Discovering Turn Moss Road …… that one with a little history

Turn Moss Road is the one that runs off Edge Lane and down onto Turn Moss.

Turn Moss Road, 2023

It’s a road that you could easily miss or just give a nod to on your way from Chorlton into Stretford.

That said it has some nice-looking properties and is marked by that giant sign which welcomes you to Trafford, with a smaller one announcing that you are about to enter Stretford which regularly attracts spray can enthusiasts and the odd individual unloading a ranger of stickers.

I doubt I would ever taken the road further if Ruth hadn’t posted “Do you know anything about Turn Moss Road? 

I live in one of the black and white ones, built around 1992. I’d love to know more about what was there before. I think there was a large house and grounds on Edge Lane that was demolished”.

She was responding to a story I had written on walking into Stretford in 1847.

Turn Moss Road, 1892

And her question intrigued me, because with the sun cracking the paving stones and a possible high of 31° predicted for today, I am not going anywhere.

The road shows up on all the old maps going back into the early 19th century and for most of its existence it was just a a lane leading to Turn Moss Farm.

There are pictures of the farm, and it also appears on the OS maps for the 1840s and 1880s and in the census returns as well as various books on the history of Stretford.

John Bailey in his book Old Stretford published in 1878 wrote that “Turf moss or Turn Moss in the low lying meadows or ees, is mentioned in one of the Mosley Wills in 1612".

It was and is likely always to be a lonely house and is yet surrounded by embankments to protect it from the floods. 

In 1771, when the estate was on sale it contained "93 Lancashire acres”,  but by the mid 20th century its size had shrunk so that when Samuel Massey in his book A History of Stretford, 1976 reported that

“Turn Moss Farm. Formerly Turfe Moss Farm. The fields, few in number, surrounded the far. The farm was approached from Edge Lane and from Hawthorn Road. The cellars of the farm house were subject to flooding. The occupiers were dependant for water on a shallow well and rainwater tank.” 

Turn Moss from the Briscat with Turn Moss in the distance, 1950

But what has really brought the old farm back is one of Allan Brown’s stories, who remembers working there as a boy in the 1940s. 

He was one of the many young people who were encouraged to help out working on farms during the Second World War.

This was the period of “Dig for Victory” with food in short supply parks gardens and even the tops of air raid shelters were used to cultivate crops.

So, Allan did his bit walking from his home near the green down the old road, now more commonly known as Hawthorn Lane to the farm and a stint of voluntary war work.

I never asked Allan if he ever used Turn Moss Road but I suppose he will have done, and back then it was just a lane with the current development dating from the 1990s.

Westonby, Edge Lane, 1914

Go back into the late 19th century and maps show that the only buildings along the Stretford side of the road was a green house and outhouse which may have the stables for the large house now long gone which stood on Edge Lane.  

That house promises to be an interesting research project and in time may match Westonby that place still remembered as the Twilight Sleep Home for painless child birth.*

It still stands to the east of our road and is somewhere I am minded to return to.

And that is about it for now..

Picture; Turn Moss Road, 2023, courtesy of Google Maps, Turn Moss Road, 1892, from the OS mapd of Lancashire, 1892-94, Turn Moss,1950 from what was known as the Briscat which was a three acre piece of pasture which back in the 1840s had been part of the land George Whitelegg rented from the Egerton’s, W. Jackson from the Lloyd collection, Westonby and Edge Lane, 1914, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, m17757 courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass.

*Westonby, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search?q=westonby

Looking at Eagle House in Eltham High Street sometime in 1874

Eagle House, 1909

Eltham has got to be lucky that so many of its fine houses built in the 18th and early 19th centuries have survived.

Of course as is ever the way the more humble dwellings of the families of agricultural labourers, tradesmen and craftsmen have long since been cleared away.

Many were unfit and will have had their time long before the last century was turned, but it is a shame.

And more so because few historians ever ventured to record what was still in their midst.  In the case of Eltham, the historian R.R.C Gregory makes references to to them and includes photographs of a few which in 1909 was all there was left.

Eagle House, 1874

Now before someone accuses me of wallowing in romantic tosh, no amount of nostalgia can hide the fact that many rural properties along with their counterparts in the cities were badly built, ill maintained and too small for the numbers who were forced to live in them.

