97 Beech Road …… the shop that did the lot

Now I must confess that over the years I have neglected no. 97 Beech Road.

In 2020

Looking back to the collection of photographs stretching back a heap of decades it rarely features and that is a shameful oversight.

I think I have just half a dozen from the early 1980s till today. By comparison pretty much all the other shops, bars, and pubs have been snapped multiple times.

And yet it deserves more.

I can track it back to 1886 when it appears for the first time, and in that long retail history it has been a butcher’s, a grocer, and more recently a fabric shop as well as a furniture dealer before beginning it’s erratic association with bars cafes and restaurants.

2022

I say erratic because in the space of the time since it embraced the café society it has been run by various people and traded under different names.

But it’s earlier history is intriguing, because in 1921 it was run by Miss Elizabeth Howard and was a “Millinery shop” to which it became again in the 1960s when it was Marcell Materials, and as a fabric shop it stayed into the turn of this century.

There are a few gaps to fill in in its nearly 140 years of trading.  I know that in 1939 it had reverted to a grocer’s, leaving just the 1950s to explore.

When it was brand new it was part of that commercial revolution which offered up all sorts of things you could buy along Beech Road, which 30 odd years before would not have been possible.

1980s

Back in the 1850s there were few shops trading in Chorlton-cum-Hardy and if you wanted a set of needles, or the latest Charles Dicken’s episode, you had to buy it in Manchester or order it up from one of iterant traders who would collect it and deliver it. 

So the construction of the shops either side of the Police Station mirrored by the other development opposite must have marked a consumer revolution, perhaps more significant for local residents than the present plethora of bars cafes and restaurants which have sprung since the mid 1990s.

And for those interested in Mr. Acton he appears in the Carlton House story, where he lived with his daughter and parents in law for thirty years.*

Location; Beech Road

Circa 1911

Pictures; no.97, 2020 and 2022, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and circa 1980s from the collection of Tony Walker

*Carlton House …… the convent on High Lane and …….. the trail that led back to a Beech Road bar, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2022/10/carlton-house-convent-on-high-lane-and.html