It has gone of course. Wiped out in the late 1960s when this part of the city was redeveloped and changed again after the IRA bomb in 1996 when the rather brutal 60s build was swept away creating the walkway to Shambles Square and Exchange Square.
In one of those odd bits of historical coincidences this walkway almost follows the line of Market Place and puts us back at the site of the photograph which dates from before 1895.
Now I can be fairly confident of the date because by 1895 the licensee of the Wellington Inn was no longer Samuel Kenyon but Eliza Kenyon who was still there in 1909. She may have been his widow or his daughter and there are two Samuel Kenyon’s listed in the Manchester Cemetery one who died in 1892 and another in 1894. But to find out more I shall have to crawl over the license records which is easy enough but not for today. Suffice to say that Samuel was there in 1886.
We shouldn’t be surprised because postcards of the period had a long shelf life and I doubt that any one sending a card would be over bothered if a few of the traders had moved on.
And it is the postcard rather than the picture that interest me more. It was sent on Saturday March 19th 1904 at 5.30 arriving in Italy on the 22nd. It was addressed to Mr Bruno Zuculie, at Camp Martio 63 in Rome and Nellie of Humphrey Street One, Old Trafford wanted to know if Bruno “will keep up the exchange?”
The romantic in me wonders at what had gone on before and what might go on in the future, But alas we shall never know.
Pictures;, from the collection of Rita Bishop courtesy of David Bishop and a detail from Goad’s Fire Insurance map, showing the Market Place, circa 1886-1901, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/
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