Forgotten gardens of Manchester …….. no 1.... in a car park

Now, I say forgotten but it may just be that the little garden at the bottom of Hilton Street is just resting, and its gardeners will return.

We first came across it back in 2012, and have watched with interest over the next seven years as the plants matured and lost that new look.

But last Saturday it was a tad overgrown and unkempt and I wondered if those people who had lavished so much care on it would be coming back.

In its way the plot is in a perfect spot at that point where Hilton Street becomes a dead end, beyond which there is the car park which occupies what was once the canal basin.

This stretch of road has been finished off with stone setts, and my friend Lawrence who worked in Langley Buildings which stretches back from Hilton Street to Dale Street, tells me that the setts have “been used in making TV programs”.

And just maybe the garden featured in a programme, although I guess it is more likely that they are part of a regeneration scheme, which brightened up the car park.

All of which led me to explore the plot through time, as you do.

In the late 18th century this area was still fields, which was quickly developed with the coming of the Rochdale Canal.

By the 1840s the garden site comprised a timber yard and a number of domestic properties running back to Brewer Street, three of which were back to backs, most of which had gone by the early 1930s, and remaining buildings by 1951.

I suspect there will be someone who can tell me whether the spot remained undeveloped during the next half century, and I hope there will be someone who can tell me more about the gardens.

We shall see.

Location; Manchester

Picture; the Hilton Street garden, 2021, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and the spot in 1851  from Adshead’s map of Manchester, 1851, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/