Footballers' pay has kicked a narrow lane of former bungalows and farm cottages into the premier league of Britain's properties, creating a cluster of Manchester mansions which are named today as one of the country's most expensive streets.
With an average price of £1.2m, the houses along Withinlee Road – aka Footballers' Alley – in the Cheshire village of Prestbury are the costliest outside southern England, beating rivals in the Midlands and East Anglia as well as other plush areas in the north.
Traditionally one of the wealthiest villages in the region, Prestbury's tradition of discreet money has been swept aside by the bulldozing of old properties on Withinlee ridge – above the equally attractive Mottram St Andrew – to make way for every sort of modern baronial style.
Wayne Rooney of Manchester United has a cinema, pool and sports complex for badminton, tennis and five-a-side football in his £3.5m mock-Georgian pad. Carlos Tevez of Manchester City pays £12,000 a month to rent a "carbon friendly" property a few doors away, which extracts heat from the ground for a pool flanked by Armani-design wall panels with an underwater sound system.
The exuberant wealth, sealed off by entry phones and security company notices, but visible from the road, has lifted the north up the annual "top streets" table compiled by the Halifax. The lane, along with eight others in Cheshire's so-called 4x4 and orange-tan belt, also comes close to many of the most expensive streets in the south, except for London.
The survey shows the capital far beyond any rival's reach, with Wycombe Square in Kensington and Chelsea in first place, averaging £5.4m a home, more than three times that of Withinlee Road. The royal borough claims the next nine of the priciest streets, until Surrey takes over with Leatherhead in 11thwith £2,645,000, followed by Weybridge at £2,550,625 and Virginia Water at £2,543,500.
Prestbury's modern glitz is not proving a wider source of prosperity, however, with one of the biggest shops and the best-known restaurants in High Street hit by the recession and closed.
Coleen Rooney uses the flower shop and other celebrities – who include three other Premier League players and the cricketer Andrew Flintoff in Mottram St Andrew – bought their Christmas stamps at the post office.
But many villagers describe the players and their families as usually "invisible". "We'd welcome more involvement from them," says Judith Cole-Clough, who manages the Spirit of the Andes clothes shop, specialising in Peruvian alpaca clothes. "They'd get a nice surprise; we've socks from £7 — down to £5. There are plenty of 'normal' people in Prestbury who need to go shopping too."
The village is also regularly up in arms over building projects on Withinlee Road, which resembles a minor version of east London's Olympic site. Anyone seeking seclusion and peace would be astonished at the number of trucks, skips and scaffolding on show in the street last night, and for the last couple of years.
"I only work here," said a builder. "That's quite enough for me." Down in the village, an estate agent, Nick Bower, said: "It's an issue that's polarised Prestbury for a long time – a lot of people wish they wouldn't keep pulling down the old houses and building new ones."
Bower has watched the recession play havoc with carefully budgeted speculation in the area. "You would have had great difficulty buying into Withinlee back then. Now we're getting used to £3m and £4m houses not shifting for months."
Meanwhile, Cole-Clough hopes for a gradual return to traditional ways. "Prestbury has a name as a discerning village," she said. "Wealth has been here, but quietly." She is one of many locals who would welcome a Withinlee resident prepared to invest in reviving the White House restaurant, once the pride of Cheshire.
"It's so sad to see it boarded up. Everyone used to come here," she says, before shifting into the village's inevitable footballese. "There was Sven Goran Eriksson – he liked it. So did Sir Alex Ferguson."