All you ever wanted to know about Chorlton Arts Festival .... tonight

Historian and author Andrew Simpson and local artist and author Peter Topping will take you on a journey through the history of The Arts Festival showing how it has grown into a successful community event in Chorlton.*

It began when a teacher, a city councillor, and a vicar sat down with a bottle of wine and explored the possibilities of an annual festival of the arts here in Chorlton. **

They were ….. Ed Wyllie, Val Stevens and Hilary Barber and that was in 2002

And now in 2026, the aim remains to bring “the Visual Arts, Literary Arts, Performing Arts, and Crafts at all levels to the Chorlton Community”.

Leaving me just to say come along and find out about all the bits from 2002 till 2026.

The presentation will is part of Chorlton Arts Festival and will be in the Community Rooms of Chorlton Library, Manchester Road starting at 8pm and conclding at 9pm.

*Chorlton Arts Festival https://chorltonartsfestival.org/

**Chorlton Arts Festival stories, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Chorlton%20Arts%20Festival

Racing horses at Middle Park with Mr William Blenkiron in 1861

Now here’s a story that I can’t claim any credit for but which I suspect will be new to many people.

Middle Park, 1873

It started with the chance discovery of horse racing at Middle Park and by degree took me to William Blenkiron.*

To be honest I rather let Mr Blenkiron go by the wayside and it wasn’t till my friend Tricia did the research that I realized that here was indeed and fascinating story.

He had been born in Yorkshire in 1807 and having begun as a farmer moved to London in 1834 “and commenced business as a general agent [and] in 1845 added to his establishment a manufactory of stocks and collars, and three years later retired in favour of his son."**

Leaving him at the still relatively young age of forty to begin a new career as the owner of a racehorse and by degree “wanting more room, removed from Dalston to Middle Park, Kent.  

He brought with him seven or eight brood mares and Neasham the head of the list of Eltham sire.  The establishment now rapidly increased until it was augmented to upwards of two hundred of the highest class and best mares that money and experience could produce.”**

And for those that want to follow his racehorse successes there is an excellent account in thamesfacingeast.***

Poll Book, 1868

Instead I am more fascinated by what Tricia uncovered from the census returns.

In 1851 he was still in Dalston giving his occupation as “Silk Merchant,” but a decade later having settled at Middle Park he described himself as a “Farmer of 500 acres employing 18 workers” and in the April of 1871 was content to be known as a “Breeder of Horses.”

Now we can track him across the electoral registers from the 1835 and even know that in 1868 he voted for the two Conservative candidates for the Kent West Constituency.****

He died in the September of 1871 and is buried in the parish church.

Location; Eltham, London

Research; Tricia Leslie

Pictures; Middle Park, detail from 1858-73 OS map of Kent and extract from the Poll Book Kent West, 1868 courtesy of ancestry.co.uk

*When horses raced on Middle Park Meadows, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/when-horses-raced-on-middle-park-meadows.html

**National Biography page 674

*** The Middle Park Stakes: The Eltham Connection, September 11, 2013  thamesfacingeast, https://thamesfacingeast.wordpress.com/tag/william-blenkiron/ 

****Enu 24, 16 Hackney, Hackney, Middlesex, 1851, Enu 1, 1, Eltham, Kent 1861, Enu 1,2, Eltham, Kent, 1871

The Lost Chorlton pictures ......... no 8. ......... giving the graveyard a make over

This was when the parish church yard got its last makeover.

But it will have been in the early 1980s and involved clearing away many of the old gravestones, and landscaping the area including picking out the footprint of the old church, which had stood on the site since 1800 and replaced an earlier chapel which dated back to around 1512.

I can’t exactly remember the old cluttered grave yard or when the makeover happened but the picture will date from the early 1980s soon after it had been completed, when the trees and bushes had yet to grow.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; the churchyard, 1981 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Looking for the lost ...... one street over time in Ancoats ..... no 1 Homer Street

You won’t find Homer Street.

