A broken Chorlton bottle ..... the stoneware from Canada .... and a trip back to the tiny twisty Manchester streets

It started with the find of a broken bottle in a garden in Chorlton which carried the name of Mason and Burrows.

Then by degree crossed the city to that warren of tiny twisty alleys behind Market Street and ended up a story on the blog.

And yesterday the story prompted this message “I am from Canada - thinking a piece in my collection of antique liquor stoneware may have a connection to your article. If you would like a picture email me”.

Which I did, and back came two photographs of that “antique liquor stoneware” which made me reprise that original piece of research.

In 1895 Mason and Burrows had shops on Moss Lane, Great Western Street and Moss Lane East, and by 1911 had expanded further south to Stockport Road, 23 Wilbraham Road and 46 Beech Road.

And as you do, I went looking for them.  

So far, I have tracked them back to 1886 to Sun Entry, which was a small street off Cock Pit Hill and Bull’s Head Yard which was part of a warren of narrow streets and closed courts bounded by Corporation Street, Market Place and Market Street.

 Sun Entry, from Cock Pit Hill, City Engineers, 1902

They had a Dickensian feel, and non-more so that Sun Entry which snaked down from Cock Pitt Hill towards Market Street becoming progressively narrower till it ended as an enclosed passageway.

The area was already in existence by 1793 and elements show up on Tinker’s map a full 21 years earlier.

There will be a few people who remember the area before its demolition in the late 1960s which was replaced by that modernistic complex which included the Marks and Spencer store with its wavey canopy.

I wish I had known that older Manchester and walked the alleys’ and entrances.

In the 1880s Mason and Burrows occupied a large premises which fronted both Bulls’s Head Yard and Sun Entry and may have shared the “arched beer cellars” which extended down to the small and equally narrow Hopewood Avenue.

Sun Entry, 1886

All of which just leaves the question of how the stoneware of Mason and Burrows made it across the Atlantic to Canada

Sun Entry, 1944

Location; Sun Entry and Bulls Head Yard, and Canada

Pictures; Sun Entry, 1886, from Goad’s Fire Insurance Maps, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/ and Sun Entry, from Cock Pit Hill, City Engineers, 1902, and in 1944, City Planners 05914, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

* Mason and Burrows, Slater’s Manchester & Salford Directory, 1895