What could you have bought on the Row in 1850?

Now I have mixed feelings about supermarkets. Historically they were an important development in the way we shop and the food that is available to us. But of course the impact of huge out of town outlets on local communities, and the demise of the independents raise big questions.

All of which made me reflect on the retail experiences that were available here in the township during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In 1850 there were just a handful of shops, most in or near the village. But fifty years later almost all the buildings from Wilton down to the green were in place. In 1911 of these 23 shops, 13 were engaged in selling food. And there were more around the green and lots more just the short walk up to and along Barlow Moor Road.

Now in an age before refrigerators this shouldn’t surprise us. People shopped daily because they had to, and if they didn’t make the journey themselves then a servant would or equally likely the shop delivered. Look at any old photograph of Chorlton and somewhere on the road there will be one or more delivery vans, pulled by horses.

Now it is an interesting thought and a challenging one that just possibly this was not such a good thing. Read any account of food outlets in the 19th century and it is to be confronted by stories of adulterated food, tainted meat and underweight produce. The weights and measures man may have been a dreaded figure but if shop keepers could get away with selling their food after it’s sell by date and underweight then some at least would. Nor I think should we mourn the passing of the loose biscuit or of the meat hung out in the open. Surveys done in the mid 19th century pointed to the fact that rural shops were more expensive than their urban counterparts.

It was for all these very reasons that the co-operative movement was started and took such a strong hold in working class areas, and even before the Rochdale Pioneers were setting out their stall the Chartists had set up a co-operative shop in Hulme and other experiments had been floated around the country, something I wrote about yesterday http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/chorlton-chartist-co-operative-ventures.html.

And it is easy to be seduced by the image of the rural shop. Many here in the township had a short life in the years before 1850. Some I guess were short term expedients to supplement the family income and were terminated when other more gainful means of making money became available. You read of someone who one year described himself as a farmer and another as beer seller before reverting to the land. Others like the Brundrett’s up by Lane End where High Lane and what is now Sandy Lane meet were well established as was the Whittaker family who were selling groceries from the bottom of Beech Road from the mid 19th century and were still there a hundred years later. But even the Brundrett’s grocery store appears to have had a break in trading at one point.

Nor is it necessarily the case that all our food shops sourced locally. Much of the food grown here was produced by market gardeners whose markets were in Manchester and they made the 4½ mile journey almost daily, either delivering the food to Stretford where it was taken by water along the Duke’s Canal or increasingly by wagon.

And it was intensive farming. The diversity of the produce was important where cash crops followed the seasons and were geared to the needs of nearby Manchester. It was reckoned that farmers who sowed the white Lisbon onions in autumn to send to the Manchester markets in spring would have the land cleared in sufficient time to plant potatoes and other vegetables. Many would also have a second crop of onions which would be ready in the summer and might earn £150 per acre.

Moreover farmers like the Higginbotham’s on the green were more likely to sell their surplus milk and dairy products direct rather than to a shop.

So there are still questions to ask about our shops before 1900 and even about the service they delivered in the century that followed. I can remember our own little grocery store which offered one basic cheese, ham that had long ago left the land for some abattoir in the more dingy outskirts of the city and a range of red sugary stuff which the jar described as jam.

As ever history is messy.

Pictures; from the collection of Rita Bishop

This story first appeared in the April edition of the Community Index www.communityindex.co.uk