Beer and blues in the new Berlin

I went to Stockport beer festival last night, held for the third year in a row at the town's Masonic Guildhall (vale Edgeley Park: Stockport County's successes on the pitch, rising from National League North to EFL League One, and the subsequent redevelopment of the ground and its hospitality and conference facilities, have put it beyond the pocket of the organisers).

Stockport might not quite be the new Berlin, as an international DJ once dubbed it, but with a new bus station, which will now eventually become a tram interchange, a bridge across the Mersey from it to the Runaway microbrewery, which relocated there from Manchester, and some long shut pubs in that area reopening, the town is definitely on the up.

I tend to gravitate towards darker, stronger beers at festivals now, and amongst those I enjoyed last night were a strong dark mild brewed by Thornbridge, on the Burton Union system they acquired from Marston's, in collaboration with Brooklyn Brewery's Garrett Oliver, Krakow Prince, a porter from Poland's only cask beer brewery, and a smoked Redwillow Rauchbier.

On the way back to the station I popped into the Spinning Top, where a blues band was playing covers of some Chicago standards (Howlin' Wolf's Killing Floor, Jimmy Reed's Bright Lights, Big City). The Spinning Top, a music pub housed in a former Indian restaurant, is named after a short story by Franz Kafka, a quote from which is painted on the wall (Kafka spent some time in Berlin, but I don't think he ever made it to Stockport).

A river runs through it

Yesterday's announcement that the South Manchester line of the Metrolink tram system is to be extended from East Didsbury to Stockport was hardly unexpected, but welcome news nonetheless. There will also be new stops on existing sections of track, including one on the Bury line at the southern end of Rochdale Road in Collyhurst, part of a housing regeneration project already being built which will eventually extend north from Victoria station along the Irk Valley.

Like the rest of the South Manchester line, the extension to Stockport is essentially rebuilding something that existed from the late nineteenth century until the Beeching cuts to railway services in the sixties, although unlike the former Manchester South District Railway which ran along the north bank of the Mersey into the town the new track will now cross the river at some point, most likely from Heaton Mersey to Edgeley, passing close to the planned station at the eastern end of Cheadle village which should also be running passenger services by then.

That bridge will no doubt be the trickiest part of the project, work on which is due to start in 2027 and be completed by 2032. Will Stockport still be the new Berlin by then? Who knows, but hopefully I'll be around to see it and finally get to board a Stockport bound tram one day in the next decade or so.

Mild about Manchester

I went into Manchester city centre yesterday afternoon and completed my sticker card for Mild Magic, an annual event organised by Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA to promote mild ale.

I usually get off to a decent start by going on the pub crawl held to launch it, but this year my attempt to join it was, er, derailed by a freight train which caught fire and shut the Manchester Airport line for several hours.

In the end, I managed to get to sixteen pubs, about half of them tied houses of local breweries Holt's and Hydes (who sponsor the event) and the others a mixture of micropubs and Wetherspoons. Seven were in the city centre, five in the SK8 postcode area, and four in south Manchester (along the Metrolink line of that name from East Didsbury to Withington).

The beer quality was generally good, with just one poor and another returned as undrinkable. I voted for the Bank Top Dark Mild I had at the Wobbly Stamp in Cheadle as the best mild, and the City Arms in Manchester as the best pub.

Agatha at Abney

I had a stroll around Abney Hall Country Park in Cheadle the other day after seeing a BBC documentary about Agatha Christie in which Lucy Worsley also visited it.

Abney Hall was built in the mid nineteenth century by businessman James Watts, who owned a large warehouse on Portland Street in Manchester, around the time he became mayor of the city (a Hydes pub a few hundred yards south of it in Cheadle village is now named after him). Agatha Christie's older sister married his grandson, also called James Watts, and as a child in the early twentieth century she spent a lot of time there, eventually writing one of her first books while stopping for Christmas at the hall, which became a model for country houses in her subsequent detective novels. It was also where she retreated in the mid twenties after the episode in which she went missing as her first marriage broke down and was found at a Harrogate hotel having suffered some kind of memory loss, and from where she set out with her sister in law to a furniture sale in Marple, inspiring the name of her elderly female detective.

One thing I hadn't thought about before seeing the documentary was how close the railway line runs to the grounds of the hall, something which features in her novel 4.50 from Paddington. Cheadle station, where Agatha's family would have alighted on trips north from their home in Torquay, shut towards the end of World War I, although the junction where it stood in the early twentieth century still looks very similar and there are now plans to build a new station at the same location. 

