Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester .......... nu 16 down along Scotland by the Irk

Now I wonder how many people who live in the high rise blocks of flats on Scotland have much knowledge of its past.

Scotland, 2016

It is one of those odd streets in Manchester which run down from Red Bank following the bend in the river Irk.

I first came across it in the late 1970s when the old slums that had once dominated Red Bank had vanished leaving just a vast expanse of empty space waiting for something to happen.

Once the area had been a dense warren of streets home to part of the Jewish Community who had settled here and across in Strangeways.

To the west just over Ducie Street was the Workhouse and to the south the river and the railway lines of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway.

Scotland, 1851

In the 1890s looking out from the row of back to back houses that ran along Scotland its residents were just a short walk from a tannery, the Red Bank Spring and Axel Works and a shed load of small workshops.

Go back just fifty years and you could have added a piggery, lime pits, timber yard and a rope works to the industrial scene.

In time I shall go looking for the inhabitants of Scotland, trawling the census returns for the details of their lives, although I doubt that any will appear in the directories.   In 1911 Salter’s Directory never bothered to include it in the list of streets which says a lot of the level of poverty of the area.

All of which will be in direct contrast today.

Pictures; Scotland, 2016 from the collection of Antony Mills, and Scotland, 1851 from Adshead’s map of Manchester, 1851 courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

Will those responsible ……… return the drinking fountain to the Rec on Beech Road

It is one of those silly stories which started with a couple of pictures of the Rec in the early morning.

Early morning on the Rec, 2021

And progressed through to a newspaper report from September 1897 of an ordinary meeting of the Withington Urban District Council at which Mr. Burgess “intimated that a gentleman in Manchester, whose name he would not at present mention, had offered to give a drinking fountain to be placed in Chorlton-cum-Hardy”.*

I had been looking for information about the early years of the Recreation Ground on Beech Road.**

It had been opened in the May of 1896, and was gift form Lord Egerton of a strip of land which had for centuries been known as Row Acre.***

And here I went very  wrong, because so engrossed was I in the research that the fountain and the Rec came together and for a brief while I went searching for just where the drinking fountain might have been located on what is now called Beech Road Park.

Waiting for something to happen, 2021

All of which will allow Mr. Pedantic of Provis Road to mumble that the story is a nonsense, and artificially connects pictures of the Rec on a Tuesday morning with the real drinking fountain which was on Chorlton Green.

And he would be right, leaving me to reflect on that earlier bit of public open space which is surrounded by two pubs, the old parish burial ground, the village school along with two former farm houses.

Today most of us think of Chorlton green as an open space of grass ringed by trees but this was not how it has always been.

Before the turn of the 19th century it may have been much bigger and indeed for most of that century was not even open to the people of the village, having been enclosed by Samuel Wilton and not returned to public use until the 1890s.

And then for a great stretch of time remained without grass but did have a pretty neat water fountain.

The Green, circa 1900

The picture dates from 1906 when the Horse and Jockey was still just a set of beer rooms on either side of the main door, Miss Wilton’s outhouse still jutted out from the building and the space between the main entrance and the sweet shop was still a private residence.

I have always liked the lamp which stands on the green, with its hint of Narnia.

And back in the May of 1986 I can remember walking past it in the early evening and coming across a string quartet playing around its base.  Today people would just take it in their stride mutter something about it being typically Chorlton, but back then it struck me as the promise of things to come.

Which later that night with the defeat of the Conservative candidate and the election of the first Labour Councillor it  indeed seem to herald something new.

But being a historian I have to own up to the fact that the following year the Conservatives were back but they were on borrowed time, and 1987 marked the final year that a Conservative would be elected from Chorlton to the Town Hall.

The year before may have been the first string quartet on the green but it has not been the last.

The drinking fountain, circa 190o

I have to say I prefer the grass but lament the loss of the fountain.  

