After the children have gone ….. Gable Nook … some doctors ..... and a story

Gable Nook is that slightly sad looking house on the corner of Wilbraham and Corkland Road, and it is clearly waiting for something to happen.

Gable Nook ... waiting for something to happen, 2024

Once on any weekday it would be full of nursery children doing what nursery children do.

But now the playground is covered in moss, the happy busy kid’s posters in the windows are fading and in one upstairs room hangs a flag making a statement on a war.

It’s last Ofsted report in 2018 judged it “Good” and had plenty of positive things to say.*

But sometime after that it closed, and it is beginning to look a bit ghostly.

Overgrown, 2024

All of which is a shame for a building which dates from 1890, had eleven rooms and commanded fine views of the new railway station.

It’s first occupant was an Alfred Alexander Mumford who was a surgeon and continued to live and practice there until around 1909.

In happier times, 2013

Thereafter it came the surgery of Helm and Steele-Smith and was still doing the business in 1939.

I last wrote about it in 2013 when it was still looking after children. **

After that at present I have yet to find out what happened to the building, but I know that the Gable Nook Nursery opened in 1992, which offers up just a short window of 53 years to research, but then someone might know.

We shall see.

And within a day I have been told that it was a nursery going back through the 1980s back into the 70s and onto the 1960s.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; Gable Nook, 2013 and 2024, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Gable Nook Day Nursery, Ofsted, https://reports.ofsted.gov.uk/provider/16/500085  

**Old houses and forgotten stories, four houses on Wilbraham Road in 1911, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2013/07/old-houses-and-forgotten-stories-four.html