The lost road names of Chorlton

Now there are a lot of lost road names in Chorlton.  

I say lost but most are just name changes.

I guess it was matter of eliminating duplicate names which appeared elsewhere in the city.

So Regent became Reeves, Crescent became Crossland and Oak Bank changed to Silverwood Avenue.

Now the most obvious moment to make the change was when we elected to join the city in 1904, but the old names persisted beyond 1911 and may have stretched into the 1960s.

It is one of these little puzzles that really can only be solved by sitting down with the street directories and working through them year by year until the changes appear.  Or waiting for someone to remember when the new road name went up.

So if there is anyone who wants to come forward please do.

In the meantime just possibly there might be an easier answer in this photograph from May 1959 of Oak Bank Avenue, which is now Silverwood Avenue.

Oak Bank may well have its got its name from a large house also called Oak Bank directly opposite on Barlow Moor Road.

It was set back from the main road and hidden in an extensive garden and orchard surrounded by meadow and arable land. Once the home of William Morton, by 1847 it was owned by the wine merchant Frederick Cope, who lived there from 1850 to 1855.

The estate ran from the junction of Wilbraham Road and Barlow Moor Road south down to Oak Avenue, then back following the line of Zetland Road to Corkland and up to what is Wilbraham Road.   

It may be that the name was changed to avoid confusion with Oak Avenue, either way the date seems to have been later than 1959 unless of course A.H.Downes who took the picture in the April of that year just read old “late road sign.”

And here is the challenge for people to collect and send  their own road name changes.  I can think of a few more but I bet there are even more.

Picture; December April 1959, A.H.Downes m17489, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass