The Libraries of south Manchester, “built in fulfilment of a promise made in 1904.” ...part 1 Chorlton

The libraries of south Manchester come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and date from the decades after 1904

This was the year when Burnage, Chorlton, Withington and Didsbury voted to join the city.  In return for voting to become part of Manchester there was the promise of cheaper gas, electricity and water rates, and the provision of public libraries.

These were a little slow in coming.  In the case of Chorlton the first library was opened in 1908 in a rented house on Oswald Road and it would be another six years before a purpose built library was opened on Manchester Road.  It was “furnished with a thousand carefully selected volumes for use in the library and home reading,.............. a good selection of magazines is placed in a separate reading room [and] a special feature of the new library is the provision of a room for meetings of Home Reading Union circles and similar organisations.”

The Manchester Guardian reported “the style is Classical with Ionic columns in Portland stone and had 7,420 books, [which] if necessary can be increased to 10,500 volumes. There is a general reading room for adults and one for juveniles.”

In an age which has seen libraries add computers to the resources available to the user it is perhaps surprising that the Lord Mayor in opening the library nearly 100 years ago “hoped that someday there would be a kinematograph connected to our libraries for the special benefit of boys and girls, enabling them the better to understand the histories they were reading.”

The exhibition with its mix pf Peter Topping's wonderful paintings and my stories of the libraries has just finished at Chorlton but  will soon be traveling across the south of the city to Burnage, Didsbury, Fallowfield and Withington.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection

*The Lord Mayor of Manchester 1927