The price of preserving the past is eternal vigilance which I am the first to admit is to misquote what the American Abolitionist and liberal activist Wendell Phillips said in 1852.*
But it serves the purpose for today which is to revisit that simple observation that often great chunks of history disappear without us noticing until it is too late.
So with that in mind I always carry a camera and snap away whenever I come across a building in danger.
And I also plunder the photograph albums of friends, colleagues and anyone who has taken a picture of places I like in the last three decades.
Nor is it just photographs for since local artist Peter Topping began his "A moment in Time" series of paintings of Chorlton, bits of it have vanished or changed beyond recognition.
As he says “lossing so many familiar places spurred me on paint Chorlton as it is now."
Shops close and become bars, houses add a dormer window or garage and old faithful buildings are demolished for another anonymous development.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on Beech Road where business change and in the process the buildings are totally revamped.
So here were are on the corner of Beech and Wilton looking at the Soap Opera which has washed people’s clothes for three decades and now is another bar.**
The building began life as a grocery and provision shop owned by John Williams & Sons on the site that had originally been occupied by Sutton’s Cottage, which was a wattle and daub dwelling and may well have been built in the early 1800s and was demolished in 1891.
Sometime in the late 1950s or early 60s the grocery shop became the Maypole launderette and continued so until quite recently.
But the launderette or washateria as my friend John from Leeds always called it was no more able to buck the consumer revolution than the laundry before it.
So apart from service washes, and duvet day the Soap Opera became an ever lonelier place.
And putting it into a context since the mid 1980s the number has fallen by two thirds while the onward march of the bar/cafe and small restaurant seems unstoppable.
And with that in mind earlier this year Peter went back to that corner of Beech and Wilton and did the business all over again.
Paintings; Painting; The Soap Opera, © 2011 and the Launderette, © 2013, Peter Topping,
Facebook; Paintings from Pictures, Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk
So with that in mind I always carry a camera and snap away whenever I come across a building in danger.
And I also plunder the photograph albums of friends, colleagues and anyone who has taken a picture of places I like in the last three decades.
Nor is it just photographs for since local artist Peter Topping began his "A moment in Time" series of paintings of Chorlton, bits of it have vanished or changed beyond recognition.
As he says “lossing so many familiar places spurred me on paint Chorlton as it is now."
Shops close and become bars, houses add a dormer window or garage and old faithful buildings are demolished for another anonymous development.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on Beech Road where business change and in the process the buildings are totally revamped.
So here were are on the corner of Beech and Wilton looking at the Soap Opera which has washed people’s clothes for three decades and now is another bar.**
The building began life as a grocery and provision shop owned by John Williams & Sons on the site that had originally been occupied by Sutton’s Cottage, which was a wattle and daub dwelling and may well have been built in the early 1800s and was demolished in 1891.
Sometime in the late 1950s or early 60s the grocery shop became the Maypole launderette and continued so until quite recently.
So apart from service washes, and duvet day the Soap Opera became an ever lonelier place.
And putting it into a context since the mid 1980s the number has fallen by two thirds while the onward march of the bar/cafe and small restaurant seems unstoppable.
And with that in mind earlier this year Peter went back to that corner of Beech and Wilton and did the business all over again.
Paintings; Painting; The Soap Opera, © 2011 and the Launderette, © 2013, Peter Topping,
Facebook; Paintings from Pictures, Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk
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