What we have lost on Ayres Road down by Brook's Bar

The Church in 2013

Now this is one of those buildings Andy Robertson captured on film just before it went.

This was all that was left of the Chorlton Road Congregational Church on the corner of Ayres Road and South Croston Street in the summer of 2013.

It was built in 1861 and just over a hundred years later it joined with the English Presbyterian church to become the United Reform Church.

Back at the end of the 19th century it also had a large Sunday School hall on the other side of South Croston Street.

The Church in 1894

Both were still standing when Mike Berrell took his pictures in 2006 but in the following years the Sunday School was demolished and when Andy happened this way in the summer of 2013 the church was about to follow.

Already the sale of land sign was up and half the roof had gone.  But even by then the church was a shadow of its former self.

Looking at the OS map for 1894 the foot print of the church pretty much extended up to Chorlton Road.

At sometime in the last two decades most of it was knocked down and replaced by a block of flats which abutted the remaining part of the church, and now even this has gone.

The church plot in 2014

Those with a keen eye will still be able to trace the original stone wall that ran along Ayrers Road and round on to Chorlton Road and in one of Andy’s pictures the tiled drive can still be seen.

Now for some this will have little meaning and be of no consequence, but I like to know where the old buildings were and something of their fate, so yet again it is a thank you to Andy who was in the right place at just the right moment.

Pictures; of the Chorlton Road Congregational Church in 2013  from the collection of Andy Robertson, and the church in 1894 from the OS for South Lancashire, 1894, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

* Chorlton Road Congregational Church Mike Berrell in 2006, http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/LAN/Stretford/ChorltonRoadCongregational.shtml