That temperance hall ……… memories of the 1970s ..... and a lost landscape

 This is Charles Street, or to be more precise, that bit of Charles Street that runs the short distance to Princess Street.

Looking down Charles Street, 2023

I vaguely remember it back in the 1970s as one of those areas waiting for something to happen.

Just behind is Sackville Street and the former buildings of UMIST, while to my right hidden by the multi storey car park is the railway viaduct.

Someone will correct me but apart from the Swinging Sporran that Scottish theme pub on the corner of Sackville Street all I would have seen ahead on either side of me on a day in 1971 would have been open land.  

And in the distance  there would have been some low-rise brick buildings which had seen better days, with the Refuge building away off to my right.

The corner of Charles Street and Princess Street, 1957

Photographs from the city’s digital image archive show a collection of tired looking shops, warehouses, and workshops along this bit of Charles Street.  

The pictures date from the 1950s into the 60s and they show buildings which l guess were on the desk for clearance long before I washed up in Manchester in 1969.

Perhaps there will be people who can share their photographs of the area just and during that redevelopment, which would plug the gap in my memory.

And undeterred by that failure to remember, I went looking for answers. 

The OS map for 1950 confirms that mix of tired looking shops, warehouses, and workshops most of which appear to be there sixty years earlier.

They would have been home to a mix of small-time businesses, which in 1911 included a firm of mattress makers, some shirt manufacturers along with two printers, a basket maker, herbalist, tea agent and bookbinder.

Earlier there had also been a sawmill, a rope walks and beyond the bend in the river Medlock a heap of textile mills, timber yards and a printer works.

But our bit of Charles Street was not really developed until after the 1850s.

There will be stories but for now the one that intrigues me is that of the Brighton Temperance Assembly Hall which stood on the corner underneath the Ibis Hotel.

Trees on the corner of Charles Street and Princess Street, 2023

The building was already there by 1849 when it went under the name of the Carpenter’s Hall and was large enough to contain an ante room as well as the main hall.

It had a short life and was gone by 1893, but despite attempts to discover the history of either hall, both have yet to come out of the shadows.

The Manchester Guardian didn’t see fit to record the doings of either place, and as yet no pictures have turned up, leaving me to go looking in the rate books and trawling the street directories.

Such is the life of a retired jobbing writer with aspirations to be a historian.

Location; Charles Street

Pictures; Looking down Charles Street, and the corner of Charles Street and Princess Street, 20023, from the collection of Andrew Simpson and the same corner in 1957, Charles Street from corner of Princess Street, 1957, H. W. Beaumont, m00882, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass