One canal …… 18 pictures ……. 47 or so years ago …… walking the Rochdale in 1979

A short series bringing together for the first time pictures I took walking the Rochdale Canal from Princess Street to the Castlefield Basin.

Most have appeared before but not together in the order in which I walked the Canal back in 1979.

But given my memory and my total failure to make notes of each shot at the time I took them some may well be out of sync.

Back then the canal was still in a shabby state and despite the work of restoration there was still an air of decay, which was added to by the state of the buildings which stood along its path.

Many had seen better days, a few were derelict waiting for something to happen, and since I walked the walk some have been demolished and some have been renovated.

And, so have the half sunken vessels which lay where they had sunk slowly rotting away.

It always amazed me that long after the restoration of the canal the three were still there, although as befitting the new tidied up canal they have finally gone.

Location; The Rochdale Canal

Pictures; The Rochdale Canal, 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*One canal …18 pictures ,walking the Rochdale Canal in 1979, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/One%20canal%2018%20pictures

The lost Eltham & Woolwich pictures ...... no.3 the Pie Shop

A short series on the pictures of Eltham and Woolwich in 1979.

For four decades the pictures I took of Eltham and Woolwich in the mid ‘70’s sat undisturbed in our cellar.  

But all good things eventually come to light.  

They were colour slides which have been transferred electronically.

The quality of the original lighting and the sharpness is sometimes iffy, but they are a record of a lost Eltham and Woolwich.

The Pie Mash and Eel shop was still there in 2009, but had gone by June 2012.

Location; Woolwich

Picture; Woolwich, circa 1976, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Chorlton in 1798

I am back with a little bit of Chorlton from 1798 looking again at some online records from Ancestry.

This one is the Land Tax Redemption for 1798, which was a tax based on the value of someone’s home.  So here we have the names of the people who lived in Chorlton in 1798 with whether they owned or rented the property and how much each house was worth.

It is a remarkable document, because it takes us back into the 18th century.  Now there are the parish records detailing the births, deaths and marriages for the township as well as the Egerton and Lloyd estate papers but here we have some of the financial details of our people a full 40 years or more before the 1841 census and the rate books and tithe survey.

There are many of the familiar names that crop up throughout the 19th century and a few new ones.  Some are quite clearly on the cusp of doing better while others will fare much the same four decades later.

And of course it is their economic standing which will be so revealing as well as their relationship with the Egerton’s and Lloyds who between them owned most of our land.
It should be possible to locate some of the properties and compare values with the rate books and tithe records for the 1840s onwards and compare the township with other nearby communities.

All of which I think is pretty neat.

Picture; the township just twenty or so years after the 1798 tax record, from Greenwood’s map of Lancashire, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/