All Saints on a sunny April Saturday ….. with a heap of history

Now All Saints on Oxford Road has been one of my haunts for over half a century and it is somewhere I still regularly return to.

Grosvenor Building, 2022 formerly Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall 

The park which is the centre piece of the place is bounded on three sides by Manchester Metropolitan University, which when I first attended as a student was the newly formed Manchester Polytechnic.

Back then the Poly consisted of the Manchester School of Art, John Dalton College of Technology and the College of Commerce and was later joined by College of Education in Didsbury, and along the way it has picked up other educational establishments.

When I first wandered the area, I had no idea of its history or that there had been a church and burial ground on the site of the present park. Its main attraction was that here was the student’s union houses in the old Righton Building which we knew as Till Kennedy, after a later occupant.

Manchester School of Art, 2022

Subsequently I learned that here was the Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall and Dispensary which I remember as a soot blackened building whose interior looked to be in need of much tender care and attention.  

Grosvenor Square, formerly All Saints Burial Ground, 2022

It was built during 1830-31 and is best remembered as the venue in 1945 for the Fifth Pan African Congress which was It was attended by 90 delegates, 26 from Africa.*

They included many scholars, intellectuals and political activists who would later go on to become influential leaders in various African independence movements and the American civil rights movement, including the Kenyan independence leader Jomo Kenyatta, American activist and academic W. E. B. Du Bois, Malawi's Hastings Banda, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, prominent Jamaican barrister Dudley Thompson and Obafemi Awolowo and Jaja Wachuku from Nigeria. 

It also led partially to the creation of the Pan-African Federation, founded in 1946 by Nkrumah and Kenyatta.

Beside the former Town Hall is the Art School, and the Righton Building, while close by is the Ormond Building which was the offices of the Chorlton Union which administered the Poor Law from the late 1830s through till the mid-20th century.  

Bellhouse Building, 2022

The building dates from 1881 became the offices the Manchester Poly in 1970 and was briefly occupied by us students sometime in the following year during a protest over library cutbacks.  

I still reflect that a few years earlier students across the West had taken over university buildings as a stand against the Vietnam War, the perceived “class based” nature of education and the “elitist control of universities”, while we spent three nights sleeping on the floor of the Poly’s offices because of a few less books.

That said the loss of a few less books was an important issue to make a stand on, even if it also allowed my girlfriend and I an opportunity to be together.

Beyond the Ormond Building, is the delightful looking Bellhouse Building which was once the town house of the Bellhouse family which my Pevsner, tells me was built in 1831 for the Bellhouse’s who “were the most successful building contractors in Manchester of the day.  Only the façade is original.  …. It was converted around 1910 for the Manchester Eye Hospital but became offices in 1987".**

All Saints, 1950, OS map of Manchester & Salford, 1950

Leaving me just to add that there is a wonderful short historical description of the area by Steve Marland.***

Location; All Saints

Pictures; walking around All Saints, 2022, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

* All Saints in the snow, 1958, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2019/12/all-saints-in-snow-1958.html

**Manchester, Clare Hartwell, 2222, Pevsner Architectural Guides, pp 130-33

***All Saints – Grosvenor Square Manchester, MODERN MOOCH,December 5, 2018, https://modernmooch.com/2018/12/05/all-saints-grosvenor-square-manchester/