A blue plaque for Mary Clarke ……….. resident of 8 Alpha Place

Now, I don’t think I will ever find Mary Clarke.

Alpha Street, 2003

In 1853 she was living in the cellar of number 8 Alpha Place, which with Omega Place and Fogg’s Place formed a complex of back to back housing consisting of 32 cottages and fifteen cellars inhabited by 208 people.*

The three streets were bounded by Commercial street to the south and Jordan Street to the east and are just off Deansgate in Knott Mill.

I am not even sure how long she was there. Two years earlier she doesn’t feature on the census return and in 1854 she has gone.

And so far, while there are plenty of Mary Clarke’s living across the city in the 1850s, it is unclear which might be her.

Alpha Street, 1849

Nor am I surprised, because Alpha Place was another of those small streets where “poverty busied itself”.*

In 1853 it attracted the attention of the Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association which drew attention to the poor housing and lack of sanitation.**

I can’t be sure when they were built, but the first entry in the Rate Books for Commercial Street is 1836 and for Jordan Street the following year. 

All 32 properties were back to back and consisted of two rooms with the addition of a cellar.

Mary Clarke paid just 1/6d for her cellar room while the going rate for the houses ranged from 2/5d to 2/8d, which was a substantial chunk of a weekly wage.

For as along as I can remember the area has been a car park and back in the 1980s it was still possible the exposed lines of the brick walls.  On my last visit the car park had been given a make over and the evidence for those walls had vanished under tarmac.***

Alpha Street, 2022

Which is pretty much how I left it.

By the start of the new century the area had been fenced off, gained an odd-looking single-story hut in 2008, which subsequently vanished behind another fence, and since then the fences have slowly deteriorated.

Andy Robertson was down there a few days ago and pondered as he took pictures, that there was “Plenty of room for at least two 95 storey tower blocks”.

But a search of the planning portal has revealed no development plans.

So, for now the site which was home to Mary Clarke, John Fletcher, Ellen Hoole, James Brooks and another 204 people remains and empty space.

Alpha Street, 2022

Of course, I know that there will never be a blue plaque to remember Mary Clarke, but perhaps there should be, if only as a reminder of the thousands of unknown residents across the city, who lived, and worked in the menial jobs, and many of whom lived on the margins of poverty.

They are less the people who history has forgotten and more those who were never even recognized.

Location; Manchester

Pictures; Commercial Street, Omega Street, 2003 from the collection of Andrew Simpson and area in 1849 from the OS for Manchester & Salford, 1842-49, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and in 2022, from the collection of Andy Robertson

*Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum, Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century, 1971, Pelican edition 1973

** Report of the Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association 1853

***Commercial Street, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search?q=commercial+street