A lost sweet shop from Beech Road revisiting a popular story

I won’t be the only one who has memories of buying sweets at the shop which was on  the corner of Beech Road and Claude Road, and there may be others like me who bought things when it sold a mix of almost antique stuff back in the late 1980s.

Not that it was always a shop; back in 1911 soon after it had been built it was the home of Robert and Janet Connell.  They were from Scotland, had been married for 38 years and had two children one of whom was still registered as living at home despite being a ships steward.

It was then an impressive seven roomed house.  If I wanted I could no doubt discover when the property was converted into a shop.  It was certainly selling sweets in the November of 1958 when R.E. Stanley photographed it.

Nor had it changed much when Tom McGrath took his picture almost thirty years later.  And I think the old bill boards were still there in the 1980s advertising the current films showing at the cinema around the corner.

Today it has reverted to a home as have other commercial conversions along Beech Road.

Pictures; Number 1 Beech Road by R.E. Stanley, November 1958, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, m17659, and from the collection of Tom McGrath

Looking towards Oswald road ......another scene of lost Martledge from 1880

I have been visiting Martledge which has passed out of common knowledge, but was that part of Chorlton roughly from the four banks up to the Library.

Until the 1880s it was like most of the rest of our township a collection of cottages, farm buildings and open land.
 And in the summer and winter of 1882, Aaron Booth who lived at Sedge Lynn took a series of photographs of the area around his house.  This was Sedge Lynn and stood on the corner of Manchester Road and Nicholas Road.

He was a comfortably off business man who owned a packing business employing 7 men, and sometime after 1881 the family moved from Ardwick to Chorlton.  Only four of his photographs have survived but they are a rare insight into what Martledge was like.

Today I have chosen a picture he took from an upstairs backroom window looking out across what was called the Isles and is now the land stretching out along Oswald and Longford Roads to Stretford. In 1882 it was what it had always been, an open expanse of land dominated by ponds which had been dug out for marl for the fields and clay for house bricks.   The ponds were fed by little streams long since vanished.  Away to our left had been a row of cottages but the rest was just open land.

I rather think for any child it must have been a pretty wonderful place to roam, particularly on a warm summer’s day with little in the way of noise save the odd buzzing insects.  As a parent I might feel less happy.

There were I remember 17 ponds around what was Oswald Field where the cottages were and some were quite large and quiet deep.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection

A Chorlton bank and a pub ......... “no one expects the Spanish Inquisition”

It remains one of my favourite Monty Python throw away comments and it struck a chord as I came across these pictures taken by my old friend Tony Walker.

They are familiar enough places but both look very dated and are as remote from today as any one of those early 20th century postcards I often post.
But back in the the 70's I just took them for granted and then they had changed.

I used the bank from time to time and in the same way  fell across the doors of the Lloyds when we were eating at the little Italian restaurant on Wilbraham Road or for a thank you drink on election night.

Now my branch of the Midland was in town so I only used it only occasionally and of course in those days before internet banking your branch of a bank was still an important place.  The staff knew you and the bank manager was privy to your innermost financial secrets.

In the same way my local had been the Trevor where we were known, served a little quicker and on occasion when Stan felt like it allowed to stay just a tad longer after closing time.

All of which meant that the Lloyds was another place which was a different experience.  It still had the small rooms off the main staircase and a bar which from memory was quite small.

And in the way of things I didn’t expect either to change.  They were what they had always been since I arrived here in the winter of 1976.

Looking at the two pictures and comparing them with what they had looked like just sixty years earlier it is clear that they had been done no favours by the respective design teams and builders.

In 1975 the bank was just an anonymous slab from which to display its name, and the Lloyds despite the summer sun looks tired and ugly.  As Kemp's the Chemist the building on the corner of Barlow Moor and Wilbraham Roads had something while the Lloyds back in 1900 looked impressive.

Still both pictures are now history and just perhaps in another fifty years there will be those who see something about the two.  We shall have to see.

Pictures; from the collection of Tony Walker

An unfamiliar photograph and a lost cottage

Sometimes you come across a picture which you know has rarely seen the light of day and yet must at one time have been familiar to everyone in the township. 

It’s of the parish church looking north from the meadows.

To our right is the back of the old Bowling Green Hotel and in the distance framed between the church and the large house is the barn of the Higginbotham’s who lived on the green and had farmed here since the 1840s.

It is a pleasant enough rural scene but has undergone some alteration.

To the right of the large brick house stood a one up one down cottage which had become run down.

Someone and I guess it was the company who issued the postcard had painted it out by extending the bushes and trees behind the pile of bricks.

The building can just be made out in a monochrome copy of the same photograph dated sometime in the 1890s and originally owned by a May Boardman.

Our postcard issued by H.Burt of Chorlton was sent in the May of 1906.

Picture; from  the collection of Rita Bishop

The lost pub of Beech Road

Peter has painted the Beech before and I have written about it. http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/beech-painting-another-story-and-bit-of.html

But today I want to concentrate on the other buildings in his picture. What are now numbers 70 and 68 are I think the oldest commercial properties still in use in Chorlton and they have intrigued me ever since I began writing my book on the history of the township.*

You might even say it was what got me going. You see Samuel and Sarah Nixon ran the Travellers Rest which was the beer shop next to the Beech for 40 years. They are buried in the parish church yard and it was the chance discovery of their gravestone that started me on researching the history of the village.

Samuel’s father had run the pub across the meadows by Jackson’s Bridge from the 1830s and sometime in the 1840s Samuel and Sarah took over the Travellers Rest. It was the only drinking place on what was then known as the Row and had been made possible by the Beer Act of 1830 which allowed people to set up beer shops for the price of a beer licence.

Stand inside number 70 today and you can get a sense of how small the beer shop would have been, and remember it was only the first half of the present shop which served as the room dispensing beer. Next to it was the stationer’s of Thomas Taylor. Now Taylor was an interesting chap who may have deprived the Methodists of the their Sunday school and owned both numbers 70 and 68 which may date from the 1830s, because he was happy to allow Thomas White later of the Horse and Jockey to apply for the first beer license for number 70 in 1832. But as they say that is all in the book, so no more about them at present.

The two buildings have had a mixed history since and for a long time served as one of our bakery shops here on Beech Road only closing as the Oven Door in the early 1980s. They were then converted back into single units and were much knocked about so today little is left of the original buildings. Even the roof was heightened much to the annoyance of friends who live along Stockton Road and the old stone urinal of the beer shop removed.

Peter’s work is on display around Chorlton and can also be seen at https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures


An occasional series of stories and pictures in the run up to the Glad to be in Chorlton Past and Present Exhibition during the Big Green Festival on March 31s

Picture; Peter Topping 2011 www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk

*Chorlton cum Hardy A Society Transformed http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20for%20Chorlton
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/chorlton-cum-hardy-community.html