Now one of the advantages of a misspent youth is that I am fairly familiar with the streets of Manchester.
From 1969 for three years as a student at the College of Knowledge on Aytoun Street I wandered the city between lectures.
Back then the library was for the studious and so after Mr Wilson’s lecture on contemporary Soviet Government and before Mr Ripley on the Chartists or Trevor Thomas on Andrew Marvel I was off exploring my adopted home.
It took me to the Art Gallery and the Ref along with the Town Hall, the warren of streets that is now the Northern Quarter and down to the very unfashionable Castlefeld.
That said the knowledge is a bit frozen in time and I didn’t really get back to looking for the historic the interesting and the bizarre until the start of the last decade.
But despite that knowledge, the maps, and the street directories this image has defeated me.
The picture come to light through a project which Neil Simpson tells me is “the Town Hall Photographer's Collection Digitisation Project, which currently is Volunteer led and Volunteer staffed is in the process of taking the 200,000 negatives in the collection dating from 1956 to 2007 and digitising them.
The plan is to gradually make the scanned images available online - initially on the Manchester Local Images Collection Website".
I think we are on West Mosley Street which was sandwiched between Cooper Street and Mosley Street and vanished sometime before now.
I am fairly confident that there will be lots of theories and if we are lucky the answer.
In the meantime I will ask my friend Andy to look up his 1969 street directory and try to identify the firm on the board above that white building.
We shall see.
Location Manchester
Picture; of Manchester, 1968, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass
Back then the library was for the studious and so after Mr Wilson’s lecture on contemporary Soviet Government and before Mr Ripley on the Chartists or Trevor Thomas on Andrew Marvel I was off exploring my adopted home.
It took me to the Art Gallery and the Ref along with the Town Hall, the warren of streets that is now the Northern Quarter and down to the very unfashionable Castlefeld.
That said the knowledge is a bit frozen in time and I didn’t really get back to looking for the historic the interesting and the bizarre until the start of the last decade.
But despite that knowledge, the maps, and the street directories this image has defeated me.
The plan is to gradually make the scanned images available online - initially on the Manchester Local Images Collection Website".
I think we are on West Mosley Street which was sandwiched between Cooper Street and Mosley Street and vanished sometime before now.
In the meantime I will ask my friend Andy to look up his 1969 street directory and try to identify the firm on the board above that white building.
We shall see.
Location Manchester
Picture; of Manchester, 1968, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass
Provincial Building Society - or am I misunderstanding the question?
ReplyDeleteHi Andrew. As you are so familiar with the buildings of Manchester, I wonder if you could try to identify a fairly substantial one that appears in the background of an old photo of my great-great-grandparents, who lived in Alderley Edge in the early 1900s and who owned a cotton business on Oxford Street. If so, how can I get the photo to you?
ReplyDeleteSend me your email it won't get posted but we can communicate
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