Walking the streets of Manchester in 1870 ......... part 3 ........testing the story of dark secrets and awful tragedies in Wood Street

Now it is very easy to fall into the trap of using newspaper reports to draw a picture of the past.

And so far that is what I have done in the new series on walking the streets of Manchester in 1870.

As everyone knows, just yards from the broad and affluent main thoroughfares of the city, was another world where unless you were very poor you dared not venture.

Wood Street was one of those.

It was and is a narrow street off Deansgate and is best known for the Wood Street Mission which sought to provide basic support for the very poor.

The charity was established in 1869 and is still going today.

Its activities included running a soup kitchen, a rescue society and home for neglected boys, and a night shelter for the homeless.  It handed over thousands of clogs and items of clothing each year, as well as hundreds of toys at Christmas.

Around the Mission poverty not only busied its self but was pretty much what defined the street, and those newspaper reports dug deep into the squalor and human misery.

There were five articles published by the Manchester Guardian from February to March 1870 and they ranged over the back streets of Deansgate, across to Angel Meadow and up Market Street and down to London Road.**

The descriptions of awful living conditions, drunkenness and prostitution are as shocking to day as they were nearly 150 years ago.

And the reports are essential reading for those wanting to know more about living conditions amongst the very poor and in particular as a backdrop to the growing movement to care for the legion of abandoned, destitute and abused children.

But nothing should be taken at face value, which meant trawling the records to test how far the vivid descriptions matched reality.

The starting point as ever were the street directories which list householders and with names you can search the census returns to find the families which in turn will offer up information on occupations, the numbers of people living in each house and the density of housing.

Wood Street, 1849

And that data can be matched with maps of the area, making it possible to follow our journalist along Wood Street.

Not that it is that simple, because in 1870 the entire residents of Wood Street were not worthy of inclusion in the street directory which meant looking instead for the nearest properties on Deansgate, and using the name of the householder to visit the census return for the area.

43-49 Wood Street, 1903

Happily it paid off and just over half of the twenty pages of the particular census return were for Wood Street.  In total there were 276 people living in forty four properties, many of which were in closed courts off Wood Street and accessed by dark narrow passages.***

Some of the courts had names like Smith’s Court, Bradley Court and Pilkington’s while others didn’t even rate a name.

Most of the properties were back to back and consisted of just two rooms and will have been in various states of repair.

And at random I fastened on the Ellis family who lived at number 3 Robinson’s Court which was at the western end of Wood Street hard by a Hide and Skin Yard.

The court was accessed through one of those narrow passages off Wood Street and in turn led off to another and unnamed court.

Robinson's Court, 1849

Robinson’s Court would have been dark, admitting little sunshine or fresh air and its occupants would have had daily to cope with the smell of the Hide and Skin Yard, just yards away.

Mr Thomas Ellis was a stone mason’s labourer, aged 33 from Manchester.

His wife Mary had been born in Dublin and was a silk winder.

Together with their four children they occupied the two rooms which made up number 3.

No photographs exist of their home but by exploring the rate books we know that they paid one shilling a week and that their landlord was John Highams who owned all six properties in the court.

33 & 35  Wood Street, 1903

A further search of the rate books will reveal the extent of Mr Higham’s property portfolio and by finding out just how much Mr Ellis earned it should be possible to judge how significant that shilling was to the family budget.

What is interesting about Wood Street is the number of lodging houses which according to the article were at the bottom end of the market with overcrowding being the norm and some verging on “vice shops.”****

I think it may be impossible now to ascertain how accurate was the journalist’s observation of “drunken women standing about the doorway, or coming in with some drunken man whom the gin shops of Deansgate have half maddened.”****

But I suspect the discovery of a group of women in another house is all too true.  “On the knees of the centre figure of this strange group lies a little month-old baby, dying-the last of twins.  It is miserably thin and the yellow skin shows the articulation of its frame.... the eyelids are drawn close down, and a long bony arm weakly and painfully raises itself.”****

One of the courts off Wood Street, 1903

We will never know the identity of any of the group or the final fate of the child, but a few days later the mother had taken refuge in the most debased of lodging houses.

