Always check your photo collections

Always regularly check your old collection of photographs is not a piece of advice I follow which is a shame, because had I dug them out more recently I would have come across this one of Barlow Moor Road.

I can’t remember when I took it but it is before the digital camera which puts it at over 25 years ago. And I have to admit the quality is rather lacking but it tells a story.

 The parade dates from about 1912 and in its time has been host to many businesses. Shortly after it was opened the first shop on the block was a sweet shop which by the late 1950s was selling electrical good and when I took my picture was Martins the Estate agent and since then has gone through many changes becoming more recently a computer repair shop.

 But for the best part of the 20th century the central section was Shaw’s Motor Garage. It was there when A.H. Downes recorded the scene in 1959 and was there soon after the parade was built. And sometime perhaps around 1912 Mr Shaw had opened the first kerb side petrol pump which in the way things were done was captured on camera.

The caption on the picture says 1912 but I am not so sure and I think a trawl of the directories might push the date a little later although having said that the car registration places the car at 1913.

But I am getting carried away. Charles Shaw was living on Wilbraham Road in a house now demolished next to the Royal Bank of Scotland and described himself in 1911 as a motor engineer which was logical step forward for a man who a decade earlier had been a cycle agent.

 There is more to the Shaw’s which I shall leave s for another time. They after all were one of those families to move from bikes to cars which in itself is the story of the 20th century. But it does take me back to my imperfect photo, for there briefly exposed above the tattoo shop was part of the old Shaw sign which takes prominent position in the old photograph. 

Ah I hear you mutter all this for an old sign but to me it is the very heart of history. Here boarded up for perhaps fifty years is a little bit of the past that takes us right back to the early 20th century and offers us some continuity for there is still a garage behind the present line of shops.

 Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson and the Lloyd collection