A damned near thing .......... just how Hough End Hall only just survived

Now I rather think that Hough End Hall was in more danger during the last century than at any time since the Mosley family put the finishing touches to their fine Elizabethan home in 1596.

Of course at present much of the first two hundred and a bit years are shrouded in mystery.

Certain key moments stand out but the daily business of running an estate and managing the house are unavailable.

At the end of the 18th century the house and land was acquired by the Egerton family and the Hall settled down to being the centre of a farm.

At present I know who was there from 1841 through to the opening decades of the last century.  I have names and details of what they owned and the rent they paid to the Egerton’s along with who worked for them and the size of the farm.

It all becomes a little bit unclear after that but by the 1940s the Bailey family were renting the hall and surrounding land and working it in conjunction with their farm at Park Brow.

Later they purchased the hall on the breakup of the Egerton estate and near the end of the 1960s sold it to a property developer.

And I am fairly confident that I shall be able to fill in the names of the missing tenants from the Lomax family till Mr Bailey took the hall over.

Today however has been about trying to understand how very nearly the hall ceased to be.  And that has involved reading through a large number of news stories and letters published in the Manchester Guardian from 1921 through to 1973.

The details will follow later but in short it is a tale of threatened demolition from the new road south out of the city to Wythenshawe and an onslaught from vandals and the natural elements.

During the 1920s some people recognised its unique value and campaigned first to save it from demolition, and then to suggest various uses including a folk museum and a community centre.

Four decades later the same depressing debate resurfaced ranging  from those who wanted it gone, to those who argued just for the preservation of its facade and a few who suggested that in the hands of a developer it could have a new life as a restaurant and club.

And it was that last option which won out.  By then the surrounding land had been taken for a new high school, two office blocks rose either side of the hall and what internal features had not been taken by the Egerton’s disappeared in a less than sympathetic restoration.

Now there is much more to come, including the decision by the ratepayers back in 1889 to refuse Lord Egerton’s offer of turning the land beside the hall into a recreation area, and plans in 1938 by both the Corporation and the National Trust to make the area around the hall into a park.

It is a sad story and one that so nearly ended with its demolition. Indeed as late as 1973 the Manchester Guardian reflecting on the “botched” restoration and those two office blocks which almost hid the building wondered “whether it might be better to put the old fellow out of its misery.”

Well that never happened and now as I have reported before there are fresh attempts to give the hall a new purpose and a community use.

Pictures; from the Lloyd Collection and Wesleyan Handbook, 1896