Renshaws Buildings in Martledge

Even I have to admit that this bit of road and kerb stone is not the most exciting picture of Chorlton and yet it is all that is left of Martledge that part of the old township which ran from the four banks down to the library.

All this week I have been writing about the place and today I want to focus on the building which ran along the side of this bit of road.  It was a block of six or maybe 12 dwellings and was variously known as New Buildings or Renshaws Buildings.

It was set at right angles to what is now Barlow Moor Road and in its time must have looked the part. It had a large impressive gable end and despite being farm cottages dominated this part of Martledge.

The block was owned and may have been built by John Renshaw sometime before 1832.  He was a market gardener living in a farm house on the Row* who also owned a number of cottages around the township.  Some at least would have been wattle and daub structures but Renshaws Buildings were made of brick.

Now I can be fairly confident that they predate 1832 because they are listed as part of his property qualification which entitled him to a Parliamentary vote in the newly reformed House of Commons.

And it maybe that they represent the first building boom here in Chorlton in the 1840s and 40s by speculative tradesmen who wanted to cash in on the population increase or maybe just the desire of local people to live in a house made of brick rather than wood, mud and straw.


It is unclear how many units there were but the evidence from the census and the old maps suggests that they were one up one down back to back dwellings.  By the beginning of the 20th century part of the block had been converted into commercial use and just before their demolition this bit was a garage.

They came down sometime in the 1920s or 30s to make way for the present Royal Oak pub.  I wish we had some written memories of what they were like but sadly we don’t.  On the other hand we do have a few photographs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries along with details of who lived there from the 1840s and the rents they paid, but for all that it is back to the book where you can see Barris’ reconstruction picture of Renshaws Buildings in more detail.  It is based on a number of the photographs and maps and we are looking at it from the west, as if were heading into the township from Manchester.  The kerb stone and narrow road are hidden on its eastern side.

*Today this is Beech Road and his home was on the site of Ivy Court facing the Rec

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson and Barri Sparshot

Living on the edge of the village, part 3 of the story of our own one up one down cottages

It is another one of the buildings that has fascinated me and is now revealing some of its secrets and in doing so has a lot to say about how we lived in the township when we were still a rural community.

This picture was taken sometime around the first decade of the last century by which time the cottage was maybe a 100 years old. It was one of those one up one down properties I have been writing about which could be found all over the township. The front door opened directly into the downstairs room and usually at the back was a boxed staircase which led to the upstairs room.

It stood on the edge of the green, just past the parish church, close by what is now the car park to the meadows.

In the 1840s and 50s it was home to John and Mary Taylor. In the June of 1841 he had described himself as an agricultural labourer and a decade later aged 72 he was still working on the land while his wife took in laundry.

Now it is impossible to say which farm he worked for or whether he was part of the casual workforce which found work where they could, but there were three farms around the green and another along what is now Brookburn Road

They rented the house from John Renshaw who had owned properties around Chorlton and paid him 1/6d a week in rent. Now this was about the going rate for such a cottage although rents began at just over a shilling [5p].

The cottage stood on open land with fine views back across the green and out toward the Mersey. Like most homes of the day there was a small cottage garden.

In that summer of 1841 John and Mary were sharing their home with their married daughter Eliza and her husband and three children. John Bentley like his father inlaw was an agricultural laborouer and it maybe that this was a temporary expedient because ten years later John Eliza and the children were living at Lane End. Now given that there were few labourer’s cottages at Lane End it is just possible that they were living in one of the four one up one down properties.

But this is to over push the documentary evidence. So I shall stay with John and Mary Taylor who continued to live at our cottage well into the 1860s and there is more. We can track them across the baptism of their children and their grandchildren and to John’s death in 1868.

They were there at that cottage from 1841 and maybe even earlier. As for the cottage it was still inhabited in 1911 when it was home to William Travis who was 52 years old widower from Ireland who like John Taylor worked on the land. He may have still been there when it was demolished around 1928 when the British Legion Club was opened on the site.

Picture from the Lloyd collection

A lost photograph and a clue to a vanished building

Sometimes you fall across a picture by chance which fills in a gap in your knowledge and at the same time is a joy to look at in its own right.


