In that great sweep of photographs of Didsbury, Parrs Wood always seems the poor relation.
It is as if having done the village, the college, Fletcher Moss, the churches and the pubs most photographers pretty much picked up their cameras and went off to their dark rooms.
A few of the more enterprising commercial photographers did snap away at the larger houses and some of the more picturesque roads.
These they would revisit offering the images for sale to the residents and later those same images made their way into the catalogues of the picture post card companies.
But Parrs Wood and East Didsbury rarely got the same attention. I suppose before the coming of the Kingsway there wasn’t that much to record and after it had been cut the area lost a little of its charm.
After all it would be a bold commercial photographer who would gamble on the attractions of the Kingsway Extension, and yet one did so, recording also the houses along its route, and the Gateway Hotel.
And these along with Parrs Wood Court and the bus garage now sit in the collection and back in the 1930s and 40s no doubt graced the mantelpieces of some of the homes in East Didsbury.
But for me it is this picture of the station which has caught my fancy.
Now as railway stations go it was quite late on the scene, having opened in 1909 a full 29 years after that other Didsbury station opened for business.
Somewhere I will be able to find details of the number of passengers it carried and I guess really came into its own with the development of the housing on both sides of the track.
For me it is all about nostalgia. I can remember those locomotives and the distinctive smell of warm oil and steam along with the wooden platforms and all the bits that went with the station, including the simple slot machines which offered up Five Boys Chocolate.
I have to say I never learned and was always disappointed at the way the chocolate tended to have gone flaky and white at the edges and invariably tasted stale.
But there were compensations in the form of those evocative train posters for faraway seaside resorts, the big cast iron weighing machines and depending on the time of the day the rows of milk churns.
All of these provided distractions from what always seemed an age of waiting, broken only by the occasional goods train and fast express which swept past cutting the air in a blur of noise and steam with its passengers gazing at you always it seemed with that mix of disdain and pity no doubt reflecting how lucky they were to be moving with such purpose.
We on the other hand looked back glum and a little sad that our train ticket allowed us only the slow
stopping train and a host of suburban railway stops.
Picture; East Didsbury Station, date unknown
A few of the more enterprising commercial photographers did snap away at the larger houses and some of the more picturesque roads.
These they would revisit offering the images for sale to the residents and later those same images made their way into the catalogues of the picture post card companies.
But Parrs Wood and East Didsbury rarely got the same attention. I suppose before the coming of the Kingsway there wasn’t that much to record and after it had been cut the area lost a little of its charm.
After all it would be a bold commercial photographer who would gamble on the attractions of the Kingsway Extension, and yet one did so, recording also the houses along its route, and the Gateway Hotel.
But for me it is this picture of the station which has caught my fancy.
Now as railway stations go it was quite late on the scene, having opened in 1909 a full 29 years after that other Didsbury station opened for business.
Somewhere I will be able to find details of the number of passengers it carried and I guess really came into its own with the development of the housing on both sides of the track.
For me it is all about nostalgia. I can remember those locomotives and the distinctive smell of warm oil and steam along with the wooden platforms and all the bits that went with the station, including the simple slot machines which offered up Five Boys Chocolate.
I have to say I never learned and was always disappointed at the way the chocolate tended to have gone flaky and white at the edges and invariably tasted stale.
All of these provided distractions from what always seemed an age of waiting, broken only by the occasional goods train and fast express which swept past cutting the air in a blur of noise and steam with its passengers gazing at you always it seemed with that mix of disdain and pity no doubt reflecting how lucky they were to be moving with such purpose.
We on the other hand looked back glum and a little sad that our train ticket allowed us only the slow
stopping train and a host of suburban railway stops.
Picture; East Didsbury Station, date unknown
I was born and brought up in Parrs Wood Court and we kids used to play around the Station and get into the Carriages in the Sidings and pretend we were going to London.
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