Continuing the story of Chorlton in just a paragraph. They are in no particular order, and have been selected purely at random.
Just over 40 years ago there was still a working water pump on Beech Road, and only a few years before that, old farmer Higginbotham finally got round to filling in his old well in the garden of his farmhouse on the green. All of which goes to remind us that before the arrival of mains water in 1864 from Manchester, the township was reliant on pumps, wells, ponds and streams. Now my picture was collected by Lois in a village in Sussex but I have every expectation that if you had walked through Chorlton something like 160 years ago there would have been plenty of similar ones. We might mourn their passing but collecting the water from a pump was a chore and one that had to be done three or four times a day, and by the 1880s most supplies had either become polluted or dried up. Nevertheless the public pumps were a meeting place and by all accounts a magic place for a six year old to play on hot summer’s days.
Picture; from the collection of Lois Elsden
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