It is also unusual in that it is not one I have seen before and I doubt that at first glance many today would be able to place it.

 It is a postcard sent in the summer of 1905 and shows that section of Barlow Moor Road running north from the junction with Wilbraham Road towards what would now be the library.

There is little that is familiar. But perhaps the first clue is the building of John Bailey, joiner and cabinet maker. It is still there today but is now the solicitor on the corner of Barlow Moor and Warwick Road. 

Adjoining the building and further down Barlow Moor Road there are other buildings which are still there today albeit with some changes.

All of which leaves the two buildings beside Bailey’s the joiner behind the chap leaning on the fence. The white building set back is the old Royal Oak which had been selling beer from early in the 19th century.

It was here in the 1860s that drunken mobs from Manchester had to be chased off by locals and earlier still the scene of a pub theft which resulted in the convicted thief being transported.

But it is the building to the right of the Royal Oak which really caught my attention. This is Renshaws Buildings owned by a local farmer who lived on the Row.* It dates from the very early 1830s and maybe even older.

It was one of a number of properties built for rent by local businessmen like Renshaw the farmer, Brownhill the wheelwright and Grantham the tailor.

They may have been the first wave of new brick built cottages, replacing the old wattle and daub properties and aimed at the increase in population in the township.

These were for the local market and the census returns show that they were inhabited by farm labourers and tradesmen.

I cannot be sure of when Renshaws Buildings went up but we can be sure they were in place by 1832 because their ownership along with other properties guaranteed Renshaw a property vote after the 1832 Reform Act

Looking at the number of units in Renshaws Buildings and the number of families recorded in the census record they have been one up one down dwellings in a block running at right angles to the main road.

The picture may also be unique in that it could be the last time it was photographed like this.

Within perhaps ten years the front had been converted into a garage and by the late 1920s had been demolished to make way for the new Royal Oak.

Today the only evidence that it was ever there is the kerb running down the south side of the pub.

So there you have it, this postcard from 1905 remains one of the best images of Renshaws Buildings, a building which I have followed from its construction sometime before 1832.

*Chorlton Row is now Beech Road

Picture; Renshaws Buildings and the Royal Oak circa 1905, from the Lloyd Collection

A family of seven in a two roomed cottage on the Row, ........ one up one downs part 1

It is hard today to imagine bringing up a family in just two rooms and yet many people here in the township during the 19th century and before did just that.

These were houses with just two rooms often with only a ladder to give access to the upstairs room, and they were common enough across the country both in our towns and cities but also in the countryside.

Only three still exist in Manchester and these are on Bradley Street backing on to far grander buildings on Lever Street.

We had our fair share but they have all been demolished and the evidence is scanty.

One survived on the edge of Chorlton on Maitland Road into the 1930s  but those which would have been here in the centre of the township along the Row and around the green vanished a long time ago.

 Most would have been wattle and daub cottages and while we still had something like fifty in the 1840s all went during the next half century with the last on the corner of Beech Road and Wilton being pulled down in 1892.

Now it is possible using old photographs, OS maps and census returns to locate them on what are now Beech Road and the green.

There were a group of them on the northern side of Beech Road almost opposite Reynard Road, a solitary example opposite the parish church close to what is now the car park for the meadows and more on Sandy Lane and there will be more in Martledge and Hardy.

These were all brick built and most survived into the 20th century and back in the 1830s and 40s were owned by local landowners, businessmen, traders and farmers.

At present we know most about those on Beech Road. They were owned by James Holt who had made his money in Manchester and retired to Chorlton to live in Beech House sometime around the mid 1830s. In the May of 1845 he was renting them out to John Hooley, John Whitehead and James Whitby and the rents ran from just under 4/- down to 3/4d. John Hooley was a joiner and Whitehead an agricultural labourer.

Trying to make sense of what proportion of their wages was paid in rent is difficult. But an agricultural labourer in Lancashire might earn between 11s and 18s. But these varied, and so in the most intense period in the summer months this could rise to 13s and fall later in the year to 12s or less.