Today Wood Street is still narrow, the Mission building is still there but as for the rest it has long ago vanished.

Location; Manchester, 1870







Pictures; Wood Street, 2007, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, numbers 43-49, 1904, m05386,numbers 33 &35, m05389, backs of numbers 33 & 35 m05391, A Bradburn courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass  and Wood Street, 1849, from Manchester & Salford OS, Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Walking Manchester in 1870

**In the Slums, Manchester Guardian, March 3 1870

***Wood Street, from the 1871 census, Enu 2, 9-20, Deansgate, St Mary’s

****In the Slums, Manchester Guardian, March 3 1870

The story of one building in Chorlton over three centuries ............. part 2 Mr Riddle, a pile of fish and bag of cakes

The Travellers Rest, 1901

The continuing story  of one building in Chorlton over three centuries

For just seventy years number 70 Beech Road was a beer shop, trading variously as the Robin Hood, the Travellers Call and for most of those seventy years as the Travellers Rest and very briefly as the Trevor.

But sometime between 1901 and 1909 it shut up shop, sold its last pint and became the home of Mr William Riddle who was an upholsterer.

Now it must have served the community well but by the turn of the century it had competition.

Another beer shop had opened next door and another almost directly opposite.

The first of these was the Beech which was a going concern by 1891 but operated from only part of what we now know as the present Beech.

By 1901 it had extended to take over the other property in the block and it may be that sometime around then this building was either remodelled as the present pub or may even have been rebuilt.

Looking down to the Oven Door. 1958

Much the same happened opposite when another small beer shop was opened in 1879 which two decades later was bought by Groves and Whitnall which had taken over the Regent Road Brewery in 1868 and began a rapid expansion which by the time they were registered in 1899 included nearly 600 pubs.

And in keeping with that expansion plan the pub was rebuilt in 1908.

Now at present I am not sure when Mr William Riddle moved on but sometime between 1911 and 1929 Mrs Laura Lothian opened a fish monger’s shop in number 70 which was still trading in 1936.

She was a widow and we can track her across Chorlton until her death in 1953 when she was living on Whitelow Road.

The Oven Door, 1979

By then the building had been taken over by Mr Jones who ran it as a pet shop.

Later it became  a bakery.

There will be many who remember the Oven Door.

We occasionally bought our bread from there but more often than not stopped off at Richardson’s which
was closer and so I did not even notice that it closed sometime in the early 1980s.

Of course its closure was only one of many of the traditional shops which we lost from the late 70s and by the following decade Beech Road was beginning to look a little empty, but renewal was on the way, but that like the rest of the story of number 70 is for another time.

And not long after this was posted, John Pemberton added that, "Around 1963/64 after the Pet shop moved on, it became Frank Beryl's Bookmakers, later in the 60s/early 70s, the bookies built their own premises on a croft on the other side of Beech Road,where the new houses are now, then the Oven Door, which was already established at No68, expanded into number 70 and became a double fronted shop."

Pictures; number 70 as the Oven Door looking down Beech Road in 1958, R E Stanley, m17671, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and in 1979 from the collection of Tony Walker

Turning off Plumstead High Street and finding a Saxon Church .....

Now you would think that I would have known the church of St Nicholas.

After all I worked on the High Street and both our Jillian and Elizabeth once lived close by.

But I never did and for that I am a bit ashamed given that it has a history which dates back to 960 just 80 odd years after Alfred burned his cakes, bits date from the twelfth century and its tower went up sometime during the 1660s.

And looking at this picture from 1915 the casual observer might well think nothing much has changed, which is a tribute to the restoration work done in 1959 following enemy action during the last world war  which caused severe damage to the structure.

So that is about it.

I could have included a modern picture to match our 1915 one, but if you live in Plumstead or have lived in Plumstead you will know what it looks like, and for everyone else I suggest you turn to page 94 of Woolwich Through Time which has a then and now set of photographs.

And that really is it leaving me to wait for a comment from our Elizabeth and Colin and my old friend Tricia.

