Walking the Isles ........ lazy little streams running into ponds full of mystery

 Now the Isles have passed out of living memory.

They were a stretch of land running west from Manchester Road to Longford Hall, and were a mix of lazy little streams running into small ponds and were evidence of our earlier industrial revolution when residents dug out the marl to put on the land and clay to turn into bricks.

The business was well advanced by the 16th century and led to one legal dispute over who had the right to dig for “marle cloddes and turves on Chorlton More”.*

Later still of course the area became the site of the brick works, which was opened at the beginning of the last century and was supposed to have a short life but lingered on into the middle decades, before closing and eventually becoming the site for St John’s school and its playing fields.

During the interwar years, the newspapers carried stories of children drowning in the clay pits and there are still people who remember childhood adventures amongst the ruins of the old brickworks, and fearing the appearance of “Duffy” whose job was to guard the place.

All of which is an introduction to that 1881 map which has featured in the blog over the last few days.

It is very detailed and has the added advantage of being in colour making the presence of the ponds along with the Black and Longford Brooks much easier to pick out.

And not for the first time I have pondered on those open stretches of water and the potential danger they presented to young children, especially those who in the twenty-seven cottages which were located close to the edge of the Isles.

These cottages were there by 1854, and there is strong evidence from earlier maps that they date back to the beginning of the 19th century and possibly into the previous century.

They were the subject of an exchange of letters in the 1880 from residents who feared their proximately to the Black Brook put their residents in danger of infection, from what had become a polluted water course.

But the Isles, like so much of this part of Chorlton succumbed to the housing boom which began in the 1880s, and by the first decades of the last century the long roads of Oswald, Nicolas, Newport and Longford has made great inroads into what had been open land.

Added to which the very clay dug by the brickworks may have hastened the loss of the Isles, as those bricks were used in the construction of the houses which now cover the area.

Leaving me just to reprise a photograph from yesterday taken around 1882 by Mr. Aaron Booth from the back garden of his house, looking out across the Isles to Longford Hall.

And not long after the story went live John Anthony Hewitt added more to the story, 

“Please allow me a minor correction to your story, Andrew. If you are referring to the 2 rows of houses marked as Fielden Terrace, not all of those were cottages. 

The nearest row of 14 on what is now Oswald Road, were indeed cottages, as my parents, neighbours and their inhabitants called them in the 1950s. The neighbouring terrace, named "Sunnyside" on what is now Fielden Avenue, were 3-bedroom houses with cellars.

Not sure Sunnyside was old as the cottages. 

Those houses did not wear well having been demolished, 1980s I think (there had been a farewell street party), to make way for bungalows, whereas the cottages are still inhabited. 

I have attached a photo, circa 1955, of my childhood home, No. 22 (and numbers 24 & 26). The large blackened stone high up on the wall was engraved "Sunnyside." If it is any help, the landlord of No. 22 in the 1950s was a firm called S. Chesters Thompson, who were based somewhere in town - Deansgate area maybe”.

Pictures; The Isles, 1881,  from the map of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, 1881, Withington Board of Health, courtesy of Trafford Local Studies Centre Sedge Lynn and the view across the Isles towards Longford Hall  in 1882 courtesy of Miss Booth, from the Lloyd Collection, and Sunnyside, 1955 from the collection of John Anthony Hewitt

*A History of the Ancient Chapels of  Didsbury and Chorlton, The Rev, John Booker, 1857