclamation is an artefact or worthy of a naturalists study. For me it was like walking round a garden. As to whether the land be allowed to reach climax vegetation or shall be developed time will tell.

There is one remaining brickworks and chimney on site. This was working until recently but now the yard is used to store wrapped stacks of Wieneberger bricks. The Kiln and brick making machinery here had been modernized and once clay stopped being extracted on site shale was bought in from the other side of Manchester. Interestingly the methane given off by the neighbouring sites was used to fire the kilns. Very neat. Sadly on our visit the works are closed and the machinery being dismantled. I am grateful for being given the opportunity to see it before it goes.

Behind the chimney in the original photographs there is the silhouette of a distinctive large church with a steeple. In the photos now, looking north above the trees there is the distinctive steeple and finials of St George’s on the Buxton Road and another steeple further to east. I went to look for the big old church to try to and orientate the original photos. I was unsuccessful. Perhaps it had been pulled down and the site sold or had been rebuilt as a modern church like the ‘Latter Day Saints’ on Bramhall Road. The existing steeple that I did find was St Matthew’s in Edgeley. Here there was something I had never seen before. In the recess of one of the windows on the tower was a bee’s nest. Four great slabs of wax exposed to the sun and rain. It bought to mind the story of Samson and the Lion, his riddle to the Philistines and from that to the Tate and Lyle emblem on treacle tins.
Points 30 & 33