Shopping on Market Street sometime in the 1920s

This is Market Street sometime between the two world wars. 

We are looking down towards St Mary’s Gate and away in the distance on our left is the Royal Exchange.

Now I can’t be sure of the date but it will be after 1911.

In that year Lockhart’s cocoa rooms were trading from number 70a Market Street while at number 72a was Linscott the jewellers, but by the time our fashionable shoppers were idling up Market Street the jewellers had gone to be replaced by the Ladies Shopping Mart.

Now I fully aware that this is a tad lazy and were I serious about dating our picture I would be trawling the directories from 1911 through to 1939, but as most know the Local History Library will close soon till February to manage the move back into Central Ref and there are other calls on the time left.

So I shall return to the photograph and reflect on how much has changed on Market Street some of which was the product of enemy action in the last war but most by the developers of the late 1960s and 70s.

The buildings on the corner of New Brown Street were destroyed along with some of Market Place during the bombing, but  that great swathe of properties on our right stretching down towards Corporation Street went so that we can now wander in the enclosed world of the Arndale.

And they went within living memory, although I have to say most of us will be hard pressed to remember this stretch of Market Street when traffic flowed freely from Piccadilly down to St Mary’s Gate.

I have to say I am fond of this picture which comes from the collection of Sandra Hapgood because it captures perfectly a little of that world we have now lost.

Picture; from the collection of Sandra Hapgood