“the green fields of one summer are the roads and avenues of the next.”

This picture of Oswald Road perfectly sums up what we had become by the early decades of the 20th century.  

For most of the early and mid 19^th century we had been a small rural community growing food for the markets of Manchester.

But with the coming of mains water, a gas supply and later a railway station we were quickly transformed in to a suburb of the city.

It was as the Manchester Evening News commented in the September of 1901 so swift a development that “the green fields of one summer are the roads and avenues of the next.”

And something of just how quickly the roads and avenues appeared can be got from the street directories for the early 20^th century.  These were not unlike our telephone directories in that they listed the householder in each road, street and avenue, with the added bonus that they often give the occupation.

And as I write I am looking at the directories for the three years of 1901, 09 and 11 and have chosen that collection of roads around Oswald Road.  Here is a remarkable story of piecemeal building as speculative builders vied with each other to build anything from a single house, to a semi up to a terrace. 

The development is patchy and is partly conditioned by changing land use.  So on the corner of Oswald and Longford Roads, what was once open ground, became a skating rink and later a row of eight semi detached houses built I guess sometime after 1916 and more likely in the years after the Great War.

In some ways these first inhabitants must have felt a little like pioneers, with views across the fields towards Turn Moss uninterrupted by other houses. Well, until the brick works arrived but that is another story.

The fun thing to do is to go and look for yourself.  Armed with copies of the1893 and 1907 OS maps and with just a little knowledge of building styles it is possible to distinguish the large Victorian piles from the Edwardian semis and terraces and the speculative in fill of later decades.

But it occurs to me that in all the stories of the new rows of houses, and the reasons for the rapid development of Chorlton at no time have I presented that population increase and so here it is.

Pictures; Oswald Road from the Lloyd collection, detail of 1907 OS map and the changes in population from 1841-1911.