Wellington Steps: Royal Oak Yard and its lost covered "brow"

Royal Oak Yard introduces itself as a gap in the south side of Little Underbank with minimal sense of its importance. In the afternoon a shaft of sunlight breaks the line of the medieval main road once a main route into Manchester. A shop on the corner as we enter is vacant and the old iron place name sits above its hoarding.
There are three routes offered to the traveller as we enter the yard. To the left a promising little cobbled piazza with a raw sandstone cliff at its far end. There are some padlocked exits into Grosvenor House facing south on the High Street above. This space has been overlooked as a pocket of real heritage potential. To the right an independent stair (Wellington Steps) descends at an angle that is not a conventional doorstep, rather this flight rises all the way up as a covered "brow" against the concealed red sandstone cliff to the High Street through a very well-trimmed plain brick arch, clearly marked on a plan of 1851.

Stockport; Royal Oak Yard; detail. Source O.S. 1851
This tall arch forms a typology repeated elsewhere in Little Underbank and should be seen as a remnant of distinctive, even idiosyncratic spaces of the earliest evolution of the town as a county commercial capital 

Wellington Steps in 2015

The route is gated and boarded off from public access. It sends a message that will be consistent for the full extent of this Victorian yard.