The way things go ...... looking for that last plot of land in Chorlton

Andy Robertson sent me these pictures of a lock up workshop on Longford Road with the comment “a bit boring, I know.”

Now he is a welcome contributor to the blog and his pictures are never boring catching as they do those moments when the place is about to change.

In the last few months he has been there with his camera just as work recommenced on the old Masonic Hall on Edge Lane, revealed for most of us the extent of the new build to Oswald Road School and recorded the demolition of New Broadcasting House, the remnant of a Salford textile mill and the iconic Raby Street alms houses.

So I was not surprised that he clocked the old workshop on Longford Road and the sign announcing “FOR SALE” Building plot with full planning permission for two three bedroom semi-detached properties.”

Most of us will be able to identify that odd bit of land that somehow never got a house during the building room of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Some remained just plots of land, while others became workshops, garages and lock ups.

Well into the 1980s the strip of land beside the brook behind Belwood Road lay empty as did a smaller plot at the southern end of Claude Road.

My old friend Jack who had a lived good chunk of his adult life here he claimed the land by the brook and been a timber yard or nail factory, but there is no evidence for either.

That said the plot at the end of Claude Road which now Rainbow Crescent did have buildings on it as late as the 1940s and well with the living memory of many of us there was a disused petrol pump at the corner.

In the same way before the Finney Drive was built in the mid 1960s there had been a a set of workshops in the old farmyard.

And that bit of land on Longford Road had belonged to the brick company at the beginning the last century.

But the onward march of property development in Chorlton will mean that fairly soon it will become the “two three bedroom semi-detached properties” of the sign above the workshop.

All of which fits with the history of the township since Egerton and Lloyd began selling off their farmland in small chunks to speculative builders.

Pictures; courtesy of Andy Robertson