Now Mincing Street seems so insignificant that even the Corporation hasn’t bothered to award it a street sign.
It runs from Aspin Lane to the junction of Corporation Street and Dantzic Street and at present is surrounded on both sides by open land. This land and the street itself exists as somewhere to park your car which I suppose is why it doesn’t any more even qualify for that street name.
So of all our forgotten and lost streets it does really merit going to the top of list.
Of course once it was much more. In the middle of the 19th century there were twenty-five properties running along the two side of the street and there was also access to a closed court of back to houses which was called simply Court No 1.
And if that was not enough at the western end of the street gave access to Holden Street which contained another seventeen houses some of which were back to back and some which faced a series of closed courts which didn’t even get titles.
It took me a little time to track Mincing Street down because back in the 1850s it was called Nelson Street and continued east under the railway viaduct to terminate at the river Irk.
Why its name was changed is unclear given that just a little to the north there is still a Little Nelson Street which might have been a candidate for a name change,
But names changes were at some point clearly in the wind given that Dantzic Street was in 1949 known as New Blakeley Street and two years later was Charter Street while today what is Aspin Lane was Ashley Lane.
I suspect that it wil not be long before those car parks are built on and given the size of the individual properties that have already gone up in the surrounding streets the density of occupation may not be so different from what it had been in 1851.
All of which just leaves me to thank Antony Mills for suggesting Mincing Street and providing me with three photographs of Little Nelson Street.
Location; Manchester
Picture; Mincing Street with a family on step, 1899, C.H. Godfrey, m03380, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and Nelson Street in 1851, from Adshead’s map of Manchester 1851, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/
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| Mincing Street, 1899 |
So of all our forgotten and lost streets it does really merit going to the top of list.
Of course once it was much more. In the middle of the 19th century there were twenty-five properties running along the two side of the street and there was also access to a closed court of back to houses which was called simply Court No 1.
And if that was not enough at the western end of the street gave access to Holden Street which contained another seventeen houses some of which were back to back and some which faced a series of closed courts which didn’t even get titles.
 |
| Nelson Street, 1851 |
Why its name was changed is unclear given that just a little to the north there is still a Little Nelson Street which might have been a candidate for a name change,
But names changes were at some point clearly in the wind given that Dantzic Street was in 1949 known as New Blakeley Street and two years later was Charter Street while today what is Aspin Lane was Ashley Lane.
I suspect that it wil not be long before those car parks are built on and given the size of the individual properties that have already gone up in the surrounding streets the density of occupation may not be so different from what it had been in 1851.
All of which just leaves me to thank Antony Mills for suggesting Mincing Street and providing me with three photographs of Little Nelson Street.
Location; Manchester
Picture; Mincing Street with a family on step, 1899, C.H. Godfrey, m03380, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and Nelson Street in 1851, from Adshead’s map of Manchester 1851, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/
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