A bridge, a missing street……. and Mr. Samuel Moore ....... baker in residence for over half a century

Now it began with a request for information about a plaque on the wall of the Boardman Street Bridge, and quickly became something else.

The plaque commemorates the building of the bridge over the River Medlock in that area between London Road and Fairfield Street, and is a reminder that once the river marked the boundary between Manchester and Chorlton Upon Medlock.

That in itself is  a fascinating story and drew me into research on Boardman Street, which today is pretty much an uninspiring bit of road which runs from Fairfield Street twisting  and turning on itself till it joins London Road.

Some time in the past it exchanged its historic name of Boardman Street and became Baring Street and gained a bridge.

The bridge and the original plaque were built after 1851 and before that the road stopped at the river where it joined Buxton Street.

I have yet to find out when the bridge was built but it was there by 1894, while the original line of Boardman Street was by the 1840s a mix of back to back properties some larger houses, a pub and a sprinkling of industrial units.

And so far it has yet to yield anything more.  It doesn’t appear in the early street directories, which in turn means I can’t find any names of lived there and that in turn hampers a search for the census returns for the street.

So as you do I turned to Buxton Street, which is in the Directory for 1851 and offered up a series of names for residents along its stretch from London Road past Boardman Street.

But none of those names can be found in the census records for that year, and after a long trawl of the existing enumerator districts, I could only turn up half of Buxton Street for 1861.

They will be there, it will just take more time to find them, and in particular to locate a Mr. Samuel Moore who was photographed outside his baker’s shop in 1895.  

He looks to be quite elderly, and so he should given that he first appears in the Rate Books in 1847 on Buxton Street renting a house and shop from a J. Campton.

And there he still is fifty-three years later.

So, I will continue to go looking for him in the census records, and when I do , I will be able to discover more about his life, that of his neighbours and the photographs of the houses from 1895.

But in the way these things work, someone will come up with the details, and that is the fun of it.

Location; Manchester

Pictures;  Mr. Samuel Moore, 6, Buxton Street, 1895, m00653, 3, 5 Buxton Street, 1895, H. Entwhistle, Plaque, Boardman Street, 1971, Ann Jackson, m11046, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass, Buxton Street in 1851, from Adshead map of Manchester 1851, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Buxton Street was in the London Road Registration District, but the rest of it may be in Aedwick, we shall see