Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester nu 20 ............. Market Place

New Cathedral Street, 2016

Now I like the way that history has a habit of repeating itself.

So here is New Cathedral Street which runs from Market Street to Exchange Square.

Like me there will be many who remember it being cut in the 1990s following the IRA bomb.

But I had totally forgotten that less than a century ago there was a similar thoroughfare that pretty much followed the same route from Market Street towards the Cathedral.

Market Place, 1900

Back then it was called Market Place and continued as Old Millgate before joining Cateaton Street at Cathedral Gates.

In the 1850s a stroll down the two streets would have taken you past the Wellington Inn, the Black Boy and the Falstaff Taverns, as well as offering up the Fish Market, Fruit Market and the Poultry and Meat Market.

A full fifty years later and while some of the buildings and their usage might have changed the route was still as narrow and twisty leading to the Old Shambles.

And for those of a more adventurous or careless approach  running parallel was a short stretch of Corporation Street which gave access to a string of tiny streets and courts with names like Bull’s Head Yard, Blue Boar Court Sun Entry and Paradise Court.

Market Place, 1851

Now none of those have been recreated, they sit under the new Marks and Spencer and Selfridge stores.

But armed with a few old maps and with a bit of imagination you can at least walk along New Cathedral Street and the ghost of Market Place.

And of course at certain times of the year when the outdoor Markets have come to town there is that added bit of interest from the stalls which might just give up a flavour of the area as it was in the past.

Location; Manchester

Picture, New Cathedral Street, 2016, & Market Place, 1900, from Goad’s Fire Insurance Maps, and in 1851 from Adshead’s map of Manchester, 1851 courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

Of floods and weirs and floating hay ricks

"It was," wrote Thomas Ellwood the local historian
“no uncommon thing to see the great level of green fields completely covered with water presenting the appearance of a large lake , several miles in circuit.”

It was for this reason that the weir was built.  Just beyond the point where the Brook joins the Mersey and at a bend in the river the weir was built to divert flood water from the Mersey down channels harmlessly out to Stretford and the Kicketty Brook.

After a heavy flood in August 1799 broke the banks where Chorlton Brook joined the Mersey, there were fears that the Bridgewater Aqueduct across the flood plain could be damaged by flooding it was decided to build an overflow channel improving the course of Kicketty Brook and build the stone weir.

Not that it always worked.  Soon after it had been built flood water swept it away and during the nineteenth century neither the weir nor the heighted river banks prevented the Mersey bursting out across the plain.

In July 1828 the Mersey flood water transported hay ricks from the farm behind Barlow Hall down to Stretford only later to bring them back, while on another occasion one man was forced to take refuge in a birch tree till the following morning.

Later floods proved to be even more destructive, destroying a bridge across Chorlton Brook and making for six major floods between  December 1880 and October  1881. The last time the weir took an overflow of flood water was 1915.

On a cold bleak and rain swept morning it is possible to sense the importance of the weir.

Stretching out from the wall is a deep and placid pool of water home to ducks and broken by bunches of water plants.

But with just a little imagination how different it might have been on a stormy night when the river swollen with rain water burst over the weir.

Pictures; Higginbotham’s field in flood, J Montgomery 1963, painted from a photograph dated 1946, m800092, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, picture of weir in 1915 from the collection of Tony Walker

Wishing you well ........... postcards from Woolwich, Greenwich and Eltham for the summer ..... nu 2 Greenwich

A short series with few words looking at the postcards we sent from Woolwich, Greenwich and Eltham.

The description on the back describes “the Parish Church of the Royal Borough of Greenwich is a handsome structure dedicated to St Alphege, which was erected in 1710 from designs by Hawksmore.  

It stands in on the site of two former bull rings dedicated to the same Saint, who suffered martyrdom on this spot at the hands of the Danes.  General Wolfe is buried within its walls.”

Location; Greenwich

Picture; Barrack Field Woolwich Common, circa 1905, Tuck and Sons, courtesy of Tuck DB, https://tuckdb.org/

The sweetness of doing nothing …….

There is an Italian saying ….. “La dolcezza del non fare niente” which simply translates into the “The sweetness of doing nothing” …….

In the Rec, at Beech Road and on the Green, yesterday.

Location, around Beech Road

Pictures; The sweetness of doing nothing, 2025, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

 

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

Who stole Chorlton’s racecourse?