Likewise women and children were better paid during the warm busy months. It is also worth noting that women’s wages in parts of Lancashire were the highest in the country. Added to this there was the money that could be earned at harvest time, and from task work and activities like drainage work.

Now overcrowding was a common feature of rural life and the Whitehead’s had five children ranging in age from 12 down to six months with the added complication that of the five one was a boy aged 12 and the rest were girls.

Families fell back on different strategies to cope, with some farming out some of the children to a grandparent or making arrangements with neighbours where by the girls of the two families slept under one roof, and the boys under another. In other cases they just relied on the blanket across the room. All of which allowed moralists and social observers a field day and was reported in great detail by Poor Law Commissioners on the Employment of Women & Children in Agriculture in 1843.

The cottages on Beech Road were demolished sometime around 1911, but those on Sandy Lane and the one opposite the parish church lasted much longer, but more about those later.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection, circa 1895

Wattle and daub cottages in Chorlton

The story of how we lived here in the first half of the 19th century.


There may still have been upwards of fifty wattle and daub houses in the 1840s in our township.

They were constructed from a timber framework with walls made of branches woven together and covered with a mixture of clay, gravel, hay and even horse hair and topped with a thatched roof.

Samuel and Sarah Sutton brought up their 2 children in one of these cottages. Their home was one of two adjoining cottages situated on the Row and in every sense looked the rural part.

The white walls and wooden beams were partly obscured by ivy and the front door was approached through a small country garden. Behind the house and away from the view of strangers stood the privy and the back garden where the Sutton’s grew fruit, vegetables and flowers.

 There would be currant and gooseberry bushes, raspberry canes, rhubarb and mix of vegetables which made an important contribution to the family income and were often home to chickens and even a pig.

Such houses were easy to build and equally easy to maintain, but there could be disadvantages to living in them. The porous nature of walls meant they were damp and crumbling clay meant endless repairs.

According to a later Parliamentary report “Many of them have not been lined with lath and plaster inside and so are fearfully cold in winter. The walls may not be an inch in thickness and where the lathes are decayed the fingers may be easily pushed through. The roof is of thatch, which if kept in good repair forms a good covering, warm in winter and cool in summer, though doubtless in many instances served as harbour for vermin, for dirt, for the condensed exhalations from the bodies of the occupants of the bedrooms....”


Floors made of brick or stone were laid directly on the ground and were almost invariably damp, and in the worst cases reeked with moisture. Once the brick was broken, the floor became uneven and the bare earth exposed. This might be compounded where the cottage floor was below the ground outside or the floor level was uneven which caused problems of drainage. Even the proudest wife and mother must have been reconciled to damp and dirt which were the result of such floors.

The only heating would come from the open fire which might have been combined with a cooking range. On damp days when the coal or wood was wet the smell would permeate every room in the house. During the winter months the unheated bedrooms were particularly unpleasant places. On the coldest nights ice would form on the inside of windows.

Cottages of this design were often limited to four rooms, and some may have had only two, with the family living downstairs and sleeping on the upper floor. In some cases access to the bedroom was by ladder rather than stairs and in many cases bedrooms were left open. One surviving cottage in Chorlton from the eighteenth century did have a staircase which opened out to a big bedroom giving little in the way of privacy.

As for sanitation this would have been equally primitive. Nationally the rural picture was grim with privies often draining into open channels which themselves got blocked with refuse and so flowed too slowly to allow the waste to disperse.


Picture; Sutton’s Cottage circa 1892, photograph from the Wesleyan Souvenir Handbook of 1895 in the collection of Philip Lloyd

Oswald Field, five cottages, a slice of rural Chorlton, and a bit of a mystery part 1

Today I decided to take a walk along one of the old field boundaries.

But of course as you would expect I have chosen to take the journey sometime in the summer of 1845.  Now this is not as difficult as it would seem and I shall not slide into some fanciful romantic recreation of an idyllic rural spot.

The walk is based on the maps and records of the time, and I want to start with an advert.  It is a little later than 1845, well actually twenty-one years to be  exact but it is a good starting point, because in that year the five cottages and land belonging to Charles Bracegirdle were put up for auction.

