Aaron Booth and his pictures of Martledge in 1882

In the summer and winter of 1882 Aaron Booth took a series of photographs from his house.  They are remarkable in many ways.

He was an amateur photographer and his pictures are some of the earliest we have of the township and they perfectly capture the area of Martledge just as it was about to change.

Martledge was that part of Chorlton roughly from the four banks up to the Library and in 1882 plots of the land were being sold off to speculative builders and businessmen.  In little over forty years the fields, farms and barns were to be lost to tall rows of terraced and semi detached shops and houses.

So my picture is a real find.  It was taken from an upstairs window of his house Sedge Lynn and looks out across Manchester Road.  In the distance are the cottage and farm building which had been home to Charles Renshaw who in the 1840s had farmed a mix of arable, pasture and meadow land across the township.  Out of sight and a little to our right was the new railway station opened just two years earlier.

It was a scene which was to vanish all too quickly.  There had been a recession which was coming to an end by 1882 and business confidence was returning which set off the building boom in Chorlton.  And so within the next decade, the farm buildings of Charles Renshaw, and the fields there about were to go.  This peaceful almost idyllic scene of Martledge on a summer’s day was lost.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection