A photograph and a clue to how we used to read

I like this picture. It is not very remarkable one but that is the point. 

In a sense it is the ordinariness of the scene which is interesting.

It was taken in the May of 1959 by A Downes who spent that year walking up and down the main roads of Chorlton, stopping and recording each block of houses and shops.

This was the parade of shops on the east side of Barlow Moor Road, opposite what is now the Co-op but was once the Palais de Luxe Picture House next to Shaw’s Garages.

It must have been a sunny day but a bit on the cold side. It was that time when people still wore overcoats rather than the padded outfits which would not be out of place on the ski slopes.

And it is the other little things which mark out the period.

There is the old fashioned machine for dispensing Polo mints which could quite easily have been for chocolate or cigarettes and a decade later might have sold cartons of milk.

Then there are the two belisha beacons at the road crossing which had been introduced in the mid 1930s but are now a rarity. Add to this the headscarf and the unfamiliar looking car and the scene is complete.

But it is the small detail that captures my eye. Just at the top of the right of the picture and partially obscured is a sign for a library. Now this was then and still is a parade of shops and the municipally owned public library is a way at the other end of Chorlton.

Privately owned lending libraries were a feature of all our towns and cities until well into the 1960s.

I well remember the one that my mother visited on New Cross Road in a bookshop which was opposite Deptford Public Library. For a small fee she could borrow a selection of books.

Some of my contemporaries have similar memories. David for instance recalled
“my parents would visit it on a Saturday afternoon. They were friendly with the couple who ran it. 

There was a counter at the back of the shop and my parents would chat with the owners - for what seemed like hours. 

My brothers and I would entertain ourselves by looking at the lurid covers of pulp science fiction titles in the room at the front of the shop” while Linda remembered “visiting the small room at the back of the newsagents, Charlesworths, in Holmfirth with my mother in the 1950s. 

 I think she paid 6 pence a week for 3 romantic novels, before the County Library opened up, and she then choose her books from there as they were free.“

And there were plenty of them. Along with the one on Barlow Moor Road, Oliver remembered Mr Cuthbert who lent out books from his newsagents at 64 Sandy Lane. Thomas Cuthbert had been in business from the late 1920s and was still there thirty years later.

It would be an interesting project to chart the rise and fall of these enterprises and look to why they eventually disappeared.

Picture, of 362 Barlow Moor Road, A H Downes, May 1958, m17608, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council,

http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass