Who remembers this Beech Road?

One of the things I like about collections of street photographs is how you can sometimes follow the photographer down the road.

 In the digital collection of Manchester Libraries there are some fine examples from the 1950s and 60s where the person behind the camera has meticulously recorded collections of houses and shops, property by property.

 They are today a wonderful snap shot of Chorlton fifty years ago.

So here is another of Beech Road from my old friend Tony Walker taken around 1980. One early Sunday morning Tony went out on to Beech Road and took a series of pictures. This is the second of the ones he took that day and judging from the angle of the picture was taken on the corner of Beech and Chequers.

It is a remarkable picture in that so much of what you can see has now gone.

There has been an off license of sorts on the corner since the beginning of the last century and while the shop is now a deli it does still sell wines.

Beyond was the grocery, a hairdresser and jutting out from the alley another grocers shop, Muriel and Richard’s green grocers and the piano shop.

At the bottom was the Oven Door Bakery in what are now numbers 68 and 70 Beech Road while the old Coop building was yet to become the home of the gift shop, Thai restaurant and Whole Food shop and instead much of it was given over to Strippo who stripped doors for under a tenner

Now I remember Joy Seal who ran the chemist. Her husband told me how when they took the shop over in the 1950s they first had to demolish the huge ovens at the back which had been used to bake bread.

It is still the chemists but the butcher to the right, and the Post Office to the left have gone as have the second hand furniture place and J. Johnny’s hard ware shop. J.Johnny's was a wonderful place where you could buy everything from a scredriver to a plank of wood.

What I particularly liked was that with some items you never paid the same price. On three different occassions I paid three different prices for having some knives sharpened, but in the end I came out evens.

I suppose the only concession to the advance of the new Beech Road was the brief appearance of an amusement arcade next to the post office and the gift shop which had been the grocers beside Thresher’s off license. Neither lasted very long but was a hint of what was to come.

In some ways this period was an unhappy time. More and more of the old conventional retail out lets were closing and it was unclear what would take their place.

These traditional shops could not compete with either the supermarket or the growing trend for home freezers.

So while Safeway’s planned to move to bigger premises by Albany Road and the shop in the precinct selling frozen food prospered our shops went through a lean time and the parade began to take on the appearance of a ghost town.

So the arrival of the Lead Station and the restaurant Primavera heralded a change and a renaissance which at times might now be irksome if you want basic things but has at least returned Beech Road to a thriving and buzzing place.

Picture; from the collection of Tony Walker