One hundred years of one house in Chorlton part 29, a thank you to the City

The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since.*

I hope Joe and Mary Ann read the slim book issued by the Corporation in 1938 which celebrated 100 years of municipal endeavour.  I have the book in front of me now and I never tire of leafing through.

Your City, Manchester 1838-1938 was written by "the Manchester Municipal Officer’s Guild in co-operation with its Group for Research in Administration and Sociology in celebration of the Centenary of the City’s Charter of Incorporation, with special dedication to the Children of Manchester.” 

Of course when it was published it was the story of what the council had achieved in the century we had had locally elected government.

So there were chapters on the improvements in sanitation, public health, education and housing, as well as leisure, and culture, town planning and the government of the city.

And it looked forward to the future, with clean and cheap electricity and gas, heating and lighting the homes across the city as well as fuelling the domestic appliances for cooking and washing.

Pride of place went to pictures of the power stations which turned the coal into “gas which feeds the fires and cookers, .... Distributed in 1,200 miles of mains, long enough, if placed end to end, to light the Rock of Gibraltar from the city’s gasworks.”  

Or the power which you command by depressing a switch.  Have you ever thought how much children benefit from electricity – both physically and mentally?  We can think of a hundred ways, not least of which are the wonderful uses of electricity in children’s’ homes.”

Now Joe made good use of electricity advertising that all his homes as well as the garages he was building were fully supplied.

And both he and Mary Ann would have relied on all those other services which Your City described in great detail including water from the “grounds of Thirlmere and Haweswater [soon to be joined by another] aqueduct from Haweswater which will be built in the next few years.”

Now I could go on and rather think that there are more stories from this 1938 publication highlighting how our house was served with all that made life comfortable and civilized but as I so often say that's for another time.

But the magic of the book for me is not only that it can be read a proud civic record of what had been achieved in a century but also that it is itself a wonderful historic document capturing the city at a moment in the past.

Pictures; from Your City, Manchester Municipal Officers’ Guild, 1938

*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house