When you could get a haircut, visit the slaughterhouse and never move off Beech Road

Now, I am old enough to remember walking that short stretch of Beech Road from the corner of Chequers Road down as far as Macqueen, and buying a bottle of wine in the off license, a cake from Lambert's, playing with the idea of a hair cut from Mr Jackson and standing in the ironmongers in what is now Macqueen.

Elk, 2019

Had I done the same journey in 1911, I could have got that bottle of wine, the cake, and the haircut from the same shops which isn’t bad given that over sixty-four years separates the two journeys.

And that is a remarkable bit of continuity, for a road which is now dominated by cafés, bars, restaurants and gift shops and clothes shops.

For those who want the exact details, what is now Ludo’s’ was Mason and Burrows, “grocers” and “wine and spirit merchants”, next door at 48, had been a baker and later a grocery shop, which in 1911 was a confectioner. 

The hairdressers have always been a hairdresser during that 60 odd years, and what had been the iron mongers was once a Drape’s and butcher’s shops.

All of which is an introduction to the history of just one of those properties, which was Elk, but began when Mrs Martha Thorpe moved into the premise sometime around 1879.

The property dates from the year before when the address was still Chorlton Row and was one of a row of houses owned by William Mounsey.

Beech Road, 1958

The very first tenant was a Mary Jane Kershaw and it is not clear what she sold in the shop but by the following year when Mrs Thorpe took over the tenancy it is listed as a “slaughter house” and she continued to do the business of selling meat from the property till the beginning of the 20th century.

For a while after that it was confectioner’s and then a bakery and later a grocer’s shop run by the Lambert family. 

I remember it as such and its conversion into a card and gift shop before it returned to its old connection with food.  For this was Primavera opened by Patrick Hannity in the early 1990s and then by degree becoming Beggars Bush and Mink before re opening as Elk.

Buonissmo, 2000

Primavera was a very different restaurant to what had gone before in Chorlton and quite rightly drew customers from other parts of the city and out into Cheshire.

Its mix of imaginative dishes heavily influenced by the cuisine of the Mediterranean has been widely copied across Chorlton but seldom bettered.

And there is an argument that Primavera, along with the Café on the Green, followed by Buonissimo, the Italian deli run by Bob and Del Amato, pretty much kick started the bar revolution on Beech Road and beyond.

Of course any one with access to the directories for Beech Road, along with some old photographs and a long memory could add more.

Location; Beech Road

Pictures; Elk, 2019, the shop window of Buonissimo, 2000, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and Beech Road in 1958, R.E. Stanley, m17670, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass