A Saturday in Salford …… in 1977 ….. the exhibition at The Langworthy Cornerstone Community Centre ... today

Last night I was at an exhibition of photographs of a bit of Salford that was lost and has now been found again.

The pictures were taken by Steve Chapman who on a Saturday nearly 50 years ago wandered down from Langworthy to the Docks recording what he saw.

He was accompanied by Phil Portus, another young photographer and both were aware that with the programme of wholesale house clearance, buildings and a community would soon be lost for ever.

Steve reflected that as a young art student in Manchester he had followed the redevelopment of Hulme which in just a few short years had demolished rows of small terraced houses as well as shops, pubs and small workshops wiping away a close-knit community.

Steve Chapman

And having rediscovered the negatives from that Salford trip he agreed to this exhibition of his work at the Langworthy Corne stone Community Centre.

The event attracted a host of people, from family, friends, and former residence of the area including Jimmy who features on one picture with a group of his friends.

Judging by the comments the display of Steve’s pictures brought back a heap of memories and are an important record of what the area was like and will stand long after that Salford has faded from living memory.

Many will remember that Steve’s companion on the day had an exhibition a few years ago at the Cornerstone where he showcased his images.*

Steve discussing an image

Tony Flynn and Steve

Steve’s fascinating record of that past Salford is on at the Cornerstone Community Centre from  Monday through  to Friday until December.

And because I can, here is a short video made by Tony Flynn talking to Steve, Jimmy and others on the night.*

Location; Langworthy Cornerstone Community Centre

Pictures; of the evening, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, 2025

*Phil Portus, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Phil%20Portus

**Salford Revisited chatting with photographer, Steve Chapman, https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=4359521310945096&id=100006618102433&rdid=n8TQxXnPD3dgNRUg#

A history of Chorlton in just 20 objects number 8 ....... a railway ticket circa 1920

A short series featuring objects which tell a story of Chorlton in just a paragraph and  a challenge for people to suggest some that are personal to their stories.

The railway had come to Chorlton in 1880, and provided a quick service into the heart of the city. It took just seven minutes to travel from Chorlton into Manchester and was one of the factors which helped the development of new Chorlton allowing people to work in the commercial heart of the city but live within a few minute’s walk of the countryside. I can’t tell you when the ticket was issued but I think it must have been between 1892 and 1947. I can be fairly certain because the Fallowfield Loop line to Fallowfield and Guide Bridge was opened in 1892 and the Cheshire Lines Committee or CLC which ran the lines out of Central Station through Chorlton ceased in 1947 when the railways were nationalized. Had we travelled on that ticket it would have taken us just seven minutes to get to Fallowfield, passing through Wilbraham Road station. And had we elected to go all the way to Guide Bridge we would have been on the train for just 22 minutes having passed through Levenshulme, Hyde Road and Fairfield, but our ticket was only valid for Fallowfield so I suppose that was where we would alighted.

 Picture; from the Lloyd collection

Home thoughts from abroad nu 1 ................. Well Hall Road on a warm spring day in 1965

An occasional series on what I miss about the place where I grew up.

Now I don’t do nostalgia.  It’s over rated and too often offers up a view of the past which at best is deceptive and at worse downright wrong.

But having been away from Eltham for over forty years I have bit by bit been drawn back.

It’s partly those bouts of reflection that come from someone in his seventies but also because it was one of the places I was happiest.

That said for most of that last forty years it is somewhere I only came back to on flying visits.

In the early 70s Well Hall was home between term time, and then a place to catch up with family and friends and later still where we brought the children for short holidays.

During those early visits I have to confess to a mix of feelings.  It was always nice to be back amongst familiar places but when you are 19 it is easy to be over judgemental.  After all I was living in the heart of Manchester which was vibrant and new, offering up a wealth of experiences and Eltham seemed small beer.

But I never entirely lost the pull of Eltham and in the last few years have begun digging deep into its history and remembering so much from my childhood.

So this is the first of those memories and it is nothing more than that walk I took from our house up to the High street.

We lived just beyond the roundabout and so on a warmish spring day it was no hardship to stroll down past the Odeon and the parade of shops taking a detour into the Pleasaunce before going under the railway bridge up past Spencer Gardens and that second parade of shops before reaching Willcox’s and the parish church.

More often than not there was no real purpose behind the trip which meant you could take your time, be delayed by looking in the window of the electrical shop near Wells the Chemist, gaze at one of the guitars in Norman’s before  deciding on a book from Willcox’s.

And then with the whole High Street ahead of you an hour or two could pass just looking at the shops and visiting the library.