First it lost its cups and then vanished sometime in the 1920s or 30s.  To my mind that was a loss.  Public fountains are wonderful places to meet people, spend time chatting and just having a drink on a hot day.

Once it would have been the village pump which offered all three and which on hot summer days had the added bonus of a place the kids could play.

Now there is a lot more history to explore in the photograph of the fountain but I rather think I will leave that for another time.

To which Michael Wood has added, "My recollection is that the fountain on the rec was located centrally outside the shelter, as on the attached snip from the georeferenced maps website showing OS 25” 1892-1914 series.  

It was the same design as was used in Chorlton Park near the tennis courts, a perfunctory iron structure with domed hoods over the outlets, operated by a button on top -  nothing like the elaborate ornamental feature on the Green.  Can’t find an image at the moment, but I could draw one!  

The Rec, 1914

They must have been a common municipal feature in their time, but by the mid-sixties they were semi-functioning or defunct. "

And I hope he does, as it is I never knew about the bandstand.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; the Rec very early on a Tuesday morning from the collection of Andrew Simpson and the drinking fountain on the green, circa 1900, from the Lloyd Collection

*District Councils, Manchester Guardian, September 10th, 1897

**Public Recreation Grounds at Withington, Manchester Guardian, May 18th, 1896

***Breaking News ……….. the Rec on Beech Road is officially opened, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2020/04/breaking-news-rec-on-beech-road-is.html

Shopping on Well Hall Road in the summer of 1907

Well Hall Parade in 1907

Now I am back with two more from Greenwich’s collection of old photographs.

They are both of Well Hall Road and are separated by just eight years.

Of the two the first offers up much more detail of what this row of shops looked like just over a century ago.

And it is a world away from today.

It starts with those ornate lamps protruding from the shop fronts which may have been lit by oil but I suspect will have been gas.

The chemist,  the fancy draper and the watchmaker, 1907

Then there are the large windows  with their iron frames which have just a hint of ornate decoration, which are topped by the names of the owners some of which will have been painted but others might have been etched on glass.

And finally there are the shop displays some of which adhere to that old Edwardian maxim of pile them high and sell them cheap.

Now I rather think it must either be a Sunday or early one morning as most of the shops have their blinds down, even though some have opened their large canopies.

On balance I would go for a Sunday afternoon sometime in the summer judging by the number of  pedestrians and the way the light is falling.

And for those with an even keener eye for detail there are no tram lines and of course a total absence of traffic bar the solitary horse and cart.

The caption says 1907 and assuming that there hasn’t ben a rapid turn over of shop keepers the shop on the corner with Greenvale Road opposite the Co-op was Mr William’s who was a cycle maker and seems to have left his shop signs propped up outside.

Little change in 1915 on Well Hall Road

And using the same street directory for 1908 it is possible to identify all the shops and their owners up to the chemists run by the London Drug Company.

Nor has much changed in the eight years that takes us up to the second picture taken in 1915.

By then the tram has arrived, there is a little more traffic which might just be explained by the fact that the shops are open and there are a fair few people about.

It is easy to forget that our parade of shops would have been as colourful as those of today and each would have displayed their names on the awnings which on this sunny day were pretty much all down.

Picture; Well Hall Road in 1907, GRW 378, and 1915, GWR380 http://boroughphotos.org/greenwich/ courtesy of Greenwich Heritage Centre, http://www.greenwichheritage.org/site/index.php

Lost in the attic .............. a new collection of photographs of Chorlton........ nu 1 Whitelow Road

This is Whitelow Road sometime in the early 20th century and with the picture comes one of those intriguing little stories.

It is one of a collection of images which were donated to St Clements Church and were found in the attic of a house.

And that is about all I know of the history of the twenty or so photographs of Chorlton.

All except one date from sometime after 1900 and measure 25.5 cms by 42 cms and have been reproduced from picture postcards.

I would love to know who went to all the trouble of first collecting and then enlarging the images and later storing them away.

