It is a place I have just taken for granted but I see now something of the original designer’s intention.
This was a building meant to attract people. Even on a drab grey day with that fine drizzle and the grime from countless coal fires any one passing would have been drawn to it. For a start there are the tiles which are a mix of shades of green which complement the coloured glass and the exotically designed entrance.
I am pleased Wetherspoons saved the building because it could have suffered the same fate as a similar building in Urmston which has lost its frontage to an inelegant extension, so that all that remains is the curved roof rising above a poorly constructed entrance.
But there is an irony in the use that Wetherspoons have put the place and as ever there is a story, which is why Peter and I have decided to come together. He paints the pictures and in the process records Chorlton at a moment in time and I dig deep and find out something of their past. And there is a story here in fact lots of stories. The building is the old Temperence Billiard Hall, so designed with its bright exterior to lure young men in and away from the pubs. We might sneer today at the idea of temperance but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries many working men were drawn in to pubs and the demon drink was responsible for some family misery. Not that it could be avoided, for many employers paid out in the local pub and even the sick and benefit clubs met in drinking places.
The hall was opened in 1907 and was designed with long roof windows to attract the maximum light.
But this is not the end of the story. Sedge Lynn was once a house situated where the old cinema and now Coop Funeral Directors stood. During the last twenty years of the 19th century it was home to the Booth family. Arron Booth was a comfortably off business man who owned a packing business employing 7 men, and sometime after 1881 they moved from Ardwick to Chorlton.
Now it is not entirely clear which of the Booth family was responsible but someone in the November of 1882 took a series of photographs of the area. These included a view from the back of the house across what was called the Isles and is now the land stretching out along Oswald and Longford Roads to Stretford. In 1882 it was what it had always been, an open expanse of land dominated by ponds which had been dug out for marl for the fields and clay for house bricks. Another picture looks out from the front across Barlow Moor Road to the railway station with nothing but fields and the occasional cottage.
I have yet to track the Booth family but they appear to have moved on before 1907.
Peter’s pictures hang in a number of venues across Chorlton and can also be seen on his facebook site Paintings from Pictures https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures
Picture © Peter Topping 2011 http://www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk .
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