Standing on the corner and watching the changes in Withington …………… Wilmlsow Road

2019

I don’t “go off on one” when places I have known for years start to change.

It is after all the way of things, although sometimes we lose buildings of significance.

All of which brings me to the corner of Wilmslow, Parsonage and Burton Roads.

It is a spot which did not seem to change for ages, and so looking at a 1960 photograph, I am reminded of how similar it was a decade later when I was briefly living there and still hadn’t changed much a full twenty years on.

2019

But as Andy’s pictures show the transformation has grown a pace.

The White Lion went along time ago as did the cinema, but the Scala’s replacement is relatively new.

Across the road what had been the corner shop/restraunat has gone and a new building is slowing rising to the sky.

I rather took that building for granted.

It was an addition to the row of shops which were themselves added to the front of a row of houses.

1960

In 1894, that tiny corner plot was an open space.

I remember it as a shop, although I would be hard pressed to say what it sold, and later we ate there when it was a restaurant, and now it will be a four-storey building with retail/commercial space at ground floor and seven self-contained flats above with two studio flats, four one-bed and one two-bed flats.

Location; Withington

Pictures, corner of Wilmslow, Parsonage and Burton Roads, 2019, from the collection of Andy Robertson and hopping Centre from the set Withington Lillywhite, Tuck & Sons, courtesy of TuckDB http://tuckdb.org/history