Go west …….. and discover Altrincham’s past …. part one

It may not be the most elegant of titles, but it does the business of introducing our new book in the series of the History of Greater Manchester by Tram.*

Lions at the Town Hall, 2026

It marks a departure because the first four books have taken in the city centre and south Manchester, and with this one we head out through Stretford, Sale and Timperley and onto Altrincham.

But like all the others the format is the same ….. take a number of tram stops, discover their stories and together they build into the history of Greater Manchester.  To these we add a collection of Peter’s paintings along with some old and new photographs.

Two pots and a heap of lampshades

And the route to Altrincham, via Old Trafford, Stretford, Sale, Brooklands, Timperley and Navigation Road offer up a heap of the past from Manchester’s 1857 Art Exhibition and tales from the Duke’s Canal to the Bravest Little Street.

We started in Altrincham and fell across a local postman who was convinced we should visit Church Street Antiques because in his words the “owners know all there is to know about the town’s past” and given that they have been trading from the shop for three decades it was a promising start.**

But nothing can beat just wandering the streets and taking a chance of going in and exploring the interior of old buildings.

And that led us into the former Altrincham Town Hall and a discussion with Libby and Ella who are part of the team which manage the building for the community and were more than happy to tell us the story of the Town Hall along with the statue of the market trader which was unveiled in the grounds in 2008.

To which Peter went home and produced this fine water colour of Church Street Antiques which must be one from inclusion in the book.

And later we may have more with perhaps one of the clock tower.

Well we shall see.

Bravests Little Street, 2026

Of course, there is much more and along with the Market Hall, and sundry old buildings we had a resident who directed us to Chapel Street for ever remembered as the “Bravest Little Street” for it was here that “from just 60 houses, 161 men volunteered in the Great War [and] 29 were killed”.

All of which promises a heap of stories from just one of the eight tram stops in the book which will be published later this year and is available at £4.99 from Chorlton Bookshop, the shop at Central Ref, St Peter's Square, or from us at  www.pubbooks.co.uk

Next; Peter’s painting of the Clock Tower a bit more Altrincham history.

Location; Altrincham

Pictures; scenes from Altrincham, 2026, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Painting; Water colour of Church Street Antiques, 2026 

*A History of Greater Manchester by Tram; https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2026/03/go-west-and-discover-altrinchams-past.html

**Church Street Antiques, www.churchstreetantiques.com

A blue plaque for Mary Clarke ……….. resident of 8 Alpha Place

Now, I don’t think I will ever find Mary Clarke.

Alpha Street, 2003

In 1853 she was living in the cellar of number 8 Alpha Place, which with Omega Place and Fogg’s Place formed a complex of back to back housing consisting of 32 cottages and fifteen cellars inhabited by 208 people.*

The three streets were bounded by Commercial street to the south and Jordan Street to the east and are just off Deansgate in Knott Mill.

I am not even sure how long she was there. Two years earlier she doesn’t feature on the census return and in 1854 she has gone.

And so far, while there are plenty of Mary Clarke’s living across the city in the 1850s, it is unclear which might be her.

Alpha Street, 1849

Nor am I surprised, because Alpha Place was another of those small streets where “poverty busied itself”.*

In 1853 it attracted the attention of the Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association which drew attention to the poor housing and lack of sanitation.**

I can’t be sure when they were built, but the first entry in the Rate Books for Commercial Street is 1836 and for Jordan Street the following year. 

All 32 properties were back to back and consisted of two rooms with the addition of a cellar.

Mary Clarke paid just 1/6d for her cellar room while the going rate for the houses ranged from 2/5d to 2/8d, which was a substantial chunk of a weekly wage.

For as along as I can remember the area has been a car park and back in the 1980s it was still possible the exposed lines of the brick walls.  On my last visit the car park had been given a make over and the evidence for those walls had vanished under tarmac.***

Alpha Street, 2022

Which is pretty much how I left it.

By the start of the new century the area had been fenced off, gained an odd-looking single-story hut in 2008, which subsequently vanished behind another fence, and since then the fences have slowly deteriorated.

Andy Robertson was down there a few days ago and pondered as he took pictures, that there was “Plenty of room for at least two 95 storey tower blocks”.

But a search of the planning portal has revealed no development plans.

So, for now the site which was home to Mary Clarke, John Fletcher, Ellen Hoole, James Brooks and another 204 people remains and empty space.

Alpha Street, 2022

Of course, I know that there will never be a blue plaque to remember Mary Clarke, but perhaps there should be, if only as a reminder of the thousands of unknown residents across the city, who lived, and worked in the menial jobs, and many of whom lived on the margins of poverty.

They are less the people who history has forgotten and more those who were never even recognized.

Location; Manchester

Pictures; Commercial Street, Omega Street, 2003 from the collection of Andrew Simpson and area in 1849 from the OS for Manchester & Salford, 1842-49, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and in 2022, from the collection of Andy Robertson

*Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum, Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century, 1971, Pelican edition 1973

** Report of the Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association 1853

***Commercial Street, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search?q=commercial+street

Snapshots of Well Hall ……….. part 1 …….1873

Now this is Well Hall House in 1873.

And what I like about it is the detail showing the old 18th century house, the gardens to the south and the collection of farm buildings to the north, bounded by what is now Kidbrook Lane and assorted cottages beyond.

What interests me is the small water course which feeds into the moat and back in 1873 required a footbridge to cross it.

I must confess that I had never knew that there was a  watercourse or  given any thought to how the moat would have once been supplied.

Which is a huge omission on my part.

But following the stream east, the map shows it joins the River Quaggy.

And opens up that fascinating bit of speculation as to whether our water course was a feeder for the river, or if it had been dug from the Quaggy to fill the moat.

I rather think I must get in touch with the Environment Agency.

On the other hand, I bet there will be someone who knows and will gently point out the obvious to me.

We shall see.

Location; Well Hall

Picture; Well Hall House and surrounding land, 1873, from the OS map of Kent, 1858-1873, First Edition, six inch to the mile, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

"See better days and do better things," the sad end of the Chorlton Liberal Club.

The Chorlton Liberal Club had opened in the October of 1897.

It wasn’t the first club the Liberals had had here, that was on Wilbraham Road but the new one on Manchester Road was more “commodious and suitable for the purpose.”*

Its opening was greeted “with the hope that the club would strengthen Liberalism in Chorlton-cum-Hardy” and membership figures seemed to bear this out. 

In the space of the year they had recruited another 50 members and were confident of more.  I suspect the club was only part of that success, with something also down to the influx of new people into the township.

Not that they saw it that way.  The official opening was done with a gold key and the job fell to Reuben Spencer “an old Liberal” who “hoped it would be a centre of light and leading, round which young men would be prepared to take a part in social, municipal and public life generally.”

We might jib at the emphasis on men especially as women were active in local politics and within two decades Sheena Simon was elected with a majority of over 1400 votes and 58% of the vote as the first woman Liberal councillor for Chorlton.**

Nationally the years around the opening of the club were not good for the Liberals.  They lost both the 1895 and 1900 general elections and would not be returned to office till 1906.

Locally they fared better both on the old Withington District Council and after our incorporation into the city on the Manchester City Council and by the 1920s were so evenly balanced with the Conservatives that the Manchester Guardian reported in 1928 that

“there are few wards in which Conservative and Liberal opinion is so nicely balanced.  Of the eight elections that have been fought in Chorlton since 1920 four have been won by the Conservatives and four by the Liberals.”**

But by the early 1930s the Liberals were on the defensive increasingly being squeezed by the Labour Party.

They won their last seat in 1932, saw their sitting councillor Lady Sheena Simon loose to the Conservatives the following year and after 1935 did not  contest another election  till 1946 by which time they had slipped to third place.***

I suspect this might have also been reflected in the state of the club which I remember as a slightly dowdy place by the 1970s.

All of which was a great shame.  It had been a private residence before becoming a club and I rather think might have been built sometime in the 1880s.  It last occupants had been the Lloyd family who where there in 1891.

It remained an impressive building and gained a new lease of life after the fire in the 1980s when it became the Lauriston Club.

And now with the close of the club it is again a residential property.

