Longford Hall and our own Chorlton radical

Here is the story of our own radical who lived on the site of what was Longford Hall at the beginning of the 19th century.

 This I have admit is an odd view of Longford Hall which was built in 1857 and demolished in 1995, but I rather like it, and it does convey something of the grandeur of the old building which Pevsner in 1969 described Longford Hall “as the only surviving example of the Italianate style of architecture in the Manchester district.” *

The Hall was built by John and Enriqueta Rylands as a fitting home to a textile manufacturer who in 1888 employed 15,000 people in 17 mills and factories.**
But before that there was an property known as Longford House which had been the home of the Walker family, of which perhaps the most interesting was Thomas Walker, one time pillar of Manchester society but also a radical politician who campaigned for the abolition of the slave trade, supported the French Revolution and was indicted for treason in 1794.

The family lived at Barlow Hall from the late 18th century spending the summer there before moving back for the winter to their town house on South Parade which faces what is now Parsonage Gardens.  And it was there that a mob attacked Walker who was forced to drive them off by discharging a pistol in the December of 1792.

This was at the height of political debate over the issues of press freedom and the French Revolution.
“Emboldened by drink and fired on by agitators, groups hostile to the radicals began to gather around the city.  Walker was in no doubt that this was pre planned.  ‘Parties were collected in different public houses, and from thence paraded in the streets with a fiddler before them, and carrying board on which was painted with CHURCH and KING in large letters’ 

On four separate occasions a mob gathered outside South Parade, broke the windows and attempted to force their way in.  Supported by friends Thomas Walker was forced to fire into the air to disperse the crowds.  The magistrates did nothing to prevent the events and while a “regiment of dragoons was in town, booted and under arms”    and ready to disperse the rioters no order was given.  As if to add insult to injury the main concern of the magistrates when they finally met Walker was that he should not fire at the crowd again if the mob returned!  These attacks had been matched by similar ones on the home of Priestly in Birmingham and in Nottingham.”***

Walker survived both the attacks and was acquitted of treason, after which he retired to the new family home at Longford House where he died in February 1817 and was buried in the parish church on the green.

Pictures; Longford Hall, 1920, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, m67353, and the Walker family gravestone in the parish churchyard from the collection of Andrew Simpson.





* Pevsner N, The Buildings of England South Lancashire,

** for more on the history of the hall and park visit Friends of Longford Park @ http://friendsoflongfordpark.org.uk/
*** The Story of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Andrew Simpson, 2012, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20for%20Chorlton

Stories of Salford Cinemas …………. Part 1 …….. A to K

This will be one of the easiest Salford stories, comes in two parts, and is nothing more than a list of all the Salford cinemas in 1928.*

The challenge should you accept it, is dredge up the pictures, with the memories.

And yes I know someone will have written the book, but where would the fun be in going there?

Instead the list is from the Kinematograpgh Year Book for 1928, which lists all the cinema’s in the country, the film companies and much else.*  I have four Year books in the collection, spanning 1914, 1928, 1929 and 1947.

Location Salford

Picture; list of Salford cinemas, 1928



* The Kinematograpgh Year Book for 1928

Cutting the grass in Mottingham …. in them olden days

I like this picture for several reasons, not least because it is one I have never seen before.

It comes from a delightful slim volume entitled Eltham Village and was published in 1984.

Happily, the authors have given me permission to use the images with of course a credit to Gus White, Ian Murdock and Paula Richardson who collected the 43 images of Eltham and the surrounding villages.

And so back to number 6, Horse drawn mower, Mottingham Playing Fields, circa 1914.  

The picture carried the caption "Mr. Groves and young helper tending the pitches of the London Playing Fields Ground Court Farm Lane.  The land was presented by the Goldsmith Company to the London Playing Fields Association in 1905 to provide ‘sports facilities for Londoners’”.

If you are of a certain age you will remember those lawn mowers which didn’t rely on electricity or diesel and instead were worked with muscle power, be it a man in shirtsleeves or men in shirt sleeves with horse.

Apparently, they are making a coming back with manual lawn mowers costing  anything from £44 and heading up towards a hundred.

And for those like me who didn't know, "The London Playing Fields Foundation was formed in 1890 by visionary Victorian philanthropists concerned about the loss of green space in London and the need to provide sport and recreation for current and future generations".**

So, there you are.

Location; Mottingham

Picture; Horse drawn mower, Mottingham Playing Fields, 1914, courtesy of Eltham Village

*Eltham Village,  Gus White, Ian Murdock and Paula Richardson in 1984 and published by G & Pi Publications Eltham

****The London Playing Fields Foundation, https://www.lpff.org.uk/about/history/

Lost Manchester Streets …. Nu 98 …… the one that never was

This is Sally’s Yard and it sounds like it should have been here for ever.

Or at least from when Hulme Street was cut sometime in the early 19^th century.

Near by there was Frank Street, Mary Street and James Leigh Street, and plenty more, all reminders of a time when speculative builders and developers threw up small properties to house a local population who worked in the surrounding mills, timber yards and metal works.

And with a sense of their own importance named them after themselves or close family members.

So having passed Sally’s Yard a few days ago I pondered on its origins and whether I could find Sally in her alley.

I had hoped for one of those narrow dismal streets occupied by small residential dwellings in the shadow of dark and grimy textile mills, but which courtesy of the census returns would offer up a heap of life stories and maybe even our Sally.

It was a forlorn hope, for moving back through the 20^th century into the middle decades of the century before our alley was just a passageway into an enclosed area which served as a storage spot for a tin works, and later a glass bottle merchants and “fancy box manufacturer”.

Of course, a Sally might have worked there but I don’t think we will ever find her.

And equally frustrating it appears the name Sally’s Yard may only date from 1995 when “Urban Splash completed their first ever transformation of an old Victorian Mill in Manchester, renovating Sally’s Yard on Hulme Street, just off Oxford Road”.*

Ah well history doesn’t always turn out the way you expect or want.

Location; Hulme Street

Picture; Sally’s Yard, 2026 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Manchester's newest New York style loft apartments - 25 years in the making...By Ben Brown, November 2020, 30th Manchester's Finest, https://www.manchestersfinest.com/news/manchesters-newest-new-york-style-loft-apartments-25-years-in-the-making/

When they stole the name of Little Stable Street

History has not been kind to Little Stable Street.

Looking down Salmon Street, 2023

First it stole its name some time in the 1870s and then relegated it to just a street which goes nowhere, and has had the added indignity heaped upon it of being left with only the backs of properties.

It was cut sometime between 1772 and 1793 and by the 1850s its eastern side was entirely taken up with commercial and industrial properties as was most of its western side.

Little Stables Street, 1850

Just one small stretch of the western side was occupied by some back-to-back houses and a passage way which gave access to a series of closed courts.

All of these were swept away in the 1870s to make way for the new Wholesale Fish Market, and it will have been around then that Little Stable Street became Salmon Street an act of rebranding which ranks as one of the least imaginative examples of town planning.

But long before then it had pretty much been ignored by the street directories who saw no merit in listing any of its occupants.

More recently Google Maps have invested time and a camera in recording the street.  The first visit was back in September 2012 which captured the name of George Makin and Sons Ltd at the far end of the street.

Spice Lounge, 2023

Two years later this had become the rear of Spice Lounge whose front faces out on to Shudehill at no.60. 

I can’t be sure just exactly when the restaurant opened but in the August of 2012 a sign announced its imminent opening replacing a branch of Costcutter.

In time I will go looking for George Makin and Sons Ltd and try to locate the residents of Little Stable Street in the middle decades of the 19th century, leaving me just with the red door and the mystery of what is behind it.

Back in 2012  it was the “New Union DVD and Video Shop” specializing amongst other things in  “Fantasy Adult Gifts”

Behind the red door, 2023

And now it is a red door and a mystery.

Location, Salmon Street, off Thomas Street

Pictures; Salmon Street, 2023, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and Little Stable Street, 1850, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

Of Waterloo sunsets, Peckham Rye and the Pleasuance at Well Hall

Now it is just one of those things that you miss where you grew up.

Coming home, 2013

It is such an obvious statement but is none the less true.

I left south east London in 1969 for Manchester unsure what was ahead of me but convinced that I would be back, but like most plans it never happened.

Manchester is where I ended up, got married bought a house and brought up four kids.

In my twenties I can’t say I missed London and I guess it wasn’t until quite recently, long after I qualified for a concessionary bus pass and reached an age to be rewarded with the being offered a seat on the tram that I began to think of home.

Well Hall, 2011

And home really only begins when the ferry docks or the  train pulls across the river into Waterloo and then I know I am back.

Another 20 or so minutes later and after the train has taken that curve I have arrived home in Eltham.

