Princess Road …. Chorlton-cum-Hardy …. two mysteries .. only one solved

Princess Road was off Neale Road and is now Pinewood Road.

Princess Road, 1933

I came across it while searching for something else, and it was one of those niggling little mysterious which needed solving. 

It is there on the 1901 census and  in the Rate Books for the 1870s.

So far so good, it just became a matter of tracking exactly where it was in  Chorlton-cum-Hardy.

The 1911 street directory recorded that it was off Neal Road, which was confirmed by later maps.

But what makes it a little more interesting is that its name was changed in advance of the big cull on repetitive street names across the city which saw Regent Road become Reeves, Church Road turn in to Chequers, and the demise of countless other old Chorlton road names.  

Most appear to have happened in the late 1960s or early 70s, but not so Princess Road which had bucked the trend and become Pinewood sometime between 1933 and 1956.

All I suspect a little nerdy which I fully accept, but for another mystery which is its appearance in the Rate Books for 1870s.

It appears just the five times in the Chorlton Rate Books, with just the one property which is owned by the Lloyd Estate and home to a Mr. Charles Chambers who paid an annual rent of £12.

Before 1875, Mr. Chambers was residing at Pitts Brow which was the was the slightly raised bit of land on the north side of where High Lane joins Edge Lane.

Six years later the 1881 census has him at Ash Tree Cottage which the census records as Wilbraham Road, but I think was more properly on Manchester Road, opposite the Lloyds.

Ash Tree, 1853

Maps from the 1850s show a collection of cottages at this point, which Thomas Elwood, our own historian, described in some detail.

They appear in one of his newspaper articles from 1885, in which he singled out Ash Tree Cottage which took its name from “a fine old ash tree which stood at the centre of Manchester Road, at the foot of which a man used to engage in prayer at a certain time every day”.*

But the cottage looks to have gone even before it appeared in his article, for while it is there in the April of 1881, it had gone by the time the Withington Board of Health published its map later in the year.

All a rad confusing, more so because on that map Manchester Road named as the road running up from High Lane to Wilbraham Road, which was cut in the late 1860s.

So, one Princess Road mystery solved but a second left to be explored.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; Princess Road 1933, from the OS map of Manchester and Salford, 1933-34, and Ash Tree Cottage, 1853, from the OS map of Lancashire, courtesy of Digital Archives Association,  http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Ancient Wood and Plaster Dwellings, Chapter IV, History of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, South Manchester Gazette, November 28th 1885