Something is stirring at what was Elk, and before that a succession of restaurants back to Primavera and before that a grocery shop to its beginnings as a “slaughterhouse” in the 1870s.
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| Beech Road, 2021 |
I have written about Mrs. Thorpe who took over the newly bought shop in 1879 and set up a new business.*
The very first tenant was a Mary Jane Kershaw and it is not clear what she sold in the shop but by the following year when Mrs Thorpe took over the tenancy it is listed as a “slaughter house” and she continued to do the business of selling meat from the property till the beginning of the 20th century.
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| Beech Road, 2020 |
For a while after that it was confectioner’s and then a bakery and later a grocer’s shop run by the Lambert family.
I remember it as such and its conversion into a card and gift shop before it returned to its old connection with food. For this was Primavera opened by Patrick Hannity in the early 1990s and then by degree becoming Beggars Bush and Mink before re opening as Elk.
Primavera was a very different restaurant to what had gone before in Chorlton and quite rightly drew customers from other parts of the city and out into Cheshire.
Its mix of imaginative dishes heavily influenced by the cuisine of the Mediterranean has been widely copied across Chorlton but seldom bettered.
And so the cycle begins again.
Location; Beech Road
Pictures, Beech Road, 2021, 2021, from the collection of Andrew Simpson
*Mrs. Thorpe, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search?q=Mrs+Martha+Thorpe
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