Monday 14 November 2022

The lost houses of Princess Street ........... part two ......... Mr Crabtree, a sink, two taps and a washer

Now Mr Crabtree’s plumbing business has come in for some attention recently.

118-120 Princess Street as was, 2015
It occupied numbers 118-120 Princess Street just down from Charles Street.

It was doing the business back in 1959 and was still trading taps, washers and much else a decade later.

But now it’s gone and the site is  just a hole in the ground as seen in this photograph from Andy Robertson.

I became intrigued by the buildings after they had been featured on facebook by Ray Ogden from a picture by Mike Peel taken in 2006.

They will postdate 1819 and were well established when the surveyors of the Manchester and Salford OS map completed their task in 1849.

And back in 1959
Two years later Slater’s directory recorded the residents of the row and Mr Adshead featured them on his colour map.

All of which means  I can confirm that along the stretch there were a motley collection of businesses and householders, from James Carruthers beer retailer and Lydia Dodson, tobacconist to Edward Hooper of the Medlock Inn.

In total there were twelve buildings running down to the Brook Street Bridge from Charles Street which neatly brings me to the fact that back in 1851 the bridge and our houses stood on Brook Street rather than Princess Street.

The bigger picture, down Princess Street, 1959
Added to which the larger building to the right of Mr Crabtree’s shop dates from after 1851, but that maybe over doing the detail.

Still the photographs from 1959 show something of the other original buildings one of which will have been the Medlock Inn, not that the pub could have amounted to much given that on neither of the two maps of the period is it listed as a place dispensing beer.

That for now is it, leaving me only to thank Andy for sharing his picture of the hole in the ground, his efforts at finding the 1959 pictures and his work which confirmed Mr Crabtree was still on Princess Street in 1969 and that back in 1911 it was the plumbing business of a Hampson Archer.

Pictures; 118-120 Princess Street, 2015, as was from the collection of Andy Robertson & as  R Crabtree & Co Ltd, 1959, HW Beaumont, m05312, & m05313, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

*The lost houses of Princess Street begin to reveal their secrets, 

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