All Saints in the snow, 1958

All Saints in the snow, 1958

It is another of those pictures which really speaks for itself, but that won't stop me adding some words

We are on the corner of Oxford Road looking down Cavendish Street.  To our right is the park and behind the bus the Art College.

Now I have a fond spot for All Saints partly because it was an area I spent a lot of time as student and because it is full of history.  The park was the site of All Saints Church, while just out of sight beyond the car on the left is Chorlton on Medlock Town Hall built in 1830-31 and the venue in 1945 for the Fifth Pan African Congress.

Chorlton on Medlock Town Hall, 1972

“It was attended by 90 delegates, 26 from Africa. 

They included many scholars, intellectuals and political activists who would later go on to become influential leaders in various African independence movements and the American civil rights movement, including the Kenyan independence leader Jomo Kenyatta, American activist and academic W. E. B. Du Bois, Malawi's Hastings Banda, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, prominent Jamaican barrister Dudley Thompson and Obafemi Awolowo and Jaja Wachuku from Nigeria. 

Snow and a bus, All Saints, 1958

It also led partially to the creation of the Pan-African Federation, founded in 1946 by Nkrumah and Kenyatta.

The British Press scarcely mentioned the conference. A number of resolutions were passed such as the criminalization of racial discrimination and the main resolution which decried imperialism and capitalism.”*

By the time I attended a meeting in the old Town Hall sometime in early 1970, the place was showing its age and would soon be gutted and become part of the Art College.

In the same way the building behind the park which had been the home of the Chorlton Union which ran the Poor Law for south Manchester would become the administrative centre of Manchester Polytechnic.

It was a place I once occupied with a girl friend during a protest at cuts in library provision but that as they say is another story.

Picture; Traffic in the snow, Oxford Road and Grosvenor Square, All Saints, Chorlton-on-Medlock, W.M.Johnstone, 1958,m00166, Chorlton on Medlock Town Hall, 1972, m52112, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass