Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester nu 44 ........ Bradley Street .... those back to backs and a car park

Now I have been visiting Bradley Street for a very long time.

Bradley Street in 1983

It runs from Faraday Street up to Ancoats Street and draws me back because of the three one up one down properties which back on to the far grander row of terraced houses on Lever Street.

They could have been lost to us but were saved and converted into offices.

Over the years I have looked into their history, trawling the census returns for the people who lived in them.

The same stretch, 2016

When I first came across them in the early 1990s they were empty and pretty derelict.  In one of the three the decades of wall paper were slowing peeling away from the wall revealing forty years of changing design.

As for the rest of Bradley Street most of it is just a car park.

But a bit of it has undergone one of those dramatic changes and is now enclosed by a building which occupies the southern end of the street.

I remember this section as an open space where buses parked up and with views from Spear Street across to Lever Street.

And then some time in 2008 the area was fenced off and by 2011 a big new development had filled the void.

Looking down the south side of Bradley Street, 2016

I have to admit that when I passed it recently I gave it no more than a glance but that would be to ignore a bit of history.

So as you do I wandered in and came out on Faraday Street which was originally Friday Street.

And that is about it except to say you should never neglect wandering the city accompained by a camera, a notebook and forewarned by the most up today announcements from the planning department of new applications to build and develop bits of our streets.


Location; Manchester

Picture; one up one down cottages in Bradley Street, 1983 from the Early Manchester Dwellings Group and Bradley Street 2016 from the collection of Andrew Simpson