Now there will be a story there but I doubt it will ever come to light.

So instead I shall concentrate on this one which shows a gang of labourers at work.

I don’t have a date but the company whose name plate appears on the steam engines was Davies Brothers, Asphalt Road Makers who were listed in the 1911 directory with an office on Princess Street and a depot on Green Lane.

Green Lane ran from Brook Street to the Garratt Bridge by the River Medlock in Chorlton on Medlock and long ago was swept away by new developments which included the old BBC Broadcasting building.

What makes the picture interesting is that it is one I have never seen before and comes with a companion photograph which also shows Whitelow Road with the same team of workmen.

Both contain a wealth of detail from the steam engines, barrels of tar to the wooden sets and the large number of labourers.

This was after all at a time when much of the work still relied on muscle power and so despite the steam engines it was still down to shovels, wheelbarrows and a lot of effort.

But the pictures also include that small band of spectators who have been drawn to the scene.

Like the workman they stare back at the camera with that mix of poses, some stopped in their tracks, a few looking curious and the rest those who just can’t miss the opportunity to be in the picture.

And of these the one I am drawn to is the chap in uniform pausing with his parcels to be caught on camera.

Now I am sure there will be someone who can help explains the use of the long wooden beam across the road and others who will want to speculate exactly where along Whitelow Road the pictures were taken from so I shall close by reflecting on how many more pictures of old Chorlton are sitting in attics across the township.

Pictures; Whitelow Road date unknown, from the Simpson Collection

Sitting in a backstreet in Florence ......... thinking of WLS radio station, Chicago

Florence, 2012

Now if you belong to that generation which was born just after the last world war, who grew up with the sound of Buddy Holly, and the Beatles, and trembled during the Missile Crisis of 1962 I expect Radio Luxemburg will stir memories.

In the absence of a dedicated British pop music radio station this was all there was till the “Pirates” arrived.

Of course it wasn’t perfect, it faded and returned and you had to put up with Horace Bachelor but it was still magic.*

And I was reminded of all that when my friend Susan from Canada told me of how “on clear nights throughout the 1960's, from my upstairs bedroom, close to the Manitoba/Ontario border, I could actually get WLS radio station in Chicago, almost a thousand miles away. They played songs I never heard anywhere else.”

Now my little transistor set bought for twenty-one shillings in Whitechapel hardly compared with Susan’s “purple and gold bakelite radio” but what they offered was something new, exciting and worlds away from our kitchen in Well Hall Road.

On the Highway Canada, 2011

All of which stirred the pot and made me begin to think of many things, but uppermost it was that idea of listening across the open lands of Canada to a radio station in Chicago and not for the first time I pondered on the vastness of Canada.

My cousins who live in Ontario will think nothing of a journey by car which will take them from their home to the small log cabin they built one summer.

It is a distance which if I replicated it here would pretty much take me from Manchester down across Europe to Vienna and would present me with a shed full of different European languages, histories and until recently even currencies.

The gas station, 2011

But for my cousin the journey would all be under a Canadian sun, with English spoken along the way and the sure knowledge that the petrol bought in Ingersol would come out of the same money as the payment for  the burger at the stop over half way and the groceries at the tiny supermarket close to their destination.

And if I push the idea, had my great uncle who was migrated to Canada by the Middlemore Homes acting for the Derby Union taken the Trans Canada Highway from St John’s in Newfoundland to Victoria in British Columbia he would have travelled 4,859 miles.

By comparison if I had continued on from Vienna to Istanbul I would only have clocked 2,108 miles from the suburbs of south Manchester to the Bosporus and the end of Europe.

That for me brings home the sheer size of Canada and of course also its southern neighbour but it also reinforces my fascination for my own Continent which offers tremendous diversity but also a sense of unity.

Rome, 2009

We may speak different languages, and some at least of us still carry our own national currency in our pockets instead of the Euro but there is much we have in common.

