Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester .......... nu 1 Sickle Street

Sickle Street from Market Street 2016

If you walk down Market Street towards St Mary’s Gate you may well miss Sickle Street.

It is a narrow alley which seems to lead nowhere and could just be an afterthought by a careless developer.

But not so it is one of the old streets which connects Market Street with Fountain Street.

It is best approached from Fountain Street via Phoenix Street and will take you by a twisty route back to Market Street which in the 1850s offered up one of those closed courts which was best not investigated by anyone with money in their pockets.

Today it is still possible to follow the course of the street and like them find the way becoming progressively narrower until it is just a canyon between two big buildings.

And that closed court along with a pile of other buildings have gone replaced by a series of car parks and wheelie bins.

Sickle Street, 1849

But with the help of the OS map for 1842, and Mr Adshead's "Illustrated Maps of the Manchester Township, divided into Wards" made in 1850 it is possible to walk along Sickle Street and get a sense of how busy it would have been.

Not that that many of its residents managed to get a listing in the directory for 1850 and the one named court and the smaller unnamed court were even less worthy of a mention.

Location; Manchester

Next; Pool Fold

Pictures; Sickle Street, 2016, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and in 1849 from the OS of Manchester & Salford, 1842-49, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/