Pictures; the Liberal Club after the fire from the Lloyd collection, undated

*Liberalism at Chorlton-Cum-Hardy, Manchester Guardian, October 11, 1897
**Not that she was the first woman councillor here in Chorlton, that was Jane Redford elected in 1910.  She was not a Liberal but styled herself a Progressive Candidate and must have been close enough to the Liberal outlook to ensure they never put up a candidate against her or other Progressives.
**The Chorlton By-Election, Manchester Guardian December 18, 1928
*** Local election results 1904-1949, compiled by Lawrence Beedle

Standing in front of the Rivoli on Barlow Moor Road sometime in 1936

Now I can’t be certain when this photograph of the Rivoli on Barlow Moor Road was taken but given that the cinema opened in November 1936 and closed because of bomb damage four years later it will be sometime between the two.

And there are other clues to a possible date.

The first is the film Anthony Adverse which was released in the November of 1936 and will have been showing in suburban cinemas within the year.

It was a dreadful film based on an impossible plot heavy in morality and set in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

That said it featured infidelity, a mistress of Napoleon and the remorse of a slave trader who turned away from “that odious traffic in human flesh” and was set in lush tropical surroundings and magnificent European palaces.

Added to which it had the young Olivia de Havilland who at the age of 20 was starring in her fourth film having already acted with Errol Flynn in Captain Blood and who within the year would star in The Charge of the Light Brigade and later still The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex and that all time weepy that was Gone With the Wind.

The film had also picked up four Academy Awards so I guess had we been here back then we would have gone along.

And that might have been the motive for Mr Clarke of 83 Clarence Road to take the photograph and add it to his portfolio of images he marketed as picture postcards.*

After all if you had seen the film or just visited the cinema you might just be prompted to pick this card out of all the rest next time you wanted to send a message which is what postcard manufactures banked on.

Commercial photographers with an eye to what would sell toured local streets taking pictures of individual houses and offering them to the residents and when that market dried up offered them to postcard companies.

In the case of Mr Clarke he did both, producing the cards with his imprint and selling them to the local shops, including Mr Lloyd’s on Upper Chorlton Road and Mrs Burt’s stationers on Wilbraham Road.

He was active during the 1920s and into the 30s and produced a series of book marks for the opening of Central Ref.

By 1940 he “re-located the family home and ceased making his living solely from photography as a 1944 wedding certificate shows him as an Inland Revenue clerk residing at 5, Keppel Rd.”**

But during his time as a commercial photographer he produced some fascinating pictures of Chorlton, of which this is one that I have never seen before.

And for all those who have debated the actual location of the cinema there is no doubting that Mr Clarke’s picture nails it firmly on the spot now occupied by K.F.C.

What I also like is the detail of the two kiosks on either side of the entrance and that the Rivoli is one of those new picture houses which have fully embraced the motor car as the cark park sign indicates.

So that pretty much is that.

Picture; the Rivoli circa 1936-40 from the collection of Peter McLoughlin

*Harold Clarke, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Harold%20Clarke

**Tony Goulding, grandson

The Tudor Barn in 1909, one for the album

The Tudor Barn in 1909

Now here is one for the picture album.

This is the Tudor Barn back in 1909 and that really is about all I want to say.

Although I find it hard to match this image with the building I knew.

It comes from Eltham Through Time.*

Picture; courtesy of Kristina Bedford.

*Eltham Through Time, Amberley, Publishing,  2013

Ms Bedford also has an interesting web site, Ancestral Deeds, http://www.ancestraldeeds.co.uk/

A day of steam, fun and history ……………The Great Railway Exposition

I have no idea how I ended up on Liverpool Road, forty years ago.

I might have read about the event, or just followed the crowds.

Either way it was a wonderful day of steam, fun and history, and reminded me of growing up in the 1950s, and taking express trains pulled by steam powered locomotives.

Even now that mix of steam, warm oil, and clunking railway wagons is enough to transport me back to rail excursions, when electric and diesel traction was rare on our railways.

I am indebted to Paul Sherlock who sent me this cover of the souvenir booklet, which anchors the moment, because I had long forgotten just when it occurred.

It was an amazing day and left me with a portfolio of pictures.

Location; Manchester

Pictures; The Real Railway Exposure, 1980 courtesy of Paul Sherlock, and moment on the day, 1980 from the collection of Andrew Simpson