Sitting in a backstreet restaurant in Florence or in down town Naples with heaps of history and culture everywhere I am reminded that 2000 years ago my journey would have been one made across one empire with a single currency, and just two official languages and bits of the small town of Manchester would have been replicated in the grand cities of Rome and Byzantium.

Added to which much that followed the fall of the Roman Empire from the Middle Ages through to the Renaissance and the Age Enlightenment owed much to the Romans.

That said while sitting at that tiny restaurant in Florence the background music on the small portable CD player veered from a selection by the Three Tenors to that Harry Chapin song with the refrain “I am the morning D.J at W.O.L.D. .......... playing all the hits for you where ever you maybe...”

On the farm, 2011

And that is pretty much  where we came in, leaving me only to share the contrasting images from three of my favourite Italian cities with the stunning photographs of rural Canada by my friend Lori Oschefski and perhaps giving a plug to that endearing radio series on Lake Wobegon by Garrison Keillor "where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

Now Lake Wobegon may have been an imaginary town set in the USA but it pretty much sums up what I think a small Canadian town out somewhere in the west of Alberta might be like and as such is miles away from those small Italian cities I know.

Alghero, 2013

The huge open landscape which just seems to go on forever runs counter to the close confines of those towns and cities where at the end of every street there is a piazza and  around every corner an ancient ruin.

That said there are plenty of ugly places where poor planning, low investment and shoddy development have created sink suburbs, dispiriting to live in and unremarkable to the eye.

Not so bits of Alghero which has it all, and may even have its own radio station dedicated to the music of the 60s.

Pictures; Florence 2012, Rome, 2009, and Alghero, Sardinia, 2013 from the collection of Andrew Simpson and the Canadian heartlands, 2011, Lori Oschefski

* Horace Cyril Bachelor was as an advertiser on Radio Luxembourg. He advertised a way to win money by predicting the results of football matches, sponsoring programmes on Radio Luxembourg.

Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester .......... nu 3 Tasle Alley

Now Tasle Alley is one of those places most people will pass without a second glance.

It is the gap almost on the corner of John Dalton Street and Albert Square which with its double yellow lines which often looks dark and gloomy can’t be much of an attraction.

On the other hand for the curious that little ginnel beside New Church House on John Dalton Street suggests an adventure and if you plunge in the tunnel leads on to Tasle Alley and through a second tunnel to Mulberry Street and St Mary’s Chapel which is more popularly known as the Hidden Gem.

As late as 1849 Tasle Alley lay open on its northern side but within two years that open land had been built on and it became the narrow alley we know today and as these things go it didn’t even warrant a listing in the street directory.

I had thought that just perhaps because the buildings seem to date from 1851 they had missed being incorporated in the street directory for 1850, but no, Mr Slater's fine Directory for 1863 stubbornly refused to list  anything for the alley.

Tasel Alley, 1849

By 1900 the alley had a set of warehouses which were mainly furniture and printing with a wine merchants and a set of offices.

So that is about it.




Location; Manchester





Picture; Tasle Alley, 2016, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and in 1849 from the OS of Manchester & Salford, 1842-49, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/ 

“Longing to tell you ‘the Tale’ at Eltham” ……. October 12th, 1917

Now sadly I doubt that the “The Tale” in the picture postcard refers to the short story written in 1916 by Joseph Conrad and published the following year.

Nor did the recipient live in Eltham.

She was a Miss Nell Goddard who lived in Wenhaston, which is a small village of 818 people in north west Suffolk.

The Domesday Book records that the village had a mill, a church and woodland sufficient to feed sixteen hogs.

Wenhaston, briefly had a railway station which was part of the Southwold Railway which opened in 1879 and closed in 1929 and today has a “thriving pig farm industry.” *

But it does have a pre-Reformation panel painting depicting the Last Day of Judgement, which Miss Nell would have known, because the panel was discovered during restoration work to the church in 1892.

