Stockport Plaza is a great trip back in time - I just wish the food wasn't too

When the Plaza was in its heyday in the mid-1930s, one corner of its tea room would find brewer and one-day knight of the realm John Robinson, of Stockport’s most famous family, installed there most days. He would take his regular table, the one nearest the front doors to the left, with the view over the square.

Remarkably, his experience there - from the monogram crockery to the art deco wall sconces - is much the same then as it is now, some 90 years later.

The Plaza began its restoration, with grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund and various other benevolent organisations, in 2009. At one time, in the late 90s, it came very close to being demolished.

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Upstairs from the auditorium of the ‘super cinema and variety theatre’, the tea room’s windows had been boarded up since 1967, from back when it was a Mecca bingo hall. A fire in the 70s had also damaged a large part of the room’s ornate ceiling.

General manager Ted Doan says he cried when the boards were finally taken down, and light flooded into the room again, the view over Mersey Square restored after decades in the dark. Ted is a devoted, protective custodian of the building. He lives and breathes it. He refers to it as ‘her’, and could talk about it for hours and hours on end.

“It was the era of Tutankamun,” says Ted. “This was meant to be an Egyptianate, Mediterranean palace. What we did during the restoration was make sure that everything was restored to how it would have been on her opening day. All of the paintwork, the plasterwork, everything.”

Archive glass plate pictures of the theatre on opening day were used to bring the place back to its former glory. The pictures were carefully studied,