The History of Martledge, now showing at Chorlton Library

We are on Wilbraham Road around 1895 and I am drawn to the parade of shops and houses on the left of the picture.

In one of them lived the Shaw family, who were the same family who opened the first petrol pump outside their garage on Barlow Moor Road sometime after 1915.

But I want to start with the house on the end.  It was a fine double fronted eleven roomed building and went under the name of Sunwick.  In 1911 it was home to the Case family.  They were typical of that new group of people who had moved into Chorlton during the last two decades of the 19th century.  Neither was from here but their children were and they were well enough off to employ three servants.  Usually most of the families at this end of Chorlton had just one, but they could afford a cook, house maid and waitress.  But

Henry Case was a surgeon and had appearances to keep up.  And this was after all a big house which had stood in a large garden in splendid isolation for perhaps twenty years on the corner of Wilbraham Road with open land to the south.  I guess it dated from after 1860 when Lord Egerton cut Wilbraham Road through the township.

But its days as a residential property were numbered in 1911 and while I have yet to find the date when it became a bank that was what it had become by the 1920s.  The fine bay windows were taken out and all that remains is the name Sunwick on one of the stone gate posts

And by the time our picture had been taken a terrace of ten largish houses had been built from what is now the corner of Manchester Road, followed by the shops which appear on the left of the photograph.  Here in 1911 could be found a dress maker, photographer, a confectioners and a book shop.  They fitted well with the new people who were settling here, and in time as the area lost it rural character and its old name of Martledge become more urbanised it took on the name of New Chorlton.*

Peter and I have tried to capture that change in our new exhibition  at Chorlton Library which runs for the next month.  The History of Martledge, records that transformation in words, old photographs and Peter’s paintings.

As ever it is the mix of history with the paintings of contemporary Chorlton which make for something more than just a record of the past.

And so to end here is one of Peter’s latest paintings, which perfectly captures Sunwick and the adjoining building on Wilbraham Road, just over 117 years after the  Shaw and Case families looked out on that same road.

Pictures; from the Lloyd Collection and © Peter Topping 2012 www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk


* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Martledge