Location; Plumstead

Picture; St Nicholas Church, Plumstead, 1915, from Woolwich Through Time





*Woolwich Through Time, Kristina Bedford, 2014

Walking the streets of Manchester in 1870 ......... part 2 ........Deansgate and Davenport’ Court "where scarcely a night passes but some robbery is committed”

Now I have to say the stretch of Deansgate from St Mary’s Gate down to Victoria Street Bridge is dismal.

Looking up Deansgate from Victoria Bridge Street, 1988

It starts with that Italian restaurant but pretty quickly becomes just a wall behind which rises that sloping walkway which now goes nowhere.

And the end of that dismal stretch is just the entrance to a car park.   All very different from the impressive Grosvenor Hotel and the Grosvenor Buildings which occupied the same spot but were demolished in 1972.

A full century earlier and the same site was home to the notorious Davenport Court where according to the Manchester Guardian “scarcely a night passes but some robbery is committed ........ and almost under the shadow of the Cathedral tower.”*

The Grosvenor Hotel, 1959

The court was one of those enclosed ones and “entered only by a narrow passage some four or five feet wide.

At the end of this are two houses, used for the most vicious of all trades, and of course registered as common lodging house.”

It was “well known in the police courts and goal.  

Yet for all these houses are still continued on the register as being well ordered, and go on nightly adding to the long calendar of crime and filling the lock wards of our hospitals.” 

Lock hospitals specialized in treating sexually transmitted diseases,

Ours had opened in 1819 and was replaced a by newer one which opened in 1874 off Liverpool Road, on the corner of Duke Street and Bridgewater Street, and while it postdates the Manchester Guardian description it is worth noting that a decade later it was so strapped for cash that “its walls still remain unpainted.”

But according to Mr Lowndes its “doors are always open in the first instance to anyone suffering from the disease for which it treats, but in order to prevent abuse, and to reserve its benefits for the most deserving, no patient is admitted a second time.”**

One wonders where some of those who needed its services a second time went, not that the journalist from the Manchester Guardian.

Davenport Court, 1849

Instead he continued to paint a vivid if depressing picture of life in Davenport Court, referring to one resident “seated by the kitchen fire of one of these houses who was a low browed short haired man, whose muscles and ferocity seemed well matched and who boasted that he ‘never did a day’s work this many a year, and should consider himself a fool,” with a very appropriate adjective ‘if he did.’”

And there was plenty of evidence of violent behaviour and criminal acts upon those who might stray into the court.  Such victims could not expect any help even though they might cry out and were unlikely to catch their assailant who being familiar with the court could vanish in an instant and be out on Deansgate mingling with passersby.

Added to which “at the corner of the entry. Keeping guard over it is a public house filled full to overflowing with wholly drunken men and semi-drunken women, and hard working labourers who are spending on prostitutes hard-earned money for want of which their wives and children are starving at home. 

Davenport Court and surrounding area, 1849

The whistle which gives token of the approach of suspicious-looking strangers, and the intense silence which succeeds it, indicate alike the commerce and the conversation carried on there.

The intruding and unwelcome visitor is greeted with muttered curses and regarded with furtive looks; he may be a ‘plain-clothes man’ taking stock, and too many know what that means to make his advent welcome.”

The pub was the Llangollen Castle which stood directly north of the court and the area was dominted by textile mills, metal working plant and timber yard.


Of course it may well be that our journalist for all sorts of reasons may have over egged the situation, but I doubt it for there are plenty of similar accounts.

That said I shall away and away and trawl the records for any reference to unruly behaviour in the pub and the court.

Victoria Street, 1988

Location; Deansgate

Coming soon; dark secrets and tragedies in Wood Street






Pictures; Victoria Street, 1988, E. Krieger, m 05447, Grosvenor Hotel and the Grosvenor Buildings, L. Kaye, 1959, m49730, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass  and Davenport Court, 1849, from Manchester & Salford OS, Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*In the Slums, Manchester Guardian, March 3, 1870

**Lock Hospitals and Lock Wards in General Hospitals, Frederick W. Lowndes, 1882, pages 12-14

The story of one building in Chorlton over three centuries ............. part 1 a beginning

Number 70 in 2014

Now over three centuries a building can pretty much be many things to many people and so it is with number 70 Beech Road. 