Supping in the seventies

I've just finished reading Keg, an overview of British brewing in the seventies by Ron Pattinson.

I was born at the start of the decade so only have fragmentary memories of the mid to late seventies, but certain things continued into and up to the end of the eighties, when I began drinking in pubs.

The consolidation of British brewing in the sixties into the Big Six national groups (Allied, Bass, Courage, Scottish & Newcastle, Watneys and Whitbread) with their large tied estates only began to break up after the introduction of the Beer Orders in 1989 - the first pub I drank in as a teenager was a Whitbread house, originally built by Manchester brewery Chester's and acquired by them when they bought Threlfalls in 1967, which finally shut last summer. The lack of choice and imposition of overpriced keg and bland national cask brands by them was a major factor in the formation of the Campaign for Real Ale in 1971 and the Big Six became their primary target throughout the seventies and eighties, although the fight against them ultimately backfired as they all subsequently sold up to global brewers with even less interest in cask beer or transformed themselves into non-brewing hotel, leisure and pub companies.

The seventies also saw lager's rise to dominance in the draught beer market, with the section on it here a snapshot of the longer, and fascinating, version in another of Ron's books, Lager.

Things which Ron mentions that I recall from the late eighties and early nineties, and which have either now disappeared or become far less common, include outside toilets, afternoon closing, drink driving, bottle-conditoned Guinness, milk stout, bottled beer mixed with draught, and not having a problem being served under the legal drinking age of 18 (the first place I drank draught beer as a 16 year old was a Labour club, after joining the Young Socialists in the 1987 General Election campaign, and which somewhat ironically is now a children's nursery. Around the same time, a couple of mates and myself sipped halves of Boddies bitter at dinnertime in a rather rough Salford estate pub, on a break from a Sixth Form thing across the road at the university, in our school uniforms). 

Smoking was of course ubiquitous and unremarked upon in pubs - the idea that it would become illegal within a couple of decades would have seemed incredible to most drinkers had it crossed our minds (I had an old coat that I only wore to my very smoky local and which stank of tobacco until I hung it out to air the next day). Other things in pubs that seemed immovable back then included men selling seafood on a Friday night and the football newspaper (pink in Manchester) on a Saturday evening, football pools coupon collectors and darts boards. You still occasionally saw older women having bottles and jugs filled with draught beer to take home. I'm not sure what the reaction to that request would be now, or to heavy drinking during working hours (Friday afternoons at Stockport social security office, where I worked in my late twenties and early thirties, were never the most productive after our extended dinnertime session at the Robbies pub round the corner).

I also recall as a kid in the seventies seeing lots of home brewing kits for sale in high street shops, the popularity of which was no doubt linked to the rising cost of draught beer in pubs, illustrated in the book by a handy table showing the average price of a pint of bitter increasing from 10p at the start of the decade to 34p at the end of it (Holt's cask bitter cost 79p a pint when I first drank it in 1989, and is now between £3 and £4.50 depending on the area the pub is in and how much the brewery has spent refurbishing it).

Trump Towers Over America

Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States in Washington tomorrow, having previously served as the 45th in that office. American socialists came under massive pressure from the wider liberal left to vote for his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris in last November's presidential election, with most understandably succumbing to it, something I still think was neither necessary nor helpful to their long-term goals for a number of reasons.

1. The Democratic party is the major obstacle to the US labour movement establishing some kind of pole, even initially a small one, around which it could organise independent political representation for itself. Within the party's ranks, the unions inevitably play second fiddle to the lobbying of the corporate interests which fund it, and are either sidelined in policy terms or become enmeshed in unprincipled deal making, much as the British labour movement was for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the Liberal party.

2. Harris is not particularly radical for a Democrat. It would be a different case if someone like Bernie Sanders, standing on an overtly pro-working class programme, had won the nomination.

3. The election was only really a contest in the seven swing states, all of which Trump won relatively easily in the end. Outside of them, socialists voting for Harris were either unnecessarily adding their ballot papers to an already decisive pile for her in blue states, or wasting them in red ones.

4. Trump is undoubtedly an authoritarian right-wing nationalist whose rule will lead to numerous reactionary decisions, especially in foreign affairs, immigration and tackling climate change, but his inauguration does not signal a fascist takeover in which future elections are cancelled, political parties banned, unions suppressed, meetings and demos violently broken up by stormtroopers and basic civil liberties curtailed, not least because of the federal system which grants US states considerable rights, and if it did voting for a Democratic candidate and advocating that others do likewise would not be an adequate response to stop that threat.