When archaeology came to Beech Road ……

It will be a long time since anyone has seen the brickwork of the newsagents on Beech Road.

After the tiles, 2022

But this week the tiles which went on sometime in the 1980s have gone revealing more than a few clues to the history of the building.

It is rare that you get a chance to match old photographs with the stripped away cladding of decades and cross reference these with the historic records.

I know that in 1911 the original living quarters of the business could be accessed by a front door to the right of the big shop window beside which was another window.  All of which would suggest that what is now the back of the shop was the living room.  

Long before the tiles, 1911

And yesterday’s picture reveals the ghost door and window exactly where they should have been.

Now I can’t be sure when they were bricked up but I am guessing it will be before 1959, when Mr. R E Stanley photographed the shop and revealed a similar bricked up doorway on what is now the Chequers side of the shop.

A ghost door and its companion window, 2022

The rate books and census returns point to the shop having been built in the 1890s along with a property on Chequers Road which is now part of the shop.

This other building was listed as no.57 Church Road [now Chequers Road] and at one stage was occupied by a boot maker, which is confirmed by finds made in the 1990s of leather offcuts in the cellar.

Small history perhaps but fascinating none the less for what it offers up about a building which can lay claim to having always been a newsagent.

And one which in its earlier days was run by Lionel Nixon who was the grandson of the family who ran the beer shop which is now 70 Beech Road. 

They were Samuel and Sarah Ann Nixon, and they were in residence offering up beer and cheer from the 1840s, while Samuel’s father was landlord of that pub over the water once known as the Greyhound, but now Jackson’s Boat. 

The continuity of our newsagents is mirrored by no.70 Beech Road which with No.68 may be the oldest commercial buildings still doing what they had been designed to do when they first opened in the 1830s.

And the shop before the cladding, 1979

Location; Chorlton

Pictures, that newsagents, 2022 and 1979,  from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and in 1911 from a picture postcard, courtesy of Dave Bishop