Parliamentary reports commented on how the traditional wattle and daub cottages were damp, cold, were a prey to all sorts of vermin and lacked decent sanitation.

So I don’t think we should mourn their passing only wish more local historians had done their best to record them in detail.

Mr Gregory makes a passing reference to Jubilee Cottages and those in Ram Alley and Sun Yard and we know that those in Sun Yard were condemned as unfit at the beginning of the 20th century, but that is about it.

I suppose in their defence our historians took these properties for granted and could see little point in writing about them.

So time I think to draw on another fine house in Eltham.  This is Eagle House which still exists today at the end of the High Street and is now the Presbytery of Christ Church.

Eagle House, 1909

It dates from the 18th century but is in fact two buildings which can be best seen from the rear.

“The house to  the east is redbrick and is 18th century while the house to the west is yellow brick and is early 19th century, at which time the front was unified.”*

And in its time it was a big place, with sixteen rooms and an extensive formal gardens at the rear.

With his usual eye to detail Mr Gregory recorded that

“This is the house which faces Victoria-road and was the residence of the late Mr J A Scrutton.

At the end of the 18th century it was the residence of the Whomes family.  It was subsequently occupied by Mr. H.Latham, Mr. H. Baines, Mrs Lambert, Mr. G J Goschen (afterwards Lord Goshen, recently deceased),  Mrs Walrond, Mr, C Hampshire and Mr. C W Bourne.

Lord Goshen date unknown

The father of the late Lord Goshen Mr J Goshen- lived in the house that stands between Ivy House and the Roman Catholic  Church.  Here the future Lord Goshen spent his childhood.  It was afterwards the residence of Mr Knightly, who kept there a private school for young gentleman.”**

Now both Mr Baines and Mr Goshen rented land in the area around Roper Street and their stories are slowly emerging but more of them later, except to say that Lord Goshen was a Liberal politican who served in the governments of Gladstone.

The house of his youth is still standing and is the St Mary Centre at 180 Eltham High Street which dates from at least 1837.

All of which we shall return to along with Mr Baines, Mr Goshen and others who lived at Eagle House.
*Spurgeon, Darrell, Discover Eltham, 2nd edition, 2000
**Gregory, R.R.C., The Story of Royal Eltham, 1909
Pictures; Eagle House from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm detail showing Eagle House and grounds from the OS map for Kent, 1858-74, and Lord Goshen from Wikipedia Commons, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Goschen,_1st_Viscount_Goschen

A farm on the green

No matter how many times I look at this picture it always has the power to draw me back in.

The date is uncertain but my old friend Tony Walker suggested sometime in the 1860s but I cannot be sure.

The bowler hats worn by two of the men began appearing in the 1850s so a date just a little later might fix the photograph.

What I do know is that it cannot be any older than the mid 1880s because the familiar lychgate at the entrance to the parish church is missing.

 Now this was erected to celebrate  Queen Victoria's golden jubilee so we are dealing with a scene from sometime in the decades after the mid century.

It is Higginbotham’s farm yard. The family had lived on the green and farmed out towards the Mersey since the 1840s and were still there in the 1960s. It takes me directly back to the period of Chorlton’s history that I am most interested in and has featured in my book.

Here are those usual objects associated with a busy farm and like any working place not as tidy as perhaps it should have been.

To the left is the farm cottage with its distinctive rear porch. To the right the barn which in the early years of the 19th century was one of the sites where the Methodists held their services before building their chapel on the Row.*

Later still it became the work shop for the Walker Brothers who ran a building firm from the site.

There was for many years a stone inscription in the barn recording its part in the history of Methodism in the township but sadly it has been lost.

My second picture dates from the 1970s when the Walker’s still had the yard.

Pictures; Higginbotham’s farm circa 1860 from the collection of Marjorie Holmes, & the same spot circa 1979 from the collection of Tony Walker.


*The Row was later renamed Beech Road

Ancient Lives with Mary Beard ..... Being Greek

Now, this is one I will listening to.

It's Ancient Lives with  Mary Beard, Being Greek.*

I am a great fan of Mary Beard, have her books, listened to her on the Romans on the wireless and always follow her TV programmes.

