Fred Aldous

Fred Aldous began in 1886 selling cane to the cotton trade; five generations later his great-great-grandson Paul Walker is joint managing director of the shop that still bears the name, on a Stevenson Square corner it has held for more than a century. The stock runs to some thirty thousand lines of art, craft and haberdashery across three floors — less a shop than a department store for people who make things — and the firm has grown careful offshoots in Leeds and Sheffield, disclosed here, without loosening the family grip. Manchester has torn down and rebuilt itself several times around this counter; the counter has restocked and carried on.