Something is stirring on Beech Road …….. and revealing a heap of history

Ludo’s is undergoing a makeover.

Ludo's 2023

And that got me thinking of the shop that has sold beer, wine and spirits for a century and more.

The chain of Mason and Burrows opened a branch of their empire on Beech Road in 1892, and were still there trading in 1959, although by then they had morphed into C.P. Burrows.

A decade on and  they are still listed on Beech Road but sometime in the 1970s or possibly the 1980s they closed.  Just when I have yet to find out, but I remember the shop trading as Victoria Wines and later Thresher.

Now as it turns out there is plenty of information on Mason and Burrows some of which appeared on the blog yesterday, including the lost Mason and Burrows’s beer bottle from Wilton Road, their offices in the now vanished twisty Dickenson Sun Entry, and the search that took me back to 1886.*

Mason & Burrows, circa 1900

I had thought that their presence on Beech Road dated back to the early 1900s but I now know that they opened their shop in the summer of 1892, having bought the building from a Mr. James Todd Kelsey, and replacing the previous tenant who was Thomas Hancock who described himself as a “beer dealer, tobacco and confectionary”.

C.P. Burrows, 1959

All of which offers up a neat piece of historical continuity and places nu 46 Beech Road as a purveyor of wines, beer and much else from the mid-1880s, and leaving me just to push back into the previous decade using the rate books. 

That might confirm the claim that the site is indeed the oldest commercial property still doing what it started out doing.

I am intrigued by the change from Mason Burrows to C.P. Burrows but that is for another time.

Any memories of when it closed are most welcome.

Victoria Wines, circa 1980s

So that is about it really.

Location; Beech Road

Pictures, Ludo’s on Beech Road, 2023, Mason & Burrows, circa 1900, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, C.P. Burrows R.E.Stanley, 1959, m17670, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass ,Victoria Wines, Tony Walker, circa 1980s and the lost Mason & Burrows beer bottle, 2023, courtesy of Declan Maguire

*A lost Chorlton bottle ….. the Beech Road offi ……… and a trip back to a Dickensian Manchester, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2023/08/a-lost-chorlton-bottle-beech-road-offi.html