Starting on Upper Chorlton Road and exploring bits of Whalley Range

Carlton Road, 2016

Once a very long time ago Upper Chorlton Road was the private road of Samuel Brooks who having bought the surrounding area in the mid 1830s set about creating an estate for the wealthy of Manchester.

And according to one source appropriated the Black Brook as part of his own sewage system which while that may have seemed quite modern was not I suspect embraced by those who lived further down stream in Chorlton.*

There had been a “footpath from West Point to Brooks’ Bar as a means of communication between Hulme and the village [Chorlton] along which a brook run, afterwards arched and utilised by Mr Brooks as a main sewer which he drained into the watercourse called Black Brook,” complimenting the new road he cut in 1838 which we now know as Upper Chorlton Road “or Brook’s-road as it is better known ..... in the year 1838 to give access to his residence, Whalley House.”*

Ruford Road, 2016

And in the course of the next century Upper Chorlton Road became the site of some pretty impressive houses a clutch of more modest properties, along with a barrage and cinema.

All of which is a way of introducing a new series of stories about Whalley Range.

The pictures are from Andy Robertson who set out yesterday down Upper Chorlton Road and took a turn down Sylvan Avenue to record what happened to Mr Brook’s grand design in the roads and avenues of Whalley Range.

Location; Whalley Range, Manchester

*Thomas Ellwood, History of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, nu 6, December 12 1885, South Manchester Gazette