All of which is a long way from Eltham and leaves me to think that this was one of those picture postcards produced in their thousands which were over printed with the names of different places.

That said I like it.

And given that we have the name of the manufacturer, who was a W & K Lonson along with a serial number, we might in the fullness of time find out more.

I hope so.

Location; 1917

Picture; postcard, courtesy of David Harrop

* Wenhaston, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenhaston

The Eltham we have lost, part 2........ The old lane by the National Schools, 1908

Another of those pictures of Eltham’s past which need no comment

This is the old lane by the National Schools as it was in 1908.  The lane is now Archery Road and 'One acre Allotments' was on the right.









Picture; the old lane,  from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm

Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester ..... nu 65 the vanished 22 houses and 81 people

I can’t think anyone would mourn the disappearance of Back Canal Street and Little David Street.

In the space where two streets existed, Chorlton Street, 2016

In 1841 81 people lived in 22 of the 28 back to back properties which had been built as one up one downs at the beginning of the 19th century.

Here lived a mix of families who earned their living as labourers, textile workers with the odd craftsmen.

So few back to backs have survived that it is difficult sometimes to realize how small these properties were and how overcrowded they must have been.

Suffice to say that the width of this stone fronted building on Chorlton Street took in the combined width of Little Canal Street and the back to back houses.

The two streets in 1849

And I think we can be even more precise and calculate that the width of the street would be the distance from the edge of the brick building to right side of the doorway and what was left would be the width of the houses.

Looking at the census records for the June of 1841 reveals that some of the houses were occupied by just one person while others contained four to five people and one had nine individuals crammed in to its two rooms.*

But those with single occupants were in the minority and the general picture is one of overcrowding made worse by what appears to be the provision of only one lavatory.

The sound of young voices in Little David Street, 1841

The largest single age group were the young with 18 out of 52 in Back Camp Street under the age of 10, and 11 out of 29 in Little David Street.

All of which must have been a constant worry for parents with the canal and an arm of the canal surrounding the properties on two sides.

And it may well have been the canal which did for our 28 houses.  Maps from the 1890s show they no longer existed and the 1863 directory lists a warehouse on the site which may even have been there by the 1850s.

So a short life for those two streets.

Location; Manchester

*Census, Little David and Back Camp Streets, Enu 10, 7-8, London Road, Manchester, 1841

Pictures; the site of Little Canal and Little David Streets, 2016, from the collection of Andrew Simpson and streets in 1849, from the OS map of Manchester & Salford 1844-49 courtesy of Digital Archives Association,  http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

Tracking the age of your house in Chorlton

Now one of the first golden rules of research is that you never turn down any information you are given.

It might not fit with what you are doing but from experience it will sometime in the future.

Age of Buildings of chosen area

All of which is why I leapt at the offer from Phil Portus of an undergraduate project he undertook on Chorlton in the summer of 1968.*

Phil was in his first year of a Geography and Geology BSc and set out to answer the question “to what extent did Urban growth after 1850 proceed within the physical framework of pre-existing patterns of land ownership” which involved using the tithe map of 1844 and comparing it with OS maps of the period from the 1840s across the rest of that century and into the next.

The final piece of work included his written answer along with a series of beautifully drawn maps and overlays showing land ownership in 1844, the age of buildings from before 1844 through to 1955 and two detailed overlays of land ownership and the age of properties on the northern side of Beech Road from St Clements to Barlow Moor Road and back to Hardy Lane.

What is all the more remarkable is that this of course was done before the internet which meant that there was no recourse to online searches and pretty much everything was drawn from documents held in the archives and local history library down at the Ref.

And judging by his conclusions also involved a lot of field work out on Beech Road and the neighbouring roads observing the properties and matching their position against the field boundaries and the tithe plan.

All of which contributes to our knowledge of the history of Chorlton.

Detail from Age of buildings in chosen area

But like all research it also offers up unexpected information and prompts for further research.

