Back on Angel Street that place of "common lodging houses and unfilled dreams"

Angel Street, March 2014

This will be the last story on Angel Street for a while.

Today it is a pretty nondescript place of empty spaces waiting development, new residential build and a pub.

It runs from Rochdale Road down to Style Street and St Michael’s Fields more popularly known as Angel Meadow.

I have passed it countless times and not given it much of a second look which is a shame because back in the late 19th century it had become almost entirely a street full of common lodging houses.*

For most people interested in the history of the area I doubt that it features prominently.  After all by Style Street is Angel Meadow a notorious burial ground packed in its time with the dead of the surrounding streets many of whom were buried unnamed and unrecorded in common graves marked only by a small cross.

Angel Street, May 1897

Close by is the Ragged School which in turn gets a fair number of visitors but Angel Street is just an alternative route from Cheetham Hill across to Oldham Road and Great Ancoats Street.

Those that drive along it may just clock the new and very impressive Co-op building at the corner with Style Street but will probably be unaware of the archaeological dig two years ago which revealed the lives of the people who lived in the mean houses and grim cellar dwellings on the present site.**

Now I am deep into the research of Angel Street trying to tease out the lives of those that lived in the common lodging houses but it is a slow job made difficult because the people who washed up here were already at the bottom of the pile and history has been unkind to them.

Angel Street March 2014

Still something of their lives is beginning to emerge.

And in the meantime Angel Street and the surrounding area is set to change.

Already much of the land has been cleared of the last of its industrial buildings and like so much of the city is fast becoming residential again.

All of which means that these pictures of Angel Street will soon be as much a piece of history as that in Samuel Coulthurst’s photograph of 1900.









Pictures; Angel Street Today from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and in 1897 by Samuel Coulthurst, m85543, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

*Angel Street, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Angel%20Street

**A planned archaeological dig in Hulme and two retired teachers, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/planned-archaeological-dig-in-hulme-and.html