One hundred years of one house in Chorlton ... part 129 ….. every house should have a Range

The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since.*

The Range, 2021

Now I rather think my generation maybe the last to remember the working cooking range in all its glory.  

There are modern equivalents and there are plenty in museums and stately homes which have been given over to the heritage industry.

But I doubt there are so many still in use, in the homes of “ordinary people”, and I guess part of the reason is the sheer effort to keep them going and keep them clean.

My grandparents had one in each of the homes they lived in and some were grander than other’s.  The last one I remember was in a large semidetached property which they bought in the late 1950s, and converted into bed sits.  They retained the servant’s quarters for themselves and dominating the kitchen was the range. 

Nana cooked on it, baked the bread every other day and even dried clothes beside it.

But outside museums and on the net, I had never come across pictures which were copyright free, and closely resembled Nana’s one.

That is until this week when Barbarella sent over a series of photographs of a range in a disused pub in Buxton.

Till & Whithead, 2021

The name plate records that it was made by Till & Whitehead who in 1911, were listed as “iron and steel merchants, whole sale ironmongers, at 86, 88, 92, and 94 Chester Road, , ‘Tillwhite, Manchester’; and Lorn Street Hulme**.

In the fulness of time I will going looking for the history of Till & Whitehead, but for now I am more interested in the mystery of whether one was ever installed in our house.

It is a story I have already covered, which was occasioned by work on a new kitchen, which revealed a concrete base large enough to have taken a range, plus a large open void which has its own flue and chimney pot. 

But if Joe Scott ever did install a range, it had gone by the 1970s, and given that he had a “modern turn of mind” I doubt he did, instead moving directly to a gas cooker when the house was built in 1915..

The Range base, 2021

And this I am fairly confident, given that in the early 1920s he was already advertising full electric lighting in his houses, including the garage, and had embraced the telephone in the same decade and TV thirty years later.

So, while we are not exactly at the point when | can say our house bypassed a range, I do actually have pictures of one, and one that takes me back to my Nana’s and my childhood, which is enough.

Location; Beech Road

Picture; The Buxton cooking range, 2021, courtesy of Barbarella, Bonvento, and our kitchen, with its concrete base, 2021, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*The Story of a House, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house

**Slater’s; Manchester, Salford and Suburban Directory, 1911, page1647

***One hundred years of one house in Chorlton ... part 125 ............ a bit of house archaeology, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2021/11/one-hundred-years-of-one-house-in.html