House Yard Road ...... the one we lost

It’s the cut through from the village green down to the Bowler we all use.

House Yard Road, 2023

Or at least we use when we don’t want to walk on the gravestones in the graveyard, or fancy chancing the narrow pavement along St Clements Road.

That said its not always the most enticing cut through.  

In winter it can be wet, muddy and slippery under foot while in high summer the vegetation can be a challenge as it stretches out across the path.

For most people that is it, but for those of us a tad older, its northern end did have that telephone kiosk which once had stood on the green.

X marks House Yard Road, 1845

And like most of us I took it for granted as just an unnamed strip of land which over the years had become an unofficial path.

But not so, because it did have a name, and it did lead somewhere other than the Bowling Green Hotel.

For this was House Yard Road and it led to the farmyard and barn of William Knight, or it did in 1845.  

By the early 20th century the farm had gone but the site was home to a collection of workshops and lock up garages, until thy all vanished to make way for Finney Drive in the 1960s.

The Knight family farmed in the township from at least 1832, and farmed enough land to qualify for a vote in Parliamentary elections at a time when the entire electorate of Chorlton was just 32 men out of a total population of about 750.

In 1845 William Knight rented 72 acres land from the Lloyd estate, which marked him out as one of the more prominent farmers.  His land was a mix of arable, pasture and meadow land spread out across the township.

His son ran the Robin Hood pub in Stretford, before moving into the township to farm on the green in the 1850s after the death of his father. 

House Yard Road, circa 1910

He is also on the electoral register for 1854-55, can be found in the minutes of the Vestry or Ratepayers and was part of the inquest held at the Horse and Jockey into the murder of Francis Deakin and he was buried in the family grave in the parish church yard.

And earlier in 1824 a Thomas Knight was listed in Pigot and Dean’s Directory of Manchester & Salford as “vict Old Greyhound, (boat house) Chorlton”, and Martha Knight was listed in Baines’ Directory for 1824-5 as running the “Boat House” in Chorlton.  This later became the Old Greyhound and still the Bridge Inn and today is Jackson’s Bridge. 

All of which means that House Yard Road will have been a busy place, and walked over by the Knight family, along with their agricultural labourers and perhaps heaps of others making their way to the Bowling Green Hotel, or the pond beside the pub to do a bit of illicit fishing.

So, our little cut through has indeed some history.

Location; that cut through beside the old parish graveyard

House Yard Road, so good we included it twice 2023

Pictures; House Yard Road, 2023 from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and circa 1908 from the Lloyd Collection, and in 1845 from the map of the Tithe Schedule