St Andrew's School, 1910

It disappeared sometime between 1934 and 1938 and I guess was part of an early clearance policy.

There will be ways of finding out but for now I am going to concentrate on the 100 or so years it was there when it was home to generations of families who worked in the factories the mills, and the timber and railway yards.

The project was prompted by my friend Bob Armato who commissioned a report on the area in advance of building a warehouse on the site.  By then Homer Street and the neighbouring properties on St Andrew’s Square, Gees Place, Dryden Street and Marsden Square had vanished so completely that they do not appear on any modern maps.*

Homer Street, 1851

But go back into the middle of the 19th century and they are all there.

It is difficult at present to get a sense of what the houses were like, but some at least were back to backs that looked out on to narrow and half enclosed streets and courts.

At the end of Homer Street was a reservoir and three streets down was the Mount Street Dye Works.

Sometime around 1851 the St Andrew’s National School was opened.  It is there on Adshead’s map of that year but is missing from the OS for 1849.

In time I will explore its story but so far I know that in 1911 the boys school had 248 students on roll although the average attendance was just 155, while the girls school had 272 with an average attendance of 160.

St Andrew Street, 1850

Some at least of the students would have been drawn from Homer Street.**

In 1851 it consisted of 15 houses which were home to 93 people.

The occupations of the residents included a porter, charwoman, several labourers, a carter and a number who did various jobs in the textile industry.

Most were from Manchester or the surrounding townships but a fair few as you would expect from the date were from Ireland.

At number 9 was Mr John McCormick a stone mason from Ireland living with his wife Mary who had been born in Manchester and their son James.  The house was also occupied by the five members of the Harris family.  Mr Harris and his wife were also from Ireland although their children were born here.

St Andrew's Church. 1960

There is much more and over the next few weeks I shall wander back to the beginning of Homer Street and forward into the 1930s in an effort to record some of the changes to the area and how the families of Homer Street fared.

But I shall conclude by observing that for almost all of its existence it didn't even get an entry in the street directories leaving me to fall back on St Andrew Street's listing for 1850***

Location; Ancoats



Pictures; St Andrew’s School, Homer Street, 1920, m48646, and St Andrew’s Church, 1964, T Brooks, m10604, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and Homer Street in 1851, from Adshead map of Manchester 1851, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Amato Food Products, http://www.amatoproducts.co.uk/

**Homer Street, Enu 1u 2-6, London Road, Manchester, 1851

***Slater's Directory of Manchester & Salford, 1850, page 90

1945 and 1914: Germany in a Nutshell .... one to listen today

Now this is one I am listening to.

It is the story of the residents of Weimar during the rise and reign of Hitler in 10 episodes based on the book "Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe" by Katja Hoyer.*

Weimar – On the Edge of Catastrophe is written by Katja Hoyer and "is informed by the meticulous diary of Carl Weirach a bookseller who moved to Weimar in 1914.

It follows the lives of the residents of the town of Weimar – a town renowned for its cultural heritage as the birthplace of Goethe and a town beloved by Schiller, Bach, Liszt and Nietzsche.

Weimar is Germany in a nutshell, the former German president Roman Herzog once said ‘a town in which not only culture and thought were at home but also philistinism and barbarism.’

The episode begins in 1945 as Allied forces march the residents of Weimar to Buchenwald concentration camp to force them to face the atrocities that have happened just 8kms from their town. The Weimarers protest they knew nothing of what took place there.

And our story begins in 1914, when Carl Weirich moves to Weimar to set up a new life, taking over a booksellers in the centre of town.

Rosa Schmidt a woman of Jewish heritage is in Alexandria giving birth to her third child. She must battle across Europe as WW1 begins to return to her husband’s home town of Weimar.

Germany’s revolution following the first World War leads to the abdication of the Kaiser and the Grand Duke, and ushers in the first democratic ballot in history on the 19th of January 1919.