So while I knew that the social housing which stretches south down Barlow Moor Road dated from before the Second World War I had never researched it in enough detail to come up with an end date of 1923.

Likewise Phil confirmed what I always suspected that small pockets of infill development around Ivy Green were undertaken between 1939 and 55.

Which just then left those unintended consequences, like the date that Church Road became Chequers.

Now I am not alone in spotting just how many name changes were made, and plenty of people have their own personal one, but I had always been puzzled as to when this might have happened.

The logical date was when we voted to join the city in 1904 but the changes were much later with people suggesting the late 1960s or early 70s and Phil at least has confirmed that Church Road was still in use in 1968.
That said Stephen has commented, "I can't agree with the idea that Chequers Road only got that name as late as 1968. I was at St John's RC primary school from 1955 to 1962, and it was Chequers Road then. 

Maybe some locals still referred to the old name. I still think of Zetland Road as Holland Road, it's old name, as the name change took place after I had ceased to use it on a daily basis to get to and from school."

So there you have it, a piece of research undertaken forty-nine years ago which  is still doing the business but may need a revisit.

*Salford Project, http://www.philportus.co.uk/salford-project/

Picture; overlay of properties on the north side of Beech Road, 1968 courtesy of Phil Portus

Celebrating Chorlton down at the Library … yesterday … an afternoon of poetry, music and heaps of fun

Yesterday there was one of those events l was pleased to be part of.

It was advertised as "How to turn a poem into a song with music in three easy steps .... And a book launch".

And it   was an afternoon in three parts, starting with the launch of Peter Topping's new book “Musical Poems and Pictures of Chorlton-cum-Hardy” but also an opportunity to hear Lindy Newns and Mark Wood share some of their poetry and part workshop.

Peter described his evolution from artist to poet, took us through the journey and the innovative approach to blending poetry, art and music against the backdrop of Chorlton where he has lived for the last half century.

So, part homage to a place we all love, the book breaks new ground in making poetry, music and art accessible to the “visually impaired and hard of hearing by the use of subtitles and karaoke …. using Navilens and QR codes, the words and pictures in the book come alive and burst into song.  QR codes have been used before to link to YouTube video but not in the same way as this book”. *

All of this and a workshop where the audience were invited to break into small groups and each a compose a verse of a poem about "Memories of Chorlton". 

These were then transformed with music in the style of our choice for a sunny Saturday and the rest as they say was two hours of collaborative fun.

This is the second in the series of “Musical Poems and Pictures of Chorlton-cum-Hardy” and follows on from three other poetry books, one of which was in collaboration with Lindy Newns.

I could say more, but all is revealed in the introduction to his latest book, and of course in the pictures on the day wot I snapped.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; from an afternoon of fun, poetry and music, 2026, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Peter Topping

Ignoring Eric ….

It does seem pretty much a given that any conversation about vegetarian food draws down a torrent of unsolicited, banal, and even hostile comments.

As if the very act of eschewing meat and fish is a threat to civilization and a direct affront to bacon lovers everywhere.

At its mildest it focuses on flatulence but ascends though the assertion that “it isn’t natural”, to visions of Armageddon with the end of all cows, pigs, and chickens from the face of the earth, and the collapse of  the entire world economy .

Nor does this wail of abuse have to be precipitated by the debate.  

It is enough on a slow news day for someone to launch into a diatribe, usually at the end of a day cataloguing their dried worm collection.

Now do they feel threatened, embarrassed or just have not thought much beyond their plate of meat and two veg?

On my part I don’t evangelise I just prefer not to eat something that had a face, and so if Eric wants to enjoy a steak, preceded by a prawn cocktail with a little side dish of fried sweet bread and black pudding that’s his choice.  Trouble is Eric and his pals won’t leave me to make my own choice.

