Deansgate remembered ................ stories from the Fox Inn on Byrom Street nu 1 .... a beginning

For many Deansgate is just a road which takes you from Knott Mill down to St Mary’s Gate.

The Fox Inn, Byrom Street, circa 1914

If you are lucky and the traffic flow is kind you can do the route in minutes.

If like me you prefer to walk it offers up a shed load of interesting buildings from the old public library between Liverpool Road and Tonman Street past the John Rylands and down to the Burlington Arcade.

And if you turn off and stroll down Liverpool Road towards the Duke’s Canal and Castlefield you will be rewarded with a rich lump of history.

Here was our Roman fort and and small town, the Manchester end of the Bridgewater Navigation, as well as the site of the first passenger railway station in the world and heaps more including one of the first recorded Cholera cases back in the 1830s.

Johhny Lee, young Charlie and Joe Gibbons

And it was a place teeming with people making it in the words of the historian Frank Heaton a “Manchester Village.”  It runs down from Deansgate towards the river, bounded on one side by a set of railway viaducts and on the other by Quay Street.

I first became fascinated by it almost four decades ago and keep getting drawn back.

And in those forty years I have researched and written about the area, walked its streets in the company of friends and conducted guided tours of its history.**

So with all of that behind me I was very pleased when Debs got in touch and supplied this picture of the pub her grandmother was born in on August 26 1908.

William Henry Forth, Doris and Florence Forth and Betty Marr

Doris Brack nee Forth grew up in the Fox Inn on Byrom Street and she recorded her memories of the pub and the area in a series of interviews with Mr Heaton who included some of them in his book.

They are a vivid picture of a vibrant working class area in the years after the Great War.

So over the next few weeks with the help of her granddaughter Debs I will be exploring those tapes and piecing together the story of a community.***

It starts with the Fox Inn and this wonderful picture. I know that standing i the doorway beside her father William Henry Forth are Doris and her sister Florence and their friend Betty Marr and Johhny Lee, her cousin Charlie and Joe Gibbons.

Now that’s a good start.

Location Byrom Street, Deansgate, Manchester

Picture; The Fox Inn, circa 1914, courtesy of Debs Brack

*The Manchester Village Deansgate Remembered, Frank Heaton, 1995, Neil Richardson

**Castlefield, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Castlefield

***Deansgate, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Deansgate