When is a building old?

Historical research is fun, or why else do it?  And that pretty much sums up what I did yesterday.  It started with a picture posted by one of my new chums on his facebook site.

Adge Lane takes and shares some remarkable pictures of the city and a few days ago he shared this one with us.  It is the building on the corner of Gartside Street and Quay Street and it provoked some interest and a debate about its age.

Now this is an area of the city I love and often wander back to.  Just a few minute’s walk away is the station and warehouse complex of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830, the site of St John’s church and basin of the Bridgewater Canal.

So a place full of history which brings me back to the buildings in Adge’s photo.  They look old but I had a vague memory of them being built in the 1980s and so the quest began.  The essential requirements are some maps, street directories, census returns, and if possible pictures which between us Adge and I could summon up.

I have to confess that for once I didn’t go looking in the census records but stuck to the maps and the directories.  A street or trade directory is a little like the telephone directory, it listed the streets and their residents along with the trades and businesses across the city.  In many cases the added bonus is that the occupations of people living in a house are also included and unlike the census they were published every year.

The drawback is that you only get the name of the householder, and the poor and those living in unfashionable streets are often missed off until late in the 19th century.  But they are a start and can be used alongside the maps of the city.

Now these go back well into the 18th century but the most useful are those made by Laurent in 1793 and Green in the following year and both show something at the corner of Gartside and Quay Street, as does the OS of Manchester and Salford for 1844-9.  This mid 19th century map was part of a series of “5 ft. town plans produced by the Ordnance Survey for the towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire with a population greater than 4000. They were produced between 1844 and 1849 during the time that these counties were being surveyed for the 6 inch maps. The 5 ft. Plans were important because of the need to improve urban sanitation to combat cholera and other diseases.


Only a few other towns outside this area were surveyed at 5 ft. usually when the town paid for the survey or as a training exercise as in the case of Southampton. After the publication of the Lancashire and Yorkshire maps, the county surveys were carried out at 25 inches to a mile and the town plans were produced at a 10 ft. scale. Although a smaller scale than the 10 ft. plans the 5 ft. plans contained, in many respects, more detail than did the 10 ft. plans. They show all street drains, street lamps and water pumps even the garden layout of large houses. Public buildings show internal layout and churches show the seating layout. The walls of public buildings are not drawn as a single line as on most maps but as a double line showing the thickness of the walls.”*

So this was a must to use, but the buildings listed here in 1849 don’t have the same footprint as those in Adge’s picture.  This detail from the OS shows the lower end of the row of buildings where Quay Street is joined by Young Street.





And this is where the two of us came together.  I had the OS for 1888-93 and Adge had the 1915 version and that same old footprint just kept repeating itself which was pretty much confirmed by the  satellite photo of the present buildings which are different in layout to those on the maps. But the photographic evidence was inconclusive and it was left to Adge to dig out the answer.


“I've found 70 Quay Street (the extreme left on my colour photograph) listed on Rightmove......it's described as "Mock Georgian building of traditional brick construction"...but nothing of any historical description, you may be right ...1980's sympathetic build.”

So there you have it, a nice piece of detective work by the two of us.

Pictures; of the buildings and 1915 map from the collection of Adge Lane, detail from the 1844-49 OS courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Digital Archives