Looking towards our village sometime in the summer of 1890

Standing in Holt Croft looking towrds the village circa 1890

We are on Chorlton Croft with the brook to our back and the date is around 1890.  

Directly in front is the old parish church and to the right is the Bowling Green Hotel which was demolished in 1908 for the present building.

According to the caption, “the circular opening, bottom right is the out fall of Wilbraham Egerton’s sewer since extended and covered by a bank and not the arch of the bridge which was later rebuilt.”

Now I remember the work done on this sewer sometime in the mid 1980s which involved a huge hole on Beech Road and an equally big one on the Rec in the north east corner.
I think it may have been built at the same time as Wilbraham Road in 1869 given that for some of its distance it ran alongside the road.  Now I would love to date it exactly but for that I will have to trawl the Egerton papers.

The Edgerton sewer outfall

The sewer “runs along the road to within a short distance of the railway bridge at Chorlton station, and then passes through the fields to Barlow Moor Lane, adjoining Lane Edge, crossing High Lane, Cross Road, and Beech Road, thence through various gardens, finally emptying itself into the Chorlton Brook at a point about 200 yards below the bridge which crosses the stream leading to Jackson's boat.”*

The scene is one that even given the outfall could date from any time in the 19th century.

The parish church had been rebuilt at the beginning of that century and the Bowling Green just twenty or so years earlier although I rather think there had been bits added during the following decades.

Beyond the hedge to our right had been one of the village ponds, which the landlord of the hotel rented out to “gentleman to fish” and sometime perhaps in the 1860s and certainly by 1888 was drained.

Look closely and it is possible to see the not very good repair job to one of the big stones on top of the brickwork of the bridge.


And there is much more detail that the picture yields up, like the outside flue of the Arnot stoves  which  heated the church and as the advertisement proudly claimed were cheap and efficient because by their

The church and Bowling Green Hotel

“circular and oblong bronzed corrugated  body, the heating surface becomes multiplied nearly three times and by means of the self regulating valve the admission of air to the fire is so regulated that it only needs replenishing with fuel once every 12 to 18 hours.” 

Just to the left of the church and away in the distance is one of the barns owned by the Higginbotham family and which had at the start of the 19th century served as a place of worship for the small Wesleyan congregation.

And off to the extreme left almost hidden from view was one of the old labourer’s cottages.

*Ellwood, T.L., Chapter 6, South Manchester Gazette,

Picture; donated by Mrs May Boardman to from the Lloyd collection