That house in Whalley Range and the grander one in Chorlton, which was Oak Bank and became Oakley

Doenberg today

Doenberg is that fine old house on Wood Road just where it joins College Road.

It was built in 1896 by Robert Rohleder and remained the family home until it was bought as the new residence for the Dean of Manchester in 1934.

And given that many of these houses were later torn down and replaced with more functional properties during the last decades of the twentieth century it is something that this one survived.

Today it has been converted into flats but was for a while left empty and forlorn which is where I left the story yesterday.

Sylvia who first asked me if I knew anything of its history thought that it might have once been a children’s home.  She had encountered a woman in the grounds searching for the site of a children’s home and thought Doenberg might have been the place.

Here then is the stuff of mystery and I wonder if the woman had herself been a resident of the home or had been drawn to Wood Road through a search for a relative.

Now a few people have confirmed that here was Cambrian House but so far that is where the trail ends.

Instead I shall return to an even bigger house which stood in the heart of had been Martledge and became New Chorlton.

The Oakley gate post

This was Oak Bank and was home in its time to the wealthy Morton family and later still the Cope’s who ran a chain of wine shops and drinking establishments in Manchester.

It stood in its own grounds which ran along Barlow Moor Road as far as Sandy Lane, and was bounded by what are now Zetland, Corkland and Wilbraham Roads.

By 1894 the estate had shrunk too little more than a pocket hemmed in by the houses on Corkland Road, Wilbraham Road and Maple Avenue and while its garden still extended west to Barlow Moor Road this too would be surrendered to housing by the beginning of the 20th century.

Today all that is left is a stone gate post with the name of the house and a bit of the old  wall.

The post gives the name of the house as Oakley and it was the Needham family who changed the name from Oak Bank.

They had moved in 1869 and stayed till the September of 1889 having changed the name to Oakley in 1883.

Oakley in 1894

To be fair the family did also leave their name which with that wonderful flair of civic imagination has become Needham Avenue although briefly in 1883 Oakley Moor Road appears in the rate books.

This seems to have referred to that stretch of Barlow Moor Road that ran alongside the estate.

A few years later and the old name of Barlow Moor had reasserted itself although there was a brief flirtation with Oakley Barlow Moor Road.

All of which seems rather nerdy but I am on a roll and will finish with Wallworth Road which again existed briefly from sometime around 1901 and was still in use in 1911.

It was that that short stretch of what is now Needham Avenue running off from Barlow Moor Road to the junction of Priory avenue where it continued as Needham.

Wallworth, Priory and Needham Avenues, 1907

Now this I tell you only because William H Wallworth had lived along here from 1901 and had owned the bakery on the north side of the avenue which is still there but has long since become home to a small set of industrial units.

This building has intrigued countless numbers of people passing along Neeedham on their way to the parcel depot.

And if you look closely there at the side of the building is our Oakley gate post, not I suspect in its original position which rather begs the question of why that wall is there.

But that is for another time.

In the meantime it is all that is left of Oak Bank/Oakley which has fared less well than Doenberg which can be still be seen and which has returned to its residential character.

Pictures; of Doenberg, courtesy of Sylvia Waltering, the gate post of Oakley from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and the Oakley from the OS map of South Lancashire 1893, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and the OS for Manchester & Salford, 1907