Stockport Market, 1976–77: Photographs by Heidi Alexander

Published 9th July 2020

Heidi Alexander’s photographs of Stockport Market record its traders, shoppers and long-established family businesses during the late 1970s. Unpublished for more than 40 years, the collection has since been reconnected with many of the people and histories it contains.

Photographer
Heidi Alexander

Body of work
Stockport Market

Location
Stockport, Greater Manchester

Period photographed
1976–77

BCA relationship
Featured editorially by BCA

Stockport, 1976–77

Heidi Alexander photographed Stockport Market whilst a student and visiting a friend in the town. She carried a Leica M4 given to her by her father, a motor-racing photographer, and photographed the market, its surrounding streets and the recently opened Merseyway Shopping Centre.

Alexander was born and raised in Switzerland by American parents. In 1969, her mother moved to Scotland with Alexander and her four siblings. Britain was still unfamiliar to her, and its streets offered subjects she wanted to examine.

“I think that’s partly why I was drawn to take photos in the streets here,” she later told BCA. “It was all unfamiliar, almost exotic.”

Stockport presented two different forms of commerce within short walking distance. The Market Hall, completed in 1862, stood at the centre of a trading district shaped over generations. Nearby, Merseyway Shopping Centre had opened in 1970, introducing a pedestrian precinct and larger retail units to the town centre.

Alexander photographed both. At the market, vegetables, shoes, carpets and clothing were arranged across open stalls, with prices painted or written by hand. Traders stood among their stock as customers browsed, talked and exchanged news. Several of those businesses had been established for decades. The Chadwick family traded on Stockport Market from 1904 until 2004. Geoffrey Kay ran his family’s sock and tights stall for 30 years.

“I only visited Stockport Market twice in 1977, and only shot 5 rolls of Tri-X.”

“I remember the bustle and the noise, especially the street pastors and their singing followers competing with the shouting traders for customers’ attention.”

In one photograph, the Portwood cooling tower rises behind the Kay stall. Part of Stockport power station at Millgate, it stood at the end of its working life. The station closed on 25th October 1976, during the period in which the collection was made.

Within a small area, Alexander found the Victorian Market Hall, the new shopping precinct and the final years of an industrial structure that had long dominated the town’s skyline. Her photographs place these different periods of Stockport’s development alongside the continuing trade of the market.

Looking again at the negatives decades later, Alexander told BCA that she was “chuffed at the lack of cropping required”. The comment points to the confidence and concentration already present in the work of a young photographer: people, stock and surrounding architecture are held together within carefully observed frames.

The rediscovered archive

The photographs were not published at the time.

After completing her degree, Alexander was offered a place on David Hurn’s documentary photography course at Newport but was unable to accept it. She became a parent and pursued a career in social work. Although she continued taking photographs and built a darkroom during her first pregnancy, the Stockport negatives passed through several house moves before going into storage.

In April 2020, during the first Covid lockdown, Alexander was searching for an old family photograph when she found eight worn proof sheets, the original black-and-white negatives and a box of colour slides from Stockport.

A friend lent her a scanner. For the first time in more than four decades, she was able to examine photographs that had been “largely unseen, even by me”.

When restrictions eased, a friend encouraged Alexander to share some of the pictures online. Jorge Delgado-Ureña and Christelle Enquist of The RAW Society advised her on reaching people with connections to Manchester and Stockport.

The negatives and proof sheets contained few names and little information about the businesses represented. Alexander hoped that people who remembered the market might be able to supply what the photographs alone could not.

Returning names to the photographs

In early July 2020, Alexander contacted British Culture Archive and sent images from the collection. BCA agreed to feature the series and asked her to provide background to the photographs and her involvement with photography. The original article was assembled from Alexander’s images and first-person narrative.

Published on 9th July 2020, it was the first dedicated editorial feature on the Stockport collection. Further photographs were subsequently shared through BCA’s social media channels.

Responses came from people who recognised parents, grandparents, neighbours and former traders. Their messages supplied names, relationships and information about businesses that had operated on the market for generations.

Arthur Chadwick was identified by his granddaughter. His father, Isaac Chadvinsky, began trading on Stockport Market in 1904, the year Arthur was born. Arthur later ran the family’s underwear and nightwear stall for more than 50 years. After his death in 1982, his wife Marie continued the business. Their son Leon took over in 1996 and remained on the market until 2004, completing a century of trading by the family.

The stall photographed beneath the Portwood cooling tower belonged to Geoffrey Kay, who ran the family’s sock and tights business for 30 years. His son Tony appears in the photograph. Geoffrey’s daughter Michele later recalled spending much of her childhood beneath the stall.

Other responses identified Eileen Higgins; Arthur and Brenda Mellor; Joe Fidler; the Lang family’s carpet business; Jessie Clarke of Potts Greengrocers; and Ann Olsen’s bra stall. Members of the Livsey family, Roy Dyer and his son Chris, Betty Taylor and Ann Goddard were also recognised.

The negatives had preserved faces, expressions and encounters, but not the relationships and working histories behind them. Publication began returning that knowledge to the photographs.

The Stockport Collection

In January 2021, The Guardian published a selection from the collection, generating further identifications from Britain and overseas.

Designer Robert Shaw, who grew up in Stockport, subsequently approached Alexander about producing a book. Published in 2021, The Stockport Collection (1976–1977): Portrait of a Community brought the photographs together with names and recollections gathered following their publication. A revised edition appeared in 2022 as further information continued to emerge.

Alexander returned to Stockport more than 40 years after making the work. An exhibition opened at Where The Light Gets In, close to the market, in April 2022. A second exhibition followed at Stockport Museum that July, where visitors continued to recognise people and businesses. Alexander later donated a substantial group of prints to Stockport Museums.

When the negatives emerged from storage, most of the people pictured remained unidentified. The collection now carries names, family histories and first-hand recollections that could not have been recovered from the images alone.

The photographs retain the immediacy of Alexander’s brief visits to Stockport, but their meaning has continued to develop through the knowledge contributed by the town. As she wrote in 2022: “The story isn’t done as new names and memories are still emerging.”

References and further reading

British Culture Archive

External sources

Heidi Alexander, “The Stockport Collection”, Ilford Photo, 19th April 2022.
Heidi Alexander, The Stockport Collection, 1976–77, photographer’s website.
“The long-lost world of Stockport Market”, The Guardian, 21st January 2021.
Robert Shaw, The Stockport Collection, book and publication history.
Historic England, Stockport Market Hall, National Heritage List for England.
Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council, “Exciting new exhibition to open capturing 1970s Stockport”, 19th July 2022.

First published 9th July 2020. Updated August 2026.