So where was Tudor Street?

 Now, the request was a simple one ……. “did I have any maps showing Tudor Street in Angel Meadow around 1880?”

Tudor Street, 1895

It was as, ever the sort of challenge I enjoy.

But I began the wrong way, for having got the destination of Angel Meadow I went looking at the 1849 OS map of the city, reasoning that much of Angel Meadow had already been developed by the beginning of the 19th century and some pockets were even older.

And I drew a blank.  So, this is the DIY guide to finding a street with little more than a name.

The first step was the directories which list the streets in Manchester and Salford, from the late 1790s, along with an alphabetical list of residents and trades.

They were published each year, which makes them very useful for tracking individuals, but do not always include every street or court or square.  

Yet again poverty which has wiped out so many people from the historical records did the same for many small streets, which were not included either because they were not deemed important enough or the residents didn’t co-operate with the survey.

Tudor Street, 1895

And Tudor Street just wasn’t there, which led to step two, which was an online search of the Rate Books, which include properties across Manchester listed by streets.  These were also published every year, and contain the name of the owner, the tenant, the estimated rent, and rateable value, and often also include a description of the property.

This led to the breakthrough because at no. 4 Tudor Street was a Thomas Barber.  He paid 4.9d a week in rent which was pretty typical of what other tenants wee paying.  I can track him back to 1871 and forward 1894, which offered up the chance of finding him on 3 different census returns.

And that is where I found him for 1881.  Later I will return and trawl all three census records to see what I can find about Mr. Barber, but for now I content to use the census to locate the street, which is easy enough given that at the front each has a description of the location of the street.

The rest was just a matter of a few minutes search because Tudor Street was off Samuel Street, which was off Suddel Street which in turn was off Livesey Street which ran from Rochdale Road down to Oldham Road.

Sadly, it no longer exists, .  It was still thre in 1951 as were all its 29 houses.  Today only Livesey Street has survived but I made a good stab of locating it at the Rochdale Road end.  I didn’t expect to find any photographs of the street in the city’s digital archive, and I didn’t, nor of Samuel, or Suddel Streets, leaving just one of Livesey Street.

Not perhaps the stuff of a Sherlock Holmes story but it pleased me.

Location; Manchester

Picture; Tudor Street in  1895 from the OS map of South Lancashire, 1888-95, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/