See it while you can ……. the sudden appearance of Hough End Hall

Now for half a century or so Hough End Hall that Elizabethan family home has been hidden.

2015

But not for long, because as I write one of those huge slabs of a building is being demolished and for a while at least there will be views from Mauldeth Road West across to Nicholas Mosley’s grand old house.

At which point the more sniffy will sneer “but not for long because soon there will be a supermarket on the spot” following up with arguments against the siting of a Lidell on the site.

And that is true, there will be a supermarket where once a monument to 20th century office development once stood.

2023

To which I have to say, so what?  The estate opposite it has not been best served for shops for years.  There is the Co-op which I have always championed and some smaller retail outlets, but otherwise if you live off Mauldeth Road West it is a journey into Chorlton to Morrisons or further afield to Hulme or Didsbury.

Added to which there is plenty of false thinking about Hough End Hall, not least about what is left.

The interior was gutted, false ceilings added, and the upper floor was closed off, meaning that very little of the original features are there.

2023

And the restoration work undertaken to the exterior in the 1960s was according to the secretary of the Ancient Monuments Society “botched and included reconstituted stone for the mullions, sills and heads”. *

That is not to diminish a building which has been at the centre of Chorlton’s story since 1596, was the hub a of 250 acre farm for 250 years and more latterly was a restaurant and venue which is fondly remembered by lots of people. 

It was even in the 1950s and 60s the place where heaps of children gravitated to looking for sinister goings on amongst the decaying building.

2023

And I have to say it is a building I have a lot of time for and for which I wrote the book of its story with Peter Topping.**

Leaving me just to thank Andy Robertson who over the last few days was down there among the digger trucks, and piles of rubble recording the demolition.

ll of that said I am just a tad economical with the truth, because had you looked across along the processional way from what is now the park,at the edge on the right of the pictures would have been part of a long barn which extended up to Mauldeth Road West and along what was that demolished office block.

So not quite the view Sir Nicholas would have encountered. 

Location; Mauldeth Road West, Chorlton

Pictures; that office block in 2015 and now, from the collection of Andy Robertson 

*Bulmer-Thomas, Ivor, letter to the Manchester Evening News, January 1969

**Simpson, Andrew, & Toping, Peter, Hough End Hall the Story, 2015