Out on Upper Chorlton Road looking for Samuel Brooks at Whalley House

Upper Chorlton Road stretches from the northern end of Chorlton up towards the city.

Back in the 1840s it was brand new and the product of Samuel Brooks’s grand plan to build an estate for the wealthy and genteel who wanted to live in the countryside but still be close to Manchester.

It is one of those stories which mix Victorian drive and ingenuity with a splash of vision and a fair amount of arrogance.

He bought the area then known as Jackson’s Moss in 1836 which I know is technically a year before the old Queen ascended the throne and proceeded to develop the estate thereafter.

Part of the grand scheme involved the sale of land  which became the site of the Lancashire Independent College and cutting the long road from the edge of town out to his proposed estate.

And not to be out done he renamed the area Whalley Range in recognition of his birthplace.

That done and his fine house built, he then proceeded to connect the pipe from his lavatory to the Black Brook which ran alongside the road.

Now he was not alone in assuming that such a solution to his waste problem was a perfectly acceptable way of doing things but a little unfair on the people who lived hard by the brook as it flowed past their cottages at Oswald Lane, giving rise 50 years later tospeculation that this might be a risk to public health.*

But had I ventured out onto Upper Chorlton Road soon after it completion I doubt that I would have seen Mr Brooks given that his fine home was hidden from view behind high walls.  That and the fact that this new addition to the roads north of the township was a toll road.

I suspect I would have opted for what is now Seymour Grove and travelled out along what was just a narrow carter’s tracked flanked by tall trees up to the Stretford Road.  Leaving Mr Brooks and his Whalley Range to those that could afford it.

* The Sanitary Condition of Chorlton-Cum-Hardy, Manchester Guardian May 19th, 1886.

Picture; detail of Whalley Range from the OS map of Lancashire, 1841, courtesy of Digital Archives Association http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and part of Upper Chorlton Road showing the wall of Whalley House early 1900s, from the Lloyd Collection