Like others I have very fond memories of the library which offered up plenty to do, from digging out those obscure old volumes from the reference section to choosing an LP and a couple of books.

Of course Well Hall Road offered up more than just a route to the library and on other days when the sun shone it was the way up to the woods and on to Woolwich.

Now I know others will have their own favourite road and I have to concede that Court Yard and Colepits Lane had their attractions but sitting here just 4 miles from the centre of Manchester I will go for Well Hall Road.

Location; Well Hall Road, Eltham

Pictures; Well Hall Road, & Eltham Library, 2014 from the collection of Chrissy Rose

Standing amongst the groceries in Hulme ..... sixty years ago

When you look through the collections of pictures of old Manchester, you seldom find many of the interiors of buildings.

I can think of plenty of reasons why that might be so, but the result is to deprive of us a huge slice of our past.

And so, I was very pleased when my old friend Ann shared a picture she drew in the 1960s, while at Art College.

It is of the inside of her aunt’s shop in Hulme, and it takes me straight back to similar shops I remember from my youth.

These were the corner shops, which seemed to stay open all hours, and were prepared to flout the Sunday trading laws.  I can still remember being sworn to secrecy one Sunday morning when I left the local grocery shop with some product which had been double wrapped to disguise what it was.

Stuff was piled high and  bunches of bananas might share a space, with a several tins of salmon, and a pile of newspapers, while somewhere near the front of the counter would be those open boxes of loose biscuits, which always presented a challenge to see how many you could grab while the shop assistant wasn’t looking.

Added to which there was that smell, which was a mix of the competing foods on display and the bare wooden floorboards.

Location; Hulme





Picture;  Ann’s auntie’s shop in Hulme. Early 1960s, from the collection of Ann Love

A bit of the Rochdale Canal …. one old building …. and the road that just kept growing

Numbers 44 to 46 Princess Street is one of those grand late Victorian buildings which still speak of the prosperity of 19th century Manchester.

Our building, 1973

It stands on the corner of Princess and Portland Streets, stretches  down to Harter Street and occupies a big chunk of Portland Street consisting of five floors with extensive cellars.

In 1886 it was home to S & C Nördlinger and  a series of other businesses.

Its fortunes have waxed and waned over the 20th century, while in the last two decades parts of the block have been occupied by a nightclub, along with Turkish and Chinese restaurants.

I will have passed it heaps of times and not given it much thought other than that there always seems to be a bit of scaffolding on part of it.

And yesterday was no exception which would have sealed my indifference were it not for the curiosity of my companion who having clocked the open iron gates leading into a courtyard suggested we venture in.

It is as he said an opportunity not to be missed, despite the consideration that a] we might be trespassing and b] someone might just close those gates.

Looking out from the courtyard on to Princess Street, 2025

Neither of which happened and instead we were offered up a heap of photo opportunities, including the tiled walls of the interior building and the landing bays replete with an old and tired looking crane.

In 1886

Looking at my Goad’s Fire Insurance Map of 1886, the original courtyard extended almost the full length of the building with multiple points for unloading goods into the businesses.

And here was the first surprise, because an arm of the Rochdale Canal ran into the eastern side of the building running behind Harter Street.

That arm predated our building and had once suppiled a collection of coal and timber yards, the Portland Street Saw Mill and James Lord's Cotton Mill.

And originally the arm continued all the way to Faulkner Street.

But this last bit had been filled in when Portland Street was extended down to join Oxford Street in the 1870s just as Princess Street was allowed to grow and absorb what had been David Street taking it all the way to Brook Street.

Now that I accept is a tad confusing, suffice to say the real story remains the building.

Once I guess that courtyard would have been a hive of activity, but yesterday we were alone with just the ghosts of past carters and warehousemen for company, not that either of us stopped to let our imagination roam.

That courtyard, 2025

But sitting here today I decided to explore the partnership of S & C Nördlinger, and I glad I did. Mr. Charles Nördlinger was 48 in 1886 and was a"Naturalized British Citizen" having been born in Italy in 1838.  His wife Louise also gave her birth place as Italy and in one of those interesting twisty turney stories, one of her sisters was born in Switzerland and her parents came from Germany.

Lincoln Lodge, 1894

In 1881 the Nördlinger's lived at 120 Plymouth Grove, which was named Linclon Lodge and stood on the corner of Lincoln and Plymouth Groves.

It's gone now and long ago became Swinton Grove Park, but maps from the 1890s show the property as one of a pair of semi detatched houses surrounded by open land, which four decades earlier had been part of a very attractive estate of fine houses large gardens and fields.

