Whose Chorlton is it? …………….

Now that old debate about Chorlton-cum-Hardy, it’s bars, it’s history and who qualifies to claim residency is back again.

This time it is again those who think that anyone who is concerned about the  number of bars, takeaways and restaurants in Chorlton, and particularly on Beech Road,  is unreasonable and should never have bought into the area.

This walks alongside those who decry the presence of newcomers, framing their comments with reference to “newbys” who delight in buying expensive and frivolous things and are somehow unChorlton.

Neither observation really fits with the history of the township and if you take the long view both have been played out before.

But before exploring that history there is the very simple observation that if you have lived on Beech Road for nearly half a century then you moved in before the bar revolution.

And raises the question,  should we move out because the revolution arrived a full 30 years after we made Beech Road our home? 

The arrival of the bars filled the vacuum left when the traditional shops moved on. 

I welcomed them when they arrived judging them better than empty shops, and have argued that they bring jobs and visitors to Beech Road  who in turn will visit the other business along the strip and make for a cosmopolitan feel to the road.

Never forget how dreary Beech Road began to appear in the 1980s with traditional shops closing and little prospect of what would replace them.

Nor I suspect will that old model of grocery shops, hardware stores, fish and greengrocer’s outlets return to Beech Road.

Once there were three butcher’s, at least two bakeries, a fish shop, greengrocers and an umpteen grocery stores from Barlow Moor Road, down Beech Road and round on to the green.

But the rise of the supermarket and different patterns of shopping have closed that retail model down.

And when Barry opened up a modest fruit and veg place in the early 2000s, it didn’t attract the trade.

So, setting aside Covid, lock downs and Tiers two and three, I think the bars are here to stay, but I think it is worth reiterating that it is simplistic nonsense to assume that those of us who were here before even Chorlton Green Cafe opened do not have the right to have a say in how Beech Road is today.

Which leads into that other simplistic observation about “newbys”.  

Historically Chorlton-cum-Hardy has always attracted new people.  Back in the middle decades of the 19th century when were still a small rural community, a high proportion of the domestic servants who worked and lived here were drawn from all over the country.*

And within two decades the housing boom which started in the 1880s brought in a new wave of “newcomers”.  So much so that people talked of “New Chorlton” or the “New Village” which was around the junctions of Barlow Moor and Wilbraham Road to distinguish it from “Old Chorlton” which was the settlement around the green and up Beech Road.

That distinction was still in use as late as the 1970s, and my dear friend Marjorie Holmes who had spent her whole life in Old Chorlton could be very dismissive of them in that other place, suggesting on more than one occasion that “they were all fancy cakes and silk knickers”, and when she wanted to be even more provocative substituting “no knickers”.

These new comers were indeed from all over Greater Manchester and beyond.  

Leaving me just to cite the history of our own brass band which dated back to the 1820s, when it was made up of agricultural labouers who by and large were from historic Chorlton families.  

Move forward to 1893, and all but a handful of the band had been born here, and only one could claim a link with farming and he was our local blacksmith, whose father had moved here in 1860.

I will close with an unhistorical  speculation on the reaction of those old residents to the new hairdresser’s shops and milliner’s shops which were springing up in New Chorlton in the 1900s and wonder if they muttered …."as if you had to go to a place to have your hair cut".

Or the reaction by the customers of our beer shops to the opening of a grand new pub in 1868, which we now know as the Lloyds  built to cater for the comfortably offer residents of the new houses being built along Edge Lane and the equally recently constructed Wilbraham Road.

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy

Pictures; Chorlton-cum-Hardy, 1978-2008, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*The Story of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Andrew Simpson, 2012, page 12