Who stole Chorlton's Street?

Now for all those who never tire of telling the assembled crowd that Chorlton has no streets but only roads, it might be a revelation that this was not always so.

Cross Road, 2018

Acres Road was once Acres Street, while the small stretch of road from the Chorlton Green past the Beech Inn to where there is a twist in the direction of the road was Lloyd Street.

Added to this the Rate Books  show that Cross Road underwent a number of name changes, beginning with Cross Lane, then Cross Street and finally Cross Road.

And nor has Beech Road always been a road, in fact it only became a road in the mid 1870s.

Before that, stretching back the centuries it was Chorlton Row.

Just why we came to prefer road to street is unclear, but it wasn’t always so.

One explanation might be the the swift urbanization of Chorlton from the 1880s onwards, which within two generations transformed the area from a small rural community to a suburb of Manchester.

The coming of mains water, a gas supply and later a railway station made Chorlton ripe for development.

And many of those who came were the "middling sort" who worked in the city and wanted a sort of rural place to come home to

Lloyd Street running north from the Green, 1854

Many of them of them were professionals, or managers, with a strong representation from clerical occupations, and perhaps the draw for them was a "road" not a "street".

It was as the Manchester Evening News commented in the September of 1901 so swift a development that “the green fields of one summer are the roads and avenues of the next.”*

And something of just how quickly the roads and avenues appeared can be got from the street directories for the early 20th century.  These were not unlike our telephone directories in that they listed the householder in each road, street and avenue, with the added bonus that they often give the occupation.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; Cross Road, 2018, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and Lloyd Street, 1854, from the OS map of Lancashire, 1854, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, https://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Manchester Evening News September, 1901

More stories

Looking out from Cross Lane ....... across the fields of Chorlton-cum-Hardy with Mr Samuel Walton, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2020/06/looking-out-from-cross-lane-across.html

Looking for Lloyd Street ........... the lost roads of Chorlton part 2, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2019/08/looking-for-lloyd-street-lost-roads-of.html