Of clay pits ...... meandering streams …….. and plenty of ponds …… walking west of Martledge in 1854

That stretch of Chorlton beyond the library heading west towards Longford Park will always be the “long roads” to me.

Looking west across the Isles to the Longford Estate, 1882

It consists of Nicolas, Newport, Longford and Oswald Road, and the name made perfect sense for one of the areas carved out for leafleting and canvasing.

The area was developed in the early 20th century as Chorlton was transformed from small rural community to a suburb of Manchester.

As late as 1894, the area of the “long roads” was still open land with only a small stretch of Oswald Road which terminated just past Vincent Avenue.

But piece by piece the urban crawl from the 1900s made a steady advance towards what is now Longford Park, and with the houses came a brick works, which was meant to have a short life but one which drifted into the middle of the last century.

Newport Road, date unknown

That brick works created clay pits, two of which were located north of Longford Road, roughly parallel to Copley Road, and I suspect these were responsible for a series of drownings reported by the press in the 1920s.

It looks to have been a dismal spot, and there are plenty of anecdotes from people I interviewed who remember playing in the disused brickworks and by those clay pits as kids in the 1960s. 

David O’Reilly remembered  “the Clay Pits” which were “situated to the immediate east of Longford Park, just the other side of the interrupted Rye Bank Road - it was a series of mounds and gulleys, the left over from previous workings of the old brick works factory with its tall chimney.  

It was a forbidden play place and it was guarded by an almost mythical man named 'Duffy'! 

With another 9 year old boy, I recall daring ourselves to go into this derelict building one day and even crawling under the tunnel - through rubble to a place where I could look up inside the chimney and see the small hole of daylight at the top". 

Although the scene might just have been lifted a wee bit by the set of allotments behind Sark Road, which are now under the Peveril Close estate.

That said the area had always had a in industrial feel, as for generations people had been digging down to extract marl and clay for farming and building.

In the 17th century there is even a recoded dispute about who had the rights to the extraction of materials from the ground.*

Looking out across the Isle towards Longford Estate,

And by the 1850s the area was full of small pits and little meandering water course which gave the area the name of the Isles.

That said the land either side of Longford Road was a mix of meadow, pasture and arable, with intriguing names like Spear Pit Field, The Reap Acre Fields, Long Raids Bung, Great Raids Bung and Little Raids Bung.

They were owned by the Egerton and Lloyd Estates, which had bought up most of the township of Chorlton in the 18th century.

And in 1854 this stretch was farmed by William Knight who farmed 72 acres and Mary White 77 acres.

Leaving me just to conclude that the romantic in me would have liked to walk the fields in the 1850s, from Red Gate Farm west to the Longford estate, when Martledge was still one of the three hamlets of Chorlton-cum-Hardy.**

Pictures;  looking out across the Isle towards Longford Park,  1882 courtesy of Miss Booth, and Newport Road, date unknown, from the Lloyd Collection, and The Isle west to Longford Estate,1854 from the 1854 OS map of Lancashire showing a section of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ 

*Booker John, A History of the Chapels of Didsbury & Chorlton, 1857, Chetham Society Manchester

** Martledge was the area around what is now the Library and disappeared in the great housing boom which started in the 1880s.