And here I have to say this isn’t a crusade, it’s just another history post, and with that in mind it is worth remembering that all through history humanity has not eaten that much meat, which in most cases was not by choice, but was restrained by lack of money and the cost of meat.  Afterall then and now it takes a considerable amount of grass, and cereal to feed an animal.

So while aristocrats might employ chefs to come up with ever more sophisticated plates of meat and fish, the men and women who grew the food in the fields ate variations of porridge, and veg.

Always remember while the Norman overlords ate pork, their English serfs raised pig.

As a result, most of the world’s cuisines were heavily orientated toward meatless dishes and reflected a more imaginative approach to what makes a meal.

Yesterday with some fine-looking tomatoes and green beans which had to be used up I cooked a simple starter.

And varied the meal the following day by leaving out the green beans but adding olives, capers and bit of garlic to a plate of linguine.  Pretty much made in the time it took the pasta to cook.

Simple and quick.

And so, starts a series on historic meals without meat.

Pictures;  Dishes to brass off Eric, 2026 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Recreating the lost Well Hall House with Edith Nesbit

Well Hall House from Well Hall Road, 1909

Well Hall House has passed out of living memory.

It was built in 1733, was home to some Eltham notables and was demolished in 1930.

It stood between Well Hall Road and the moat and replaced the Tudor manor house which Sir Gregory Page knocked down to build his fine 18th century house.

But a building which dominated Well Hall, and was known by many seems to have left little trace.  There are a few photographs a handful of maps and the land records of the tithe schedule.

Well Hall, 1874

Together these show a tall building which ran to three floors, had a wing on each side and was set in an estate of about 33 acres including a front garden, a walled garden to the south, the moat , three ponds, a stream and much meadow and pasture land along with the farm buildings which included the present Tudor Barn.

A little to the north were Well Hall Cottages which in the 1840s had been a complex of six properties but by 1911 seem to have become a farm house and one cottage.

But Well Hall house was sufficiently enclosed that I doubt the cottages proved much of an intrusion, and so within its grounds the occupants of the big house got on with their favoured lives wandering the fourteen rooms and looking out east across the fields and west across their gardens.

Judging by the photographs I am not sure it was a place that would have caught my fancy.  It was tall and the design fitted that classical style of balance so that what you saw on one side was replicated on the other.

All of which is not much for a house which stood for just under two hundred years, but as these things work there is one other source of information, and that comes from Edith Nesbit, the novelist who lived in the house from the late 19th century into the twentieth.

Contained in some of her books are references to Eltham, Well Hall and the house itself.  And of these it is The Red House written in 1902 which provides some wonderful insights into the place.

The back of Well Hall House from the Paddock and moat, 1909

The book itself is a light account of the lives of a newly married couple who inherit the Red House and choose to live there.

In the course of the year that follows Ms Nesbit describes in some detail the house, its gardens, the nearby cottages with references to the village the parish church and offers up walk on parts for both Woolwich and Blackheath.

But it is the house which draws you in, with its panelled rooms, great hall, vaulted cellars and kitchen still with the equipment which would have been in use through the 18th and 19th centuries.

Added to this there are observations about the rooms which had been much messed about by changing fashion.

The front of Well Hall House, date unknown

Now like all such descriptions I suspect there will be points when the Red House departs from the actuality of the original, but I am confident that there is more that will have been the same than less.

This in turn stretched to her descriptions of the gardens, including the walled one, the presence of the railway with its station and embankment and the parish church.

Edith and her husband Hubert had taken on the house and 7 acres of the land.

Of course there may be more sources of information sitting in the Greenwich Heritage Centre and in the letters of the people who visited Edith and her husband at Well Hall which included the Webb’s, H.G.Wells and Bernard Shaw but in the meantime the Red House seems to have done the old place proud.

