This is Chadwick Street which is off Fairfield Street and faces out on to Piccadilly Railway Station.
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| Wyre Street, 2021 |
Despite being a popular place to park up and wait for someone arriving off a train, you won’t find it on any maps, and it ends pretty much soon after it starts.
Today it is called Wyre Street and dribbles out as a footpath before connecting with Travis Street.
To the casual visitor it has nothing much to commend itself, lacking any buildings bar a brick wall, the railway viaduct that cuts across it and heaps of grass.
Nor was it ever thought worthy of an entry into the directories, although back in 1850 the Stag and Pheasant was recorded in the trades section of Slater’s Directory. The pub served the 22 houses, and surrounding streets and some closed courts, which will have provided a lot of potential customers.
Despite there being no reference to the street in the directories, I know that some of the 22 homes were back to back properties, and Chadwick Street gave access to a number of closed courts with even more small and mean houses.
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| Chadwick Street, 1851 |
We also have the names of the residents who lived there in 1851, and equally important the occupations they were engaged in. These ranged from skilled and unskilled jobs to a clerk, the inevitable charwoman, as well as those making a living from the streets including a milk seller.
The largest group were connected to the textile trade, covering all the main areas of work and interestingly one who described himself as a handloom weaver. This was Elias Johnson from Stretford which had been a centre for handloom weaving.
But as he was 62 I suspect he was describing the occupation of his youth given that by 1851 machines had all but squeezed out most handloom weaving.
Just how many of these visited the Stag and Pheasant is lost, but its landlady a Mrs. Matilda Lovitt ran the place from at least 1848 and into the early years of the next decade. The Rate Books record it separately as a Public House and also a Beer House, with the pub rated at £40 a year and the beer house at £12.
By contrast the neighbouring houses were rated at between £12 a year down to £2 suggesting that her business was indeed profitable.
We know that she was born in 1808, married her first husband in 1829, and her second in 1856, and was widowed twice. By the age of 30 in 1841 she had three children and that two of them were still living with her at Chadwick Street in 1851.
Her second husband was also a publican who was the landlord of the Railway Inn at 221 Deansgate.
He is listed there from at least 1850 through to 1856, but by 1863 has gone. By which time the Stag and Peasant also does not appear on the records.
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| Wyre Street, 2021 |
And a full thirty years later Chadwick Street has become Worsley Street, and the Directories record only a clutch of industrial units with one beer shop, leaving yet another name change from Worsley Street to Wyre Street sometime by 1915.
I doubt we have finished with the street, and in the fullness of time it would be fun to return to track the residents in 1851, leaving me just to add that in 1881 the former Mrs. Levitt recorded as living with one of her children in Preston at the grand old age of 71.
Location; Manchester,
Pictures; Chadwick Street, 1851, from Adshead's map of Manchester, 1851, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and Chadwick Street, 2021, from the collection of Andy Robertson
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