It is Newport Road sometime between 1907 and 1910, and if I wanted to stick my neck out maybe just maybe the year 1909.
It is just a very ordinary picture of one of the three long roads that were being cut and developed from Oswald Road down to Ryebank. In 1907 Nicolas was the most complete but even so it was really only the east side that been developed.
By comparison Longford had only been built on its western side just past Chepstow and Newport ran out after just 15 houses.
For the residents of these three roads it must have been a little like being pioneers. You were one of the first families to settle here and to the south and east it was still open land while to the west there was the Brick Company.
During the course of the next three decades there were enough families who had cause to dread the brickworks with its deep pits which quickly filled with water and proved deadly to children who fell in.
It was what it looked, a new development of modest housing for the middle people who made their living as commercial salesman, clerks, shopkeepers and engineers.
But they were proud enough of their new homes to have bought postcards showing the road and sent them to friends and families.
Commercial photographers banked on this local interest and would often hawk the finished picture from door to door before selling the negative on to a postcard firm.
Our photographer had taken advantage of the morning sunlight and the fact that the road is virtually empty. Away in the distance a horse drawn delivery van calls at one of the houses while closer to the camera two women make their towards Oswald Road and halfway along a dog and some children make up the scene.
It is of course a lost moment and one that is all the more unfamiliar with stone setts which have yet to covered with tar.
Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy
Picture; the Lloyd collection, circa 1900s
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