Out on Upper Chorlton Road in 1925

We are outside the township which might be seen as leaving my comfort zone, but only just outside.

The year is 1925 and this is Upper Chorlton Road.

Back in the 1840s this area was being developed by Samuel Brooks into "a desirable estate for gentlemen and their families."

It had been a swampy area known as Jackson’s Moss but with its purchase by Brooks in 1836 it was transformed into a pleasant estate of fine houses set in large private gardens.  And it was a patten he was to repeat elsewhere.

As a testament to his own confidence in the development he chose to live on the estate and it is the entrance to his house which we can see in the photograph.  This was Whalley House and it stood here for almost a century before being demolished in 1930.

Well that it was the caption says on the photograph in the collection but I am just a tad unsure.  The maps from the 1840s through to the ‘90s suggest that Whalley House was a little further to the north which seems to be confirmed by the 1901 census.

All of which may seem a little pedantic and something I want to return to tomorrow.  In the meantime I think I will explore a little bit more of the life of Samuel Brooks.

He was a banker and lived at his new home with his three adult children and five servants.  Like many of his contemporaries none of the servants he employed were local.  This was a common enough practice, for who would want their family secrets made the gossip of the community? So of his five, one was born in Withington, and second from Yorkshire, a third from Suffolk and the remaining two from Manchester.

Two years after he bought the land he cut a new road from West Point* to Brooks Bar.  This had originally been just a footpath along which ran a brook which he arched over and used as a sewer from his home to the Black Brook.

It was an amazingly cavalier approach to sanitation and is a reminder that there must be plenty more little brooks, streams and water courses which once flowed in the open and have now been buried and many forgotten.

And his brazen use of the brook as a sewer caused problems well into the century.  Thomas Ellwood writing in 1885 reported that

“the brook frequently flooded the footpath during heavy rain, and old William Hesketh, who lived at the Pop Cottage, was often awakened at night by the cries of travellers for help and guidance through the water. Amongst these was sometimes the Wesleyan minister, who had been to the village to preach.“ **

All of which is a long way from the picture of Upper Chorlton Road on a summer’s day in 1925. And in my search to find out more about the houses of Whalley Range I came across this site which is a wonderful place to get a sense of the history and current events in the place where Samuel Brooks developed his estate in  1836. http://whalleyrange.org/

Picture; from the Lloyd collection

*West Point was the name for what is now the junction of Manchester, Upper Chorlton Roads and Seymour Grove
** Elwood, Thomas, Roads and Footpaths, December 12th  1885, South Manchester Gazette