If it wasn’t for the houses in between you could see all the way across the fields to Ancoats Hall*

Smithfield Wholesale Fish Market, 1900,

We were in the Northern Quarter recently showing some of the family around this part of the city.

There will be many who remember it as a bustling area dominated by the whole sale markets and lots of little businesses.

But when I washed up in Manchester in the late 1960s it had taken on a more run down and seedy appearance, a place waiting for something to happen but not quite sure what that something might be.

Junk, 2 Dale Street

Today large parts of it seem to have a purpose and function again.  Here are those quirky little shops and businesses you won’t find elsewhere in the city.  It is to quote one review, “a centre of alternative and bohemian culture.”**

And as you would expect it’s also rich with history.

Walk these streets and more particularly the small narrow ones or the even smaller ones which sit behind them with names like Back Piccadilly and Back Thomas Street and it is still possible to get a sense of the city’s past.

More so because a fair number of the late 18th and early 19th century workers home and workshops have survived.

Detail from Green’s map of Manchester 1794

They were built just as Manchester was beginning to grow into something new and exciting on the back of commerce and cotton.

A place Asa Briggs described as “the shock city of the Industrial Revolution” and one that attracted visitors who came to gawp at the mills, the smoke, noise and great show warehouses, taking away vivid memories of the sheer frenetic activity of a new type of city.

Now there is no getting away from the fact that there was here also a lot of sorrow, blighted lives and a sense that for those working in the mills, living hard by the canals and factories and existing in awful housing conditions Manchester was no easy place to inhabit.

It was also a place of overcrowding, poor sanitation, and long hours of work which were recorded by Kay, Engels and others.

My old friend Richard Buxton’s family had moved to New Cross from rural Prestwich in the late 18th century and exchanged fields for those narrow mean streets and courts.

But during this period it was possible to walk just a few minutes from Piccadilly or New Cross and be in fields, with fresh streams and endless expanses of open countryside.

Richard Buxton is a case in point.  The family home may have been in a crowded little terrace off Great Ancoats Street but where he began work was just where the city met the country.

Port Street, 1960

In 1798 he was apprenticed at the age of twelve to James Heap in Port Street “to learn the trade of bat maker; that is a maker of children’s small leathern shoes.”

At that time Port Street was still on the edge of city.  On one side there were houses and workshops and open land on the other.

Standing with his back to the built up street Buxton could have looked out east on fields and the occasional houses with an almost uninterrupted view to Shooters Brook and the farms beyond.


Twenty years later you could still have followed the river Medlock or the Rochdale Canal out past Ancoats Hall and be open countryside by the time you reached Beswick.  Had you chosen to head west instead, once you had cleared Cornbrook with its dye works and chemical plants you were fair set for the field and farms which would eventually take you by degree to Chorlton and beyond.

Junk, 2 Dale Street

All of which would have been familiar to Buxton who was a botanist and often walked out of the city in the early to mid decades of the 19th century.

Now I know that is a long way from where we started in the Northern Quarter, so perhaps we should end where we started.

I think any one fascinated by the history of the city should just wander the area, and I suppose if you want a guide there is nothing better than Claire Hartwell’s book, Manchester, Penguin, 2001.

Our Jill and Jeff did.  The following day they were back there and in one of the shops on Dale Street Jill bought a very nice little red dress.  One of the memories and for showing off back in Eltham.

Pictures; Smithfield Wholesale Fish Market, 1900, now the Craft Centre, m59592,Port Street, 1960, H. Milligan, m04850, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, Junk, 2 Dale Street, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, detail from Green’s map of Manchester 1794, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

*apologies to Gus Elen and his music hall song, If it wasn't for the houses in between
Oh it really is a wery pretty garden
And Chingford to the eastward could be seen;
Wiv a ladder and some glasses,
You could see to 'Ackney Marshes,
If it wasn't for the 'ouses in between.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1GmDA8FU9w

** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Quarter_(Manchester)