Your mission ........ should you accept it ........ Chorlton ghost signs in the sky

The challenge was simple enough.

Barlow Moor Road, 2023

It was accompanied by a picture of a ghost sign and the intriguing “Morning Andrew. While out walking today, doing my 10,000 steps a day for Cancer Relief, I noticed this old sign on a shop that is being refurbished. Your mission, should you accept it, is to find out who they were, what they sold and when they shut down”.

Now it is one of those seemingly bizarre things that the closer you are to the present the more difficult it is find out about the story of an individual’

Of course if they are splashed across the media for any manner of things it is easy, but for the rest of us that prohibition on identity theft and right to anonymity pretty much scuppers any chance to uncover a life.

And that is as it should be.  But it does create plenty of obstacles.  It starts with that hundred-year rule which means no census return is available after the 1921 census.  

Barlow Moor Road, 1959

Added to which the 1931 census was destroyed in the last war and because of that war, no census was taken in 1941.

Likewise certain entries for the 1939 Register taken in September of that year have been redacted all making it more difficult to follow a person.

There are telephone directories, and electoral registers but most are not yet online and the go to street and trade directories for Manchester were last published in 1969.

But I wasn’t deterred, and once I had established that Brian’s ghost sign was at 365 Barlow Moor Road a search of that last Manchester Directory revealed that W Rowlandson was a grocer.

Barlow Moor Road, 2008

And that means that knowledge of the shop will still be within living memory and I am confident someone will remember the shop and W, Rowlandson.

Well, we shall see.

And as a starter I know that in 2008 the shop was inhabited by Spot Signs Professional Sign Makers and Professionals, and by 2012 the grocery mini market of Perspolis.

Location; Barlow Moor Road

Pictures; the ghost sign, 2023, from the collection of Brian Norbury, and 365 Barlow Moor Road, , 1959, R E Stanley m17534, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and 2012, courtesy of Google Maps.