The story of Didsbury in just twenty objects, chosen at random and delivered in a paragraph or more.
I doubt that Alexander Somerville was the first tourist to fall in love with Didsbury.
He was a journalist and in the June of 1847 had come over to Chorlton looking for potato blight, moved across the Mersey by the Greyhound pub at Jackson’s Boat and ended up in Didsbury.
A place he wrote “of great beauty- not surpassed even by the beautiful fields, meadows, gardens, and the public pathways through them, lying around London.” *
And went on to revel in the place, stating boldly, “Let the traveller, passing out of Cheshire into Lancashire by the Northern Ferry, who loves to loiter on the road, and see sights, come at the hour of summer sunset.
Let him approach Didsbury, and look back suddenly through the trees, the traveller will see the houses standing on the brow of eminence, and the gardens with them, and the people looking out of opened windows, the very houses gazing, as it were, with wonder; and the old church, with its graveyard, and the dead of a thousand years around it, standing in the very brink of the eminence.”*
And yes I know Ford Lane, 1933, is not Alexander Somerville in 1847, but try finding an appropriate image.
Location; Didsbury
Picture; Ford Lane, from the collection of A.H. Clarke, 1933
*Somerville, Alexander, A Pilgrimage in search of the Potato Blight, The Manchester Examiner, June 19th, 1847
He was a journalist and in the June of 1847 had come over to Chorlton looking for potato blight, moved across the Mersey by the Greyhound pub at Jackson’s Boat and ended up in Didsbury.
A place he wrote “of great beauty- not surpassed even by the beautiful fields, meadows, gardens, and the public pathways through them, lying around London.” *
And went on to revel in the place, stating boldly, “Let the traveller, passing out of Cheshire into Lancashire by the Northern Ferry, who loves to loiter on the road, and see sights, come at the hour of summer sunset.
Let him approach Didsbury, and look back suddenly through the trees, the traveller will see the houses standing on the brow of eminence, and the gardens with them, and the people looking out of opened windows, the very houses gazing, as it were, with wonder; and the old church, with its graveyard, and the dead of a thousand years around it, standing in the very brink of the eminence.”*
And yes I know Ford Lane, 1933, is not Alexander Somerville in 1847, but try finding an appropriate image.
Location; Didsbury
Picture; Ford Lane, from the collection of A.H. Clarke, 1933
*Somerville, Alexander, A Pilgrimage in search of the Potato Blight, The Manchester Examiner, June 19th, 1847
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