But then because we moved around, the train could quite easily have taken me to Queens Road or New Cross and because for a long time our Elizabeth lived in Plumstead and Woolwich there was that other set of railway stations.

My kids always know which special song to play for me and ever since I first heard Waterloo Sunset it has been my tune, with a special meaning given that Kay and I would meet every Friday night under that clock.

Ten years earlier Waterloo Station would be one of the destinations along with London Bridge which would be the start of an adventure.

Woolwich, 2015

For with 2/6d pocket money and aged just ten there were lots of places you could go for a modest return fare and still have change for a variety of sweets.

Sometimes you struck gold and on other occasions you ended up in a dreary back street beside a canal with grim tall buildings all around you.

But that didn’t matter because the fun was in the expectation of where you might go and once there roaming across the city in search of anything that looked interesting.

And there were the bombsites which were still pretty much in evidence all around us.  Most of the time there wasn’t much to discover, but once we found a gas mask still in its box with the green paint and black rubber looking brand new.

Woolwich, circa 1940s

And then there was the old bombed church of St Mary’s which was a place where with a shared candle  a group of you could wander through the crypt anticipating all sorts of horrors and finding only a damp and smelly mattress.

Some adventures turned out not so well, like the time me, Jimmy O’Donnel and John Cox having walked from Lausanne Road to Greenwich, took the wrong turning by the entrance to the foot tunnel and instead of standing on the sand in front of the Naval College we turned left walked amongst the barges and sank up to our ankles in oily Thames mud.

To this day I remain ashamed that I blamed the other two when mother interrogated me on arriving home.

Worse than the interrogation was the bath that followed which seemed to take hours and involved much scrubbing to remove the dried mud from me and even longer to make my shoes half decent.

Today those trips are less perilous but no less fun and often involve a brief visit to an old haunt like the Pleasaunce at Well Hall which is only a few minute’s walk from our old house.

Cambden Church, 1904

Of course I am well aware that the places of my youth have changed and as in the case of Woolwich pretty dramatically but I don’t subscribe to that throw away judgement that places I knew are “now rubbish”, they are just different and no doubt there would be those catapulted into the 21st century from 1900 who would mourn the passing of the “smoke hole” at Woolwich and wish there were two lanes of traffic forcing their way down Powis Street.

I suppose for those of us who leave it is always a bit odd to be confronted with the disappearance of all our childhood memories.

That said I never tire of Waterloo Sunset or arriving south over the river.

Location; south of the river

Pictures from the collection of Andrew Simpson, Scott MacDonald and Elizabeth and Collin Fitzpatrick and Steve Bardrick, Camden Church Peckham Road, circa 1904, Albert Flint Photographer and Publisher, 68 Church Street, Camberwell in the series Camberwell, marked by Tuck and Sons, and reproduced courtesy of Tuck DB, https://tuckdb.org/

A lost bridge across the Brook

Now I think it is time for a walk across the meadows in search of Mosley Bridge.

It was a small bridge over the Brook put up by Charles Walker and later washed away.  Charles Walker was the son of Thomas Walker, the radical, and lived at Longford Hall and the bridge connected his land on either side of the brook.

In the 1830s it was destroyed by a flood, and a new one was built where the brook joins the Mersey which makes it easy to find.  It’s there on the old tithe map of 1845 and looks to be roughly where the bridge is today.

But I am not sure that this is our bridge.  Over the last fifty years the banks and the land on either side of where the brook runs into the Mersey have been raised a number of times but from memory the masonry looks old.  And a bridge does show up on the right spot not only the tithe map of 1845 but on the earlier OS for 1841 and the later OS of 1888-93.

So far I have not come across any old photographs of the bridge but there is a painting made by J Montgomery in 1963 looking east along the line of the Brook.  Stand on that exact spot today and to the south there is a dense collection of bushes and small trees which were entirely missing when Montgomery recorded the scene.

But neither his or the modern view are how it was.  Back in the 1840s, to the south of the Brook on what was Charles Walker’s land were water meadows, while away to our left just beyond the field was Walker’s orchard.

Now before I take a walk down to the spot I should really ask my old botanist pal David Bishop whose knowledge of the place goes back to the 1970s and whose blog at http://friendsofchorltonmeadows.blogspot.co.uk/ is a wonderful collection of information about the land and the plant life along this stretch of the Mersey on the edge of our township.

Picture; Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, Junction of Gore Brook [Chorlton Brook] and the River Mersey, J Montgomery 1963, m80140