Round Field Holt ….. Albany Road …… and a man called Enoch Royle

This is the story of a road.

Albany Road, circa 1920s

Not that there is much to distinguish it from all the other roads which from the 1880s into the next century transformed a place of fields and cottages into rows of shops and houses.

Along the way this place had lost its ancient name of Martledge and gained a new one.

The new one was less romantic and was just a statement.

 So, when people called the surrounding area New Chorlton, or the New Village it was only to distinguish it from the old centre of the township located around the former village green and the long twisty lane we now call Beech Road which was always known as Chorlton Row.

But New Chorlton had the railway station, which had opened to a flurry of interest in 1880 and was accompanied by a goods yard for the unloading and temporary storage of “things”.

Coal reciept, 1963

And because we were still a coal age part of the yard was given over to coal merchants, some of whom have yet to pass out of living memory, along with the Bailey family who regularly “walked” their newly arrived animals from the goods yard through Chorlton to their farm on St Werburgh’s Road.

As for Albany Road it was not cut until 1885, and then only extended to number 57, with the remaining seven houses coming along about nine years later.

To which will now be added a “4 storey building to form 40 residential apartments, together with cycle and car parking, bin store, landscaping, and boundary treatments” at 4B Albany Road.

Its a development which will replace a low-rise industrial building dating back to 1983.*

This plot has had a chequered past having once been railway land sitting at the end of the goods yard and briefly for a period in the 1920s into the 1930s was home to a tennis court.

Go back another century and it was farmed as arable land by William Knight and owned by the Egerton Estate.  Mr Knight counted 72 acres of arable, pasture and meadow land in his holding of which our spot had the delightful name of Round Field Holt.

Enoch Royle and assistant, undated

To date I have found no pictures of the field although there are a few of the goods yeard and the railway station.

But Albany Road was recorded, and amongst the images there iare two of Mr. Enoch Royle and his wagon.  

He was a carter, and the two images show him on the stretch of Albany Road just past the junction with Brantingham Road.

What makes the two pictures of special interest are the buildings behind the wagon, one of which is the semidetached houses which are still there today and the other is the garage.

The church and hall, J Montgomery, 1968 from a lost picture postcard

And it is the garage that has always intrigued me, because I think this is on the site of what was once a church and church hall. 

There is a reference to the St Andrew’s Protestant Episcopal Evangelical Church and the Davenport Mores Hall on the corner of Albany and Brantingham.

It was run by the Rev William R. Graham D.D. and it was built sometime between 1907 and 1909, and two years later had become St Luke’s Protestant Episcopal Evangelical Church.

By then in 1911 the hall was unlisted but beside it on Albany Road sandwiched between the church and the home of Mrs Annie Kennedy was Metcalf & Higginbotham Ltd, paper merchants, which later is recorded as a “Furniture depository” and by 1950 as a garage.

All decked out, undated

All of which takes me back to the second picture of Enoch Royle which shows his wagon decked with decorations

The caption says “Decorated float in Albany Road, for Chorlton Carnival in the 1930s? Enoch Royle at the horses head, permission William Jackson.”

And I suppose that decorated float is where we will start.

According to the local historian John Lloyd, Chorlton staged a number of these carnivals during the mid-1930s which seemed usually to be centred on the Oswald Road part of new Chorlton and were part of the Rose Queen festivals which raised money for the Manchester and Salford Hospitals.

Before Albany Road, 1881

The Manchester Guardian in 1937 reported that carnival season had opened with “the gala held in St Margaret’s playing fields, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, on Saturday may be said to mark the opening of the charity carnival season. 

It has a history of five or six years only, but already it has become perhaps the most considerable effort of its kind undertaken in the city on behalf of the Manchester and Salford Medical Charities Fund”. 

And beyond a field, a railway and a Rose Queen Festival, there will be more on just how Albany Road fitted in to the story of Chorlton-cum Hardy but that is it for now.

Location; Albany Road

Pictures; Albany Road, circa 1920s, Enoch Royle and his wagons, undated but circa 1930s, from the Lloyd Collection, Coal reciept, 1963, courtesy of Marjory Holmes, and the church and hall, J Montgomery, 1968, from a lost picture postcard, m80123, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and Before Alabany Road, 1881, Withington Board of Health, courtesy of Trafford Local Studies Centre

*Application for the Erection of a 4 storey building to form 40  residential apartments, together with cycle and car parking, bin store, landscaping, and boundary treatments following demolition of existing buildings. 136878/FO/2023, Manchester City Council Planning Portal. 2023, https://pa.manchester.gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?keyVal=RU36JOBCJDG00&activeTab=summary