Location; Well Hall, London


Pictures; Well Hall House circa 1909,  from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Rob Ayers, http://gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm and Well Hall House, from The Edith Nesbit Society, http://www.edithnesbit.co.uk/ map of Well Hall from the OS Map of Kent 1858-74

The humble outside lavatory ….. here in Chorlton ….. wondering how many have survived

Now for anyone who grew up or lived in a 2 up two down property, this brick structure will be familiar.

Declan's brick structure, 2021

And for those who  wonder what I mean by a two up two down property, they were the basic model for many working class homes in the 19th century, and consisted of two downstairs rooms, one of which would be the kitchen with two upstairs rooms.

You can still find them across the country in our towns, cities,  and villages and with a bit of tender care and attention still do the business.

You entered directly off the street into the front room, although at the posher end of the market, there would be a small glass vestibule which took up a little of the space in the front room but did afford a bit of privacy.

New Gates, typical Manchester Court, 1908

At the rear was a small yard complete with an outside lavatory, which before mains sewage were supplied with a pail which would be collected by the night soil man.

Ours in Ashton Under Lyne still retained an aperture in the back wall where the pail could be left for collection.

And that is where Declan Maguire comes into the story, because yesterday he sent over this picture, adding, “Hi Andrew, after your article on the few air raid shelters still surviving in back yards, here’s a photo of another backyard survivor from Victorian times. 

I wonder how many houses in this area still have one of these? 

I can think of times when I was sharing my home with teenager ‘bathroom blockers’ when it could have been useful for me.

I wonder how would they be referred to in estate agent pitches; “many original Victorian features”? “bathroom and second separate toilet?

It would  be interesting to find out if many have survived locally, whether in working order, or as tool/storage sheds. 

I’m old enough, (born in 1960 in Belfast, another red brick Victorian city), to have used these during family visits to grandparents and other relatives. I can remember the new WC being installed inside my maternal grandparent’s 3 storey terraced home around 1970. The photo was taken in one of the side streets off Sandy Lane, the house is currently up for sale & unoccupied”.

Whiteman's Yard Derby, 1882-83

And being a tad older, I remember visiting my grandparent home in Derby which was a conversion from two one up and one down properties into a single home.  The rear of the house had opened up to a small shared courtyard where there were several of these little brick privies.

Manchester Corporation had been in the forefront of eliminating the one up one down as early as the 1850s, along with cellar dwellings.  Other cities like Leeds tolerated the one up and one down into the 20th century.

As for our humble brick lavatory it would be the coming of mains water that would banish the weekly visit of the night soil man.

That said in 1894 in Manchester,  “there were 24,300 water closets,  78,486 pail closets, and 35, 700 midden privies, and even by 1927 there were 230,046 water closets, and still 1,108 pail closets and thirty-five privies”.*

All of which beings us back to Declan’s brick “outhouse”, and Chorlton-cum-Hardy.  By the time his old house and most of two up two down stock were built in Chorlton in the late 19th century, the township had mains sewage.

But this was a new thing.  The first pipe bringing in mains water arrived in 1962 at the request of 16 ratepayers living on Edge Lane, while the local sewage works was only developed in the 1870s.  Before then people used privies, and obtained their drinking water from wells, or surface water.  

So when Stockton Range was built on Edge Lane, they were built with interior wells.

But the great housing boom which started in the early 1860s, and the much bigger provision of houses from the 1880s was only possible because of the arrival of piped drinking water and an effective sewage system.

Some historians have pointed to the arrival of the railway in 1880 and the corporation tram two decades later, but without the basics of water and sewage it is difficult to see how that housing boom could have taken off.

Pictures; A little brick outhouse, 2021, from the collection of Declan Maguire, Whiteman's Yard, detail of the OS Map of Derby 1882-83, supplied by Derby Local Studies Library http://www.derbyshire.gov.uk/leisure/local_studies/  and New Gates, 1908, m8316,  courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

*E. M. Brockbank, The Book of Manchester & Salford, 1929, quoted by John J Parkinson- Bailey, Manchester An Archetctural History, 2000, page 40