"From Marvel movies to presidential elections their powerful influence endures on our stories, philosophies and politics, but what it was it like to be an Ancient Greek? Scattered clues need to be gathered until they form a living, breathing human, witness to the cultural powerhouse that was Ancient Greece.

In Being Greek, Mary Beard, Britain’s best-selling historian of the ancient world, rebuilds the lives of six people, from a priestess to a murderer. 

Her investigations reveal the limits of female independence and take us deep into the marriage of an Athenian power couple. 

Themes of faith, politics and justice reveal the foundations of Greek society, but it’s the thoughts, feelings and lifestyles of individual Greeks she’s really interested in. Gods and legendary heroes are easy to come by, but Mary looks behind the temples and beyond the classic myths, filling in her stories with the relatable detail of Greek life, uncovering what they ate, how they decorated their homes and raised their children.

Mary visits the sites that help cast fresh light on past lives- the grave of a powerful woman in prehistoric Mycenae, an exquisite temple clutching the slopes of the Acropolis and the dusty plains of Marathon. Experts in Greece and the UK help Mary interpret the clues, along with film director Martin Scorsese who’s fascinated by the story of a gangster of the ancient world who pulled powerful strings to escape imperial justice.

In the first episode we meet Euphiletos, on trial for the murder of his wife's lover. Can he convince the jury that this is a crime of passion, not a calculated act of mob violence?

Producer: Alasdair Cross

Researcher: Anna Charalambou

Expert Contributors: Rosanna Omitowoju, Cambridge University and Rebecca Sweetman, Director of the British School at Athens

Actors: Robert Wilfort as Euphiletos and Laura Dos Santos as the old woman

Translations by Mary Beard

Special thanks to Elizavet Sioumpara and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture".

Leaving me just to fall back on one of my favourite historian of children's books, Looking at Ancient History by R J Unstead

Location; BBC Radio 4

Picture; cover of Looking at Ancient History, R J Unstead, 1959

*Ancient Lives with Mary Beard Being Greek, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002xzjn

** R J Unstead, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/R.J.Unstead

Lost and forgotten streets of Salford ........... nu 55 standing on Greengate with the help of Mr Goad

Now yesterday we were on Greengate in the winter of 1949 and today we have moved forward almost a full half century.

Of course by now there are a bank of photographs to call on to recreate what Greengate was like.

But instead I have fallen back on a map.

And it is a very unusual map in that its main purpose was to assist insurance companies.

“Goad’s fire insurance plans had a number of features that distinguished them from the available commercial maps, notably the Ordnance Survey town plans. 

First and most importantly, the plans were produced to meet the needs of a specific customer, the fire insurance companies, providing a range of information that would enable them to assess more accurately the risks associated with insuring properties. 

To that end the plans, surveyed on a scale of 40 feet to the inch, covered all properties in a town or city centre, recording information on the materials used in the construction of each building. 

This was achieved by means of a colour code (red: brick and stone; light blue: skylights on one/two storey buildings; purple: skylights on taller buildings; yellow: wooden buildings), a feature which gave the plans their distinctive appearance. 

Details were provided of the internal layout of buildings, particular attention being given to the construction and flammability of party walls, skylights, windows and doorways. 

Thus roofs were identified as slate, tile, metal, cement and felt with tar. The entrances in warehouses distinguished such features as hoists and the crane doors.”*

Now that is pretty impressive.

More so because the plans were regularly updated although instead of printing a new plan correction slips were produced and just pasted on the original section of the map.

All of which means that the original sheet became a multi-layered document and dating the map can be a bit difficult given that the first surveys were undertaken in 1886 and were still being issued in 1901.

That said they are a fascinating guide and just leaves me to trawl the directories to match the names on the maps with the street lists.

Picture; Greengate 1886-1901, from Goads Fire Insurance maps, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Introduction to Goads Fire Insurance Maps, Digital Archives Association

Two pictures….. one canal …. and 47 years …. walking the Rochdale Canal

It was sometime back in 1979 when armed with just a couple of cameras and heaps of curiosity I wandered down the Rochdale Canal from Princess Street to the Castlefield Basin.