Just what their house looked like is lost but some idea of just how grand it might have been can be guauged by its neighbour which was the home of Elizabeth Gaskell.

All of which is a long way from the Rochdale Canal and Princess Street, but that is just where stories go.

The home of Elizabeth Gaskell

Location; Princess Street

Pictures; the interior of the courtyard 44-46 Princess Street, 2025, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, the building in 1886 from Goad’s Fire Insurance Maps, and Lincoln Lodge, 1894 from the OS of Manchester & Salford, 1894, courtesy of Digital Archive, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and the corner of Princess and Portland Streets, 1973, m05264, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and the home of Elizabeth Gaskell, 2020, courtesy of Google Maps

A history of Chorlton in just 20 objects number 7 ....... a plough 1894

A short series featuring objects which tell a story of Chorlton in just a paragraph and  a challenge for people to suggest some that are personal to their stories.

This was the last time the land opposite our house went under the plough.  The year is probably 1894 and the field was Row Acre.  I can be pretty sure that the chap at the plough was Alfred Higginbotham whose family had farmed here since the 1840s.  Row Acre stretched down from Cross Road to what is now Acres Road and was divided into strips.  Along with the Higginbotham’s parts of Row Acre were farmed by the Bailey family, Thomas White and John Brundrett, and perfectly echoed the medieval idea of a community each working a strip of land.  And of course the plough reminds us that we were a farming community. The image was originally dated 1896 but that was the year the Rec was opened, so I think we can push the date back by two years

Picture; Ploughing Row Acre before it became the Recreation Ground, 1894 from the collection of William Higginbotham

Inside Tommy Ducks one day in 1960 ......... reflecting on where all the pictures went

Now one of the things that continues to puzzle me is the absence of pictures of the inside of Manchester pubs.

I suppose the grand professional photographers never saw it as a suitable subject while everyone else was too busy enjoying themselves to bother.

Of course tucked away in cupboards and family albums there will be a shedful of snaps recording birthdays, nights out and romantic moments but for obvious reasons these rarely get entered in to the archives.

There are exceptions.

I have some fine pictures by Bill Brandt of London pubs in the 1940s and Humphrey Spender’s Bolton pictures from a decade earlier but there must be loads more.

I can think of only a few in the collection from Chorlton and have yet to come across many from elsewhere in Greater Manchester.

All of which made this discovery of these three both a bit of a find and an introduction into a world of pubs which we have pretty much lost.

All three date from 1960 and were taken in Tommy Ducks on East Street, and come from a time long before the coffins or the display on the ceiling.

Back then it was a pub with little in the way of frills.

It served beer, offered companionship and like all pubs of the time, opened at 11, closed at 3 and reopened in the evening till 10.30 with an extension of just half an hour on Fridays and Saturdays.

And woe betide any landlord who infringed those licensing hours because they remained one of the reasons why they could lose their pub.

For most of us back then those time slots pretty much suited our lives.  During the week you were at work and while you might slip in for a pint at dinner time it was usually just the one.

Nor could most of us afford going down the pub every evening and even if you did 10.30 was a sensible time to be turfed out if you had to be at work for 8 in the morning.

And I have to say after a couple of hours I had had enough.  We always went down for the last hour, doubled up at last orders and went away satisfied.

That said it would only be in the morning when you smelt what you had worn the night before that the enormity of what you had inhaled from cigarette smoke really hit home.

Nor did it matter whether it was the vault or the saloon they were full of the stuff.

I can still remember the odd late afternoon in a city centre pub watching the sunlight mingle with the smoke and catching sight of the yellowing ceiling and paintwork which had once been white but was now a darkening yellow.

Added to which if you touched the woodwork it had a slightly sticky feel which clung to your fingers.

Not that I was over bothered back then by such things because  that was just how it was.

In the same way the decor of most pubs I visited was pretty basic.  You might get the odd framed picture which unlike now didn’t trade on nostalgic Manchester.

Instead there would be the tired painting of an elk which competed with an equally faded photograph of a

pub day out to Rhyl and a dozen or so  posters for the breweries best bitter along with a hand written notice of the next four darts fixtures.

All of which brings me back to Tommy Ducks one day in 1960 when Mr H. W. Beaumont took his pictures, none of which I would have come across had I not featured Peter’s painting of the pub sometime before it was demolished in 1993.

Pictures; inside Tommy Ducks, 1960, H W Beaumont, m50721, m50272, and m502775, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Painting; Tommy Ducks © 2011 Peter Topping

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