It also follows the fortunes of the Schmidt family, whose matriarch Rosa Schmidt was of Jewish origin. They return to her husband’s home town of Weimar in 1914 and look for an opportunity to set up a new hotelier business.

Weimar explores ‘the question of how and why a nation that prided itself on its culture and civility enabled the catastrophe of Nazism haunts us to this day because we fear a repeat.’ The book is about the tension between individual and collective responsibility and sounds a warning for our own times.

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian, journalist and the author of the international bestseller Beyond the Wall as well as Blood and Iron. A visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she writes for Bloomberg and Berliner Zeitung and is a commentator on German current affairs for many British newspapers. She was born in Germany and is now based in the UK.

The reader is Sian Thomas.

The abridger is Julian Wilkinson.

The producer is Lu Kemp"

*Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe by Katja Hoyer, BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002w5pm

The Morecambe Flip …… and other stories

Memories of the Milk Maid in Piccadilly will fast be fading from living memories.

The Milk Maid, 1906

Mine is sitting in the Milk Maid looking out onto the bus station with the gardens beyond.

It specialized in milk shakes, along with frothy coffee and sweet things.

The bar was light, spacious and had a figure of a milk maid picked out on the tiled side wall.

I doubt many others will remember the place.

Or so I thought but over the last few days people have messaged me with their own fond memories.  “Pancakes”, “frothy coffee” and “wonderful ice creams”, seem to be uppermost in what many remember, along with calling in after shopping or waiting to get the bus home. 

And for one it was “tomato soup with a swirl of cream followed by a cake” which characterized the place.

We frequented it in the early 1970s, usually after a day at the College of Knowledge on Aytoun Street.  What we had is lost in time, but I guess it would have been during my frothy coffee period.

I do remember the tiled figure of the giant milk maid.

Just when it opened and when it closed I have yet to discover and I still travel in hopes that someone will have a picture.

So far, I have not found an image of the place, but yesterday an old Union colleague phoned to tell me about The Morecambe Flip which was another of the Milk Maid’s specialities which was a pancake served with shrimps in a sauce.  Now Ray is from Morecambe and couldn’t resist asking if the shrimps were Morecambe Shrimps.  I think he already knew the answer which was confirmed when the member of staff just looked back with an expression of incomprehension.

The Golden Egg, circa 1960s

But he got me thinking again about little history, those events and memories which can claim no great place in history.  They are not high matters of state, earth shattering discoveries or the reverberations of war or natural disasters which roll down the generations.

Instead, they are the trivial recollections of the lives we have led.

They can be seeing the old Queen’s coronation on the telly, remembering exactly where you were at the news of the death of President Kennedy or Ottis Reading, or that first date which turned into a long and happy relationship.

And behind those memories are the bits of our own collective history.

The Ceylon Tea Centre, undated

So, in the case of the Milk Maid I am fairly convinced that it was run on behalf of the Milk Marketing Board, one of the state agencies set up to promote British agriculture alongside the Egg Marketing Board. 

Back then plenty of government agencies both here and abroad vied to entice hungry customers to sample the produce.

In St Peter’s Square there was the Ceylon Tea Centre and on Deansgate the Danish Food Centre, and across the city and beyond there were multiple UCP outlets.

It was years before I realized that UCP stood for United Cattle Products which made sense when you walked past the trays of tripe, sausages and black puddings.

The Golden Grill, Woolwich, 1979

And in the more affluent decades of the mid-20th century there were those other chains of new cafes and restaurants, from Wimpey to the Golden Egg, and out on the main roads the chain of Little Chefs.

What they all had in common was that they offered up  uniform regular dishes, the same whether you were in Scunthorpe, Manchester or London.  

Food purists might dismiss them but for a generation on the move with more money in their pockets than in previous generations they represented all that was new and exciting about the 1960s.

Of course they didn’t have the monopoly, mum would regularly go to a Lyons Tea House in the 1940s, and the Kardomah chain had been selling that blend of food, coffee and light entertainment from the early 1900s.