That journey and the eighteen or so pictures I took became a series of stories chronicling that day and subsequent trips.*

In the course of those 47 years the canal has undergone a transformation from a run down, slightly edgy place, littered with sunken boats covered in tall grass and invasive undergrowth which had all but taken over the towpath.

1979

But nothing daunted I returned with family and even groups of students when risk assessment hardy existed.

All of which was a sad lament on what had once been a busy waterway which cut through the centre of the city.

Back then there were plenty of reminders of its former glory fallen on hard times,  from the decaying warehouses lining the route to a complex set of pipes which carried steam from the nearby power stations to surrounding buildings.

Now the overgrown vegetation has been tamed, the warehouses converted into swish apartments or demolished for swish new apartments and those pipes which leached steam have gone to the scrap yard.

And as I was standing on Oxford Road this morning, I was drawn back to snap a few new pictures.

I checked the back catalogue but couldn’t replicate the scene from 1979 and instead fell back on an image looking towards Oxford Road.

At this point I could go into detail on the history of the canal and that space which was once the hospital, but I won’t.

They are all in the blog.**

Still its close enough. 

Location; The Rochdale Canal

Pictures; The Rochdale Canal from Oxford Road, 2026, and looking back towards Oxford Road, 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*One Canal 18 pictures …….. https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/One%20canal%2018%20pictures

**The Rochdale Canal, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Rochdale%20Canal

Walking into Stretford along Edge Lane in 1847

Now if I wanted to walk to Stretford from the village in the late spring of 1847 I would have used the old road.

It started at Hardy Lane as a foot path twisted and turned its way following the course of the Brook at one point before skirting the church and green and going off across Turn Moss, under the Duke’s Canal and coming out at the pump opposite the Cock Inn.

It is a road I have written about before* so instead I think I will take Edge Lane which if you were at all of an inquisitive nature would be a better choice, for it offered you a chance of gazing over some fine houses.

So Edge Lane it is, starting at the green with its farmhouses and pubs and then out along the road which took you to the junction with High Lane.

Now I said it gave you a chance to gaze on some fine house but most of these are set back in their own gardens.  This is particularly true of Longford house the home of the Walker family from the early 19th century.

They too are a family who I have written about, Thomas Walker was a Manchester politician, radical and businessman who is buried in the parish church yard, and his son Charles was a noted author.  But there home like its successor Longford Hall was some distance away from the road and not therefore easily visible.

Nor so Edge House home of George and Mary Bannister who farmed 150 acres of land and employed eight men.  Their home was up a long winding lane set in an orchard.

There were of course more humble homes, along the way which were lived in by James Cain, carpenter,James Hodcroft, market gardener and William Barlow florist.

And then there was Peel House, the last before the canal.  I think it dates from after the 1830s, had its own lodge house, orchard and gardens and was the home of Norbury family who included an inspector of houses, a retired cotton merchant and a solicitor’s clerk.

I would have liked to have seen Peel House, and there are photographs but these are the property of Trafford Libraries who guard their copyright.  Had I arrived just a few years earlier in Manchester and I might have seen the building for myself, but it was demolished in 1967.

Like all such walks what you saw depended on when you walked the walk.

So a little earlier in the decade and there would a have been a few meaner cottages, while  just into the next decade and beyond Peel House the home of Thomas Massey who lived by the new railway station and was employed as a railway porter.

Fast forward just another 30 years and this end of Edge Lane would have been dominated by a series of large houses with impressive sounding names like Standish House, Fern Bank, Wansbeck House and Beech House.

But the 1880s and 90s are out of my comfort zone, I as many know prefer to walk the fields and lanes of the township in the years before 1850.

So I shall close with a place that would have been easily accessible both from the old road and Edge Lane and this was Turn Moss Farm. It is mentioned in some of the histories of Stretford, was the subject of plenty of photographs and is remembered by my old friend Alan Brown who worked for the farmer during the last war.  Bu that is a story for another time.

Location; Chorlton, Manchester

*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20Old%20Road
**http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/childhood-memories-of-war-service-farm.html

Pictures; detail of Edge Lane from the OS map of Lancashire 1841-53, and Hennet’s map of Lancashire 1830 courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and looking across Turn Moss circa 1950s, from the collection of David Bishop