Looking for Lloyd Street ........... the lost roads of Chorlton part 2

Now you won’t find it in Chorlton but it did exist and it was that short stretch of Whitelow Road running from the corner of Beech Road to that point where Whitelow bends to the left.*

This was once Lloyd land.  He was the second largest landowner in Chorlton buying into the township at the end of the 18th century and so I guess naming this little lane after him made sense.

Even now it is narrow  and hints that once it was just country lane with a few buildings on its eastern side and the large garden of William Cookson directly behind the Horse and Jockey.

But it is an interesting little place and reveals much about the life of our village.

Just at the end of the lane was the home of William Griffith.  The Griffith [s] family were active Methodists.

They appear in the ’41 and ’51 census in the tithe schedule rate books and Chapel registers.  William was a market gardener and one of his sons a wheelwright and his possession of freehold houses on Lloyd Street qualified him for a Parliamentary vote in 1832 1835 and 1840 which in turn marked him out as one of just 30 or so men who could vote.

For me an even more interesting man was Thomas Taylor.  He can also be found in the electoral registers for 1832, 1835, 1840 and 1854-55 by virtue of freehold houses for rent at end at the bottom of Beech Road and round into Lloyd Street.

These included what are now numbers 68-70 Beech Road and possibly whatever was on the site of the Beech Inn and extended on to the modern Whitelow Road.  Back in the 1840s nu 70 was the Travellers Rest which was a beer shop and nu 68 was a stationer’s and later the post office.

And it is his hand in the strange case of the loss of the Methodist Sunday school which had been in a building on the corner of Lloyd Street

This too had been built by subscriptions, and for a while was used by James Renshaw for his day school.

But the building was not secured by a trust and so reverted to the Lloyd Estate who sold the building to Thomas Taylor.

For a while Taylor charged the Methodists an annual rent but eventually in 1827 served notice on them to quit and the building was converted into cottages.

No detailed explanation has survived as to why the Methodists lost control of the building they had sacrificed so much to build but it was on Lloyd land and George Lloyd was devoted enough to the established church to give land for the building of the new National School on condition that “the school to be conducted upon principles consistent with the doctrines of the Established Church.” But it could equally have been a decision based purely on business.

Looking at the value of the cottages and the rents Thomas Taylor received it is easy to see that this might just have been a cash consideration, but more about this and the people who lived there another time.

Picture; Lloyd Street today, from the collection of Tony Walker, the Oven Door was the Travellers Rest back in the 1840 and what is now the Beech Inn may in part be all that is left of the cottages on Lloyd Street, map showing Lloyd Street from the OS map of Lancashire 1841-53, courtesy of Digital Archives,  http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

* It was still Lloyd Street in 1871