It began as a beer shop was briefly home to an upholsterer, and has also been a fish shop, a bakery and art gallery before becoming home to a jewellery and craft business.

All of which means it may well be our oldest commercial property with an unbroken record of selling various things dating back to 1832.

As such it is only beaten by the Horse & Jockey which opened its doors sometime around 1800 in a building dating back to the 16th century.

And yes the Bowling Green does date from the 1780s but is now in a building which was built in the early 20th century, while the pub over the water at Wilton's bridge is now no longer in Chorlton.

Now I can’t be sure of the exact date but 1832 is a good starting point.

Nu 70, the Travellers Rest, circa 1901

It does not show up on Hennet’s map of 1830 but was open for business just two years later when it was run as the Robin Hood.

But perhaps to distinguish it from a pub with the same name in Stretford it became the Travellers Call and by the 1840s was known as the Travellers Rest.

It fronted directly on to the road and so those who chose to visit it would walk straight in off the Row.**

Inside there was just the one room with all the natural light coming from a window beside the door.  

Judging by the size of the room which was just 3.5 metres [11.5 feet] wide by 1.75 metres [6 feet] long, and its customers were packed in sitting on simple wooden chairs and benches with just enough room for one table

It lacked the size of the Bowling Green Hotel or the position of the Horse and Jockey on the green, but it was a natural stopping off point for anyone coming down the Row.**

Grouped around about were a fair few village homes, and there was the added attraction of William Davis’s smithy just across the road.

Looking up Beech Road around 1901

For those dropping off tools to be mended or horses to be shod the “Rest” was a natural port of call, particularly for those thirsty from the heat of standing near the forge.

Like other beer shops the Travellers Rest may not even have had a bar.  It was a simple drinking room where men gathered, drank their beer and enjoyed each others’ company.

Its first “beer keeper” was Thomas White who was succeeded by Samuel and Elizabeth Nixon and they ran the place until the mid 1880s, after which it continued as a beer shop until the early years of the 20th century.

The corner of number 70 in 1979

But that is not quite all for this first chapter in the story.

Samuel’s father ran the pub over the Mersey, his son took over the post office next door at number 68 and his grandson opened the first newsagents on the corner of Beech Road and Chequers Road and had married in to the Brownlow family who had been making wheels at Lane End from early in the 19th century. ***

So less a story of one beer shop more of one family and what they did in Chorlton.

Next; from beer shop to upholster and the story of Mrs Lothian who sold fish from number 70 well into the 1930s.

Pictures; number 70 Beech Road, 2014 from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and the Travellers Rest circa 1901 and the Oven Door, 1979 from the collection of Tony Walker.

*The story of one building in Chorlton over three centuries,  

**The Row or Chorlton Row was the name  of Beech Road

***Lane End was where High Lane and what is now Sandy Lane joined Barlow Moor Road

When a smelly sewer was just one too many

Now I am pretty much sure I am going to be corrected today or at the very least attract someone who knows more about 19th century sewer ventilation pipes than I do.

But I grew up with one at the top of our road in south east London. It is still there today as is the one my brother in law took a picture of in Plumstead. Of course when you are growing up you take bits of street furniture for granted. Well I did anyway.

Ours was tall made out of iron and was always painted a pale green although the one in Plumstead is more a pale blue. But I digress.

They were for venting the sewers of the more obnoxious and even dangerous gasses which could accumulate down below. I suppose they are still necessary today.

Our Colin reckoned he heard running water when he took one picture of the base.

Now I have not come across one in Manchester but I bet there will be someone who has, and posts the fact with perhaps a picture.

I expect they help date the area.  One source I read suggested that they were erected in the years after the Great London Stink in 1858 and this would fit roughly with when my bit of Peckham was being laid out. They were particularly necessary in hilly areas where gas could get trapped in pockets, and both my bit of Peckham and Colin’s Plumstead are built on hills.

