The Didsbury mystery …… and “a right pong”

Now I say mystery, but I suspect there will be an avalanche of answers to the simple question, what is it?

The mystery object, 2025

The blog regularly gets requests to search out people, places, and events, as well as being offered pictures and stories, and so I welcomed the message from Dominic Parker who wrote in “Hi Andrew, big fan of your work!  Wondered if you could enlighten as to what this is?

Craigmore Avenue and the Mersey, 2025

It’s in a garden I maintain on Craigmore Avenue West Didsbury.  My own theory is its some sort of ventilation for an old tip or something like that, it kicks off a right pong every now and then”.

Craigmore Avenue is off Princess Road close to where the Mersey does one of its loops and is sited on what was Redbank Farm.

I can’t be exactly sure when the avenue was cut but it will be sometime after 1936.  The OS map for that year shows the farm still there but the 1938-46 version records the presence of the avenue with its houses.

Looking at all the maps going back to 1818 there is no indication of a water course feeding into the Mersey at this spot.

But the City Council conducted widespread controlled tipping which at the time lauded as the new and scientific way was “'controlled tipping'.  Here the rubbish is dumped on low lying land and is spread carefully out and ‘sealed’ by covering with a thick layer of soil. 

Redbank Farm and the Mersey, 1894

Then another layer of waste is put on top, ‘sealed’ and so the land is built up into what becomes in a year or two solid land.  

Just as the clinker obtained from the incineration method is put to good use in road making, the controlled tipping method is usefully applied to filling up waste land, and as you will find on the Mersey Bank at Wythenshawe that a large area of waste land previously liable to floods has been built up by this method into high solid land, grass-grown and suitable for all sorts of purposes, such as playing fields and parks...”

Now just exactly where around Craigmore Avenue the City Council may have undertaken tipping is as yet unclear but with a bit more research and perhaps some anecdotal memories, we may be able to establish if this were so.

I don't think that the Corporation would build on tipped land, and there is no evidence on the maps from the 1930s that the area by Redbank Farm was tipped on, especially given that the farm had existed on that spot from the early 19th if not the late 18th century.

The Mersey and Redbank Farm to the left, 1915

Despite the Mersey’s unpredictable flood record, generations of farmers would bot choose to build and live in a farm so close to the River.

So, it is over to the experts. …. Sorry Dominic.

And just an hour after the story went live we had the suggestion that it was a "Septic tank vent" which has form, but I think all the houses will have been connected to the sewage system, but it will be interesting to hear from local residents.

Location; Close to the Mersey in West Didsbury

Pictures; the mystery object, Dominic Parker, 2025, Craigmore Avenue, 2025, courtesy of Google Maps, Redbank Farm 1894, from the OS map of South Lancashire, courtesy of Digital Archive Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/ The Mersey at Red Bank 1915 from the Lloyd collection

*Our City, Manchester 1838-1938, the Manchester Municipal Officer’s Guild, 1938