Now, this is a serious question, because once, according to our own Chorlton historian we did indeed possess a racecourse.

The old lane up to Hough End Hall, 2014

Writing in the December of 1885, Thomas Ellwood recorded that “Barlow Moor is celebrated in the annals of Manchester as the scene in the seventeenth century of animal races and other games prior to the establishment of the Manchester Races on Kersal Moor.  

All that remains to recall the racecourse is the field bounded by Barlow Moor-lane, and the left of the lane  leading to Hough-end Hall, still known as the ‘scaffold field’ where was formerly a low mound, which  served as a vantage point from which to view the contests”.*

And since then, John Lloyd in his book on the township also chimed in with “Horse racing was followed in the 17th century, traditionally the site being a field known as the ‘Scaffold Field’.  The field can be more accurately defined as being the area north of the path in line with the front entrance to Hough End Hall and occupied by the schools and the bowling greens."**

Riderless Races in Rome, 1817 

But Lloyd was merely repeating Ellwood and points out that “Ellwood seems to be the only source and the one frequently quoted”.

To which Eric of Sandy Lane will mutter that all of this was so far in the past that it “ain’t worth a copy of yesterdays Chorlton and Wilbrahamton News”.

And here I would disagree, if only because it does still come up in conversation.

So this much I know, Kersal Moor “achieved its greatest popularity from 1688 to 1816, the period when horse races were held on it”.  That said a later newspaper article pushed back the date to 1687 when an advertisement appeared in the London Gazette, announcing a plate of £20 to be run at Carsall (Kersal) Moor”.****

Chorlton Park, 2020

All of which does indeed push back the date when the “sport of kings” took place in what is now Chorlton Park.

Nor do I think that those events in the 17th century can  truly be equated with our idea of horse racing, because the popular idea of the sport was still in its infancy.

According to a Mr. W.G.C. Frith who was clerk to the Manchester Racecourse in 1963, the first race meeting held at Kersal Moor back in 1687 was “At a time when racing was just emerging from the stage when one man ran his horse against another’s for a private bet”.****

So, there you have it, perhaps those horsey events described by Ellwood were less a series of grand races watched by the good and the rich, and more a set of individual contests where farmers pitted their horses against each other.

I await Eric’s informed and measured response.

Leaving me just to observe that Axon in his wonderful Annals of Manchester, makes no reference horse racing at either Chorlton or Kersal Moor in the 17th century.*****

Scaffold Field and the Observatory, 1854

Although the 1854 OS map for Lancashire , does show an Observatory in front of Brookfield House just a little to the west of the lane  leading to Hough-end-Hall.

As for Scaffold Field this shows up on the Withington tithe map for 1848 as belonging to the Egerton estate and occupied by William Jackson who may have been connected to Henry Jackson who was the tenant at Hough End Hall in the 1840s.

There are a number of William Jackson’s listed as living in Withington in 1841, but none I think are our tenant of Scaffold Field.

So, that is it other than to say the painting Riderless Racers at Rome, has nothing to do with racing in Chorlton, other than it shows horses in Rome which is a city I like.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; lane  leading to Hough-end-Hall, 2014, overgrown Chorlton Park, from the collection of Andrew Simpson,  detail from the 1854, OS map of Lancashire, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and Riderless Racers at Rome, 1817, Walters Art Museum

*Ellwood, Thomas L Horse Racing, Chapter VII Badger and Bear Baiting’s, History of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, December 19th, 1885, South Manchester Gazette

**Lloyd, John M, The Township of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, 1972, page 75

***History of Kersal Moor, An Early Manchester racecourse, Manchester Guardian, September 11, 1936

****The end of 276 years of racing history, Manchester Guardian, November 9th, 1963

*****Axon, William E.A., Annals of Manchester, 1885

Wishing you well ........... postcards from Woolwich, Greenwich and Eltham for the summer ..... nu 5 Greenwich Park

A short series with few words looking at the postcards we sent from Woolwich, Greenwich and Eltham.

Now I don’t think this scene of the park had changed over much between when it was sent to Miss L E Thompson of Shepherds Bush and when I played there a full half century and a bit later.

It is unclear whether “C S” lived in Greenwich.  He sent the card from west London just after midday in the August of 1902 and confined himself to the simple message “Isn’t it nice.”

Location; Greenwich Park

Picture; Greenwich Park circa 1902, Tuck and Sons, courtesy of Tuck DB, https://tuckdb.org/