Challenging Chorlton myths …..

I fully expect to upset a few people, but sometimes it is worth exploring those cherished assumptions about our past.

Busy Beech Road, 1979

They regularly crop up on social media and nostalgically offer up a picture of Chorlton in which at best is a rosy glow memory and at worse just wrong.

The most popular observations range from the lack of cars in the olden days, to the amount of litter that swirls across the roads and takes in the loss of traditional shops.

And each in their way reminds me of my own cherished memories of summer holidays in the 1950s when the sun always shone, Wagon wheels were gigantic and jubbly’s retained their flavour until the last bit of frozen orange juice was eaten.

Litter and vacant shops, Barlow Moor Road, 1982

It is true that if you go far enough back into time, there were fewer cars parked up and a range of traditional shops selling fresh food, and groceries.

To these can be added shops selling paraffin, an odd number of nails, milliners, photographers and places that repaired everything from televisions, shoes and picture frames.

So, I do remember a Beech Road where there were all of the above, but there are enough pictures which show that our roads were congested with stationary cars, litter was a problem, and the rise of charity shops and empty premises were already on the march at the start of the 1980s.

A chance photograph of Beech Road in 1979 offers a busy scene of cars while another of Barlow Moor Road three years later shows both heaps of litter, to let signs and the temporary use of a butcher’s shop for a political party.

Litter on the Rec, 1910

Go back to the beginning of the last century and our litter louts had been busy in the Rec and on the long roads off Oswald Road.

I grant that each might have been an exception to the rule or in the case of the piles of discarded newspaper and other stuff were about to cleared away, but I doubt it.

Leaving me just to muse on that other more unpleasant criticism that somehow Chorlton is now home to lots of strangers who weren’t born here and are only passing through.

History however reveals a different picture.  The 1851 census lists people who have settled here from all over the country, which meant that a walk along some of our more popular roads and lanes could have been interrupted by accents from the Home Counties, as well as from the far north and also Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

And again the housing boom of the 1880s onwards saw new residents from across Manchester and further a field making this place theirs.  

All of which is evidenced by our own brass band, which dates back to the 1820s.  Back then it was made up of local farmers, and agricultural labourers, but by 1893 the majority were drawn from bandsmen who were first generation Chorlton or had been born elsewhere.

Leaving me just reflect that if I am honest my summer holidays in the 1950s and 60s could be gloomy affairs when the rain came down like stair rods and Sammy sunshine hid behind the clouds.

Tasteful and subtle, chicken soup advert, Beech Road, 1980s

And while we are on punctuating myths, I have to say this 1980s advert for chicken soup which graced a hoarding on Beech Road was hardly the pinnacle of taste.

Location; Chorlton before now

Pictures; Chorlton in the 1970s and 1980s from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and the Rec in 1910 from the Lloyd Collection