The lost Kardomah, South Mill Street, 2021

The Manchester Guardian in the 1950s carried several adverts for staff to work at the Market Street Café, which in 1952 was offering a successful applicant between £5-£10 for a 47 hour week, spread over 5½ days.  

No experience was required because “full training will be given”.*

All of which makes me think perhaps I will come across someone who worked at the Milk Maid and if pushed might offer up the answer to Ray's question of where the shrimps for the Morecombe Flip came from.

We shall see.

Location; anytime between 1900 and 1980

Pictures; The Milk Maid, from a 1906 picture postcard from Tuck and Son, courtesy of Tuckdb, https://tuckdb.org/  The Golden Egg menu circa 1960s, courtesy of Andy Robertson, the Ceylon Tea Centre, date unknown**, and the rival The Golden Grill, Woolwich, 1979 and the entrance to the Kardomah, South Mill Street, Manchester, 2021, from the collection of Andrew Simpson,The Kardomah, Market Street, 1958, m62093, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass 

The Kardomah, Market Street, 1958

*Wanted, Manchester Guadian, October 26, 1955

**Vernon Corea’s visits to the Ceylon Tea Centre at 22 Lower Regent Street London, https://vernoncorea.wordpress.com/tag/ceylon-tea-centre-lower-regent-street-london/

Searching the picture ….. London Road 1895

This is a photograph of London Road where it joins Store Street and we are in 1895.

London Road, 1895

There is nothing very remarkable about the picture and might well be described as eight people, two posters  and one antique shop.

But there is of course more and it is the more that has drawn me in.

Above the brick pillar is the approach to London Road Railway Station and that antique shop is still there.  I remember it as a tobacconist and also as a betting shop and is now empty and boarded up.

London Road, 2019

Just whether it will ever see better days again is debatable.

It is after all on that very busy stretch of London Road which most pedestrians shun and is given over to speeding traffic and passing trams.

All of which means it’s footfall is limited.

But not so back in 1895 when an H Entwhistle captured that group of four boys and four men staring into the camera in front of Mr. William Butterworth Wharton’s shop. He described himself as a “dealer in works of art”, and I can track his presence there from 1888 to 1911.

Earlier he is listed during the late 1870s and early 1880s on Half Street by the Cathedral and was living at Oak Bank Cheetham Hill Road.  Now that begs the question of whether the move to London Road was a step up or a slide down.

He died in 1915 leaving the sum of £1150.

Sadly, so far there is little of him in the official records.  He is missing from the census returns but I know  he married in 1880, that his wife Maria died in 1912 and he had at least two sons. They along with his wife are buried in the same plot in Manchester General Cemetery.

And as they say …. Watch this spot because a Sarah Ellen Makin, a Joseph Shevlin and a Betty Mckeown share the plot.  These last three may have no family connection with the Wharton family but it will be fun to explore the chances that they were.

Our man, 1895

At which point I have to confess our dealer in art was not how I was drawn into the picture, that prize goes to one of the eight staring back at me.  He is the one with the hat and by chance his face is the one most clearly visible.

He leans against the poster stand looking back at the camera with what could be a mix of curiosity, or disdain challenging the photographer to  discover what he is thinking.  

And what ever he is thinking I am convinced that he will never offer up any details of his life or his secrets.  

By contrast the others are a blank canvas and could be any one of the thousands of passers by confronted with the new technology of photograpy.

To their right are two posters advertising an event at Bell Vue featuring the Storming of Port Arthur during the short Russo Japanese War of the year before.

The caption on the picture refers to the “crack in the abutment” which 130 years later is still there.

Leaving me just to ponder on what the man on the left has in that basket and just what the neatly dressed  boy with cap and posh looking overcoat was doing on London Road .

But I doubt we will ever know, as for what our man in the hat was thinking .... that is just utter conjecture which has no place amongst the facts other than as a piece of tosh.

Location; London Road, London Road, 1895, H Entwhistle m63006, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and Mr. Wharton’s shop, 2019, courtesy of Google Maps