And at least one chap got in on the act and in 1895.  Joseph Edmund Webb, of Birmingham, patented the “Webb’s Patent Sewer Gas Destructor" in  March 1895. At its top, behind a glass, burned a small flame from the town’s gas supply. This acted as a chimney, drawing the sewer gas up to the flame, where it was ignited, thus illuminating the street. The cleverness of Mr Webb’s patent was the way it regulated the supply of sewer gas.

North Tyneside council has restored ten in Whitley Bay and Monkseaton. Blyth council has restored five. Sheffield, though, is the capital of the destructor.

It was built on seven hills, so there were lots of folds and u-bends in its sewer system in which to trap gas.

From 1914 to 1935, it installed 84 destructors, of which 22 remain with three still at work, casting an orange glow on the Sheffield streets.*

And much to my surprise there is even a facebook page.

Which I think might indeed be a fitting point to close on although I have yet to find  Henry Eddie & Co Ltd or the Bow Foundry.

Pictures; from the collection of Colin Fitzpatrick   

*The Northern Echo July 2008 http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/history/memories/3211527.Is_this_just_the_tip_of_the_stink_pole_/

Walking the streets of Manchester in 1870 ......... of privies closed courts and foul passages..... Ludgate Street

Now Ludgate Street which runs from Rochdale Road into Angel Meadow should have fared better.

New gates, 1908, a closed court

There are no images of the place in the City collection, it warrants only one entry in a street directory and got a pretty poor press from the Manchester Guardian back in 1870.

You can still walk down it today.  It is one of the narrower streets in the city and is fronted by a mix of tall residential properties, and until recently was home to a warehouse, car park, and some open land.

And as such is not over remarkable but back in 1870 it attracted the attention of the Manchester Guardian and appeared as No. 3 of their series “In the Slums.”*

Ludgate Street, 1851

“Ludgate-street is a principal thoroughfare leading from Rochdale Road into Angel Meadow.

From each side of this street branch off many courts, each with its open gutter down the centre; and as the houses are built back to back, forming the front street and back yard at the same time.

In each of these courts we find privies and ashpits very dilapidated and dirty, and in many cases built over with rooms.

In Church court the privies open on to the yard or court, where boys and girls are playing about. ....... Foul passages past fouler places lead from these courts and streets, passages so narrow that it is impossible to avoid contact with that which decency would shun, but which is utterly unheeded by those who dwell here, such is the debasing effect of constantly living in such places.

Back Simpson –street, Marshall’s Court and many other places we have visited could be adduced to show how horrible this district is, but it is needless to reiterate facts.  In Factory Court there is one lodging-house registered for 20 beds. And 20 beds means 40 persons and for these 40 persons there are one privy and one ashpit, and these are partially destroyed by the fall of an adjacent wall.

Church Court off Ludgate Street, 1851

In Joinery-street there is a court with a foul privy, without a door, and full ashpit within five feet of the living room; and in a court off Brabham-street one privy, without a seat or door and in such a state that it cannot be approached, is the sole provision for seven houses.”

Nor was that quite all, because our intrepid journalist moved a little distance away to Newtown which he described as a suburb of Angel Meadow which had “plenty of open spaces, spaces which might act as lungs for the overcrowded district it adjoins and where a little fresh air might be found.”

Nearby in another building were “hundreds of cows’ feet waiting to be boiled and, and separated from them by a board only, a heap of bones of those which have preceded them."

44 Angel Street 1898 which backed on to Ludgate Street

Alas this was not to be because the area was full of piggeries.

Behind one street there were sixteen in a long block “without drainage or anything to carry away the filth; it soaks through and runs the amongst the soil till the place is offensive in the extreme for yards away."

Now I could go on but I won’t.  There were plenty of more pleasant places in the city which in the fullness of time will appear in our walks but for now that is it.

Next time; Deansgate and Davenport’s Court “where “scarcely a night passes but some robbery id committed ........ and almost under the shadow of the Cathedral tower.”

Location; Manchester in 1870

Pictures; New gates, 1908, m8316, Angel Street, 1900, m85543, S.L.Coulthurst, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and Ludgate Street in 1851 from Adshead map of Manchester, 1851, courtesy of Digital Archives Asscociation, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*In the Slums, Manchester Guardian, March 3, 1870