It has much to tell us for not only do we have the name of the owner, but also those of the tenants, some of whom had been here in the summer of my walk, and we know their occupations, the rents they paid, and from all this something of what the cottages were like.     But all of that is for later.

The summer of 1845 was mixed.  The earlier part of the year had been cold with “heavy snow falls in March and despite a warm April May had been cold and dull.  June by contrast was fine, but July brought thunderstorms and August was dull cloudy and wet.  Only with September and harvest time did things improve, and the rest of autumn was mild and fairly dry.”*

So this is not the most promising of times to walk a field boundary.  We are on the eastern edge of Oswald Field, which today faces that piece of open land on the corner of Oswald Road looking north and west towards Claridge Road. We know it as Oswald Field, earlier it went by the name of Oswald Croft  and by the early 20th century was part of Oswald Lane, which in those days ran from Oswald Road down to Manchester Road.  And for most of that century it was a narrow little road bounded by the backyards of Claridge Road and Fielden Terrace.

But in the summer of 1845 the lane was in the heart of Chorlton countryside.  Our five cottages stood on the eastern side of the boundary, fairly close to what is now Oswald Road.  In front of them a line of trees only partly obscured views across open land towards the Botanic Gardens, the Duke’s Canal and Trafford.

All around them there were small orchards and woodland, but for the Aldcroft and Barret families who had young children I guess it would have been the ponds which preoccupied them.  There were plenty of these.  Most were the result of digging for marl and clay and within just a short walk there were sixteen of varying size and I guess depth. Some like the large one directly opposite was described as a pond while others were marked as "Marl Pits.”**

Despite the evidence of the marl and clay diggings this was mostly meadow and pasture land and like the rest of the township was rented by a number of different tenant farmers and market gardeners.

So if we had followed the boundary away from the cottages it would have brought us to Red Gates Farm which today is the site of the library and the main road out of the township to Manchester.

Then as now it would have been busy with farmers and market gardeners travelling into the city with food for the markets and itinerant traders and carriers arriving with goods to sell or orders to deliver.  There would also have been that Sunday trade, escaping the confines of industrial Manchester just 4 miles away for a walk with the family in the countryside or visiting our beer shops, pubs and hotels.

Their first port of call might well have been the old Royal Oak, or the beer shop of Mrs Leech, roughly I think where Manchester Road joins the modern Wilbraham Road.  All of which has taken us away from our original field boundary and so is perhaps a good time to stop.

Pictures; advert from the Manchester Guardian, September 16th 1865, detail from the 1841 OS Map of Lancashire courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Stratton, J.M, Agricultural Records, 1969

**the pond was on that southern side of Oswald Road, now occupied by the six semi detached houses, while the marl pits are now under Oswald Road school.

Oswald Field, five cottages, a slice of rural Chorlton, and a bit of a mystery part 3

I think this will be the last of the stories on Oswald Field.

Over the last few days I have walked its field boundary, explored the five cottages and tried to discover something of the people who lived there.

But I am content to end with the man who owned the five cottages and just over three acres of land, most of it at Oswald Field but a little on the Row* close to the blacksmith just before the road ran into the green.

And here is the mystery that I have alluded to for despite owning property which qualified him to vote in parliamentary elections he appears not to have owned his own house living instead as a lodger in several homes and variously described himself as a cordwainer [shoemaker], and retired gardener while on his will he is called a labourer and left effects of under £200.

He was born in Great Warford in Cheshire in 1783.  There were Bracegirdle’s in Great Warford in the 1840s and 50s.  One was a farmer, another a book seller and another was a weaver.  Now the place was small enough for him to be related but at present it is an avenue of research I shall leave to someone else.

More promising is his connection with Methodism.  He was at one point superintendant at the Sunday school and some at least of the people he lodged with were Methodists as were two of the men who proved his will.

And it may be that this also gives a clue to when he arrived here in the township.  He is not mentioned as part of the early Wesleyan congregation during the 1820s and the first documented mention of him is 1840 but we may just be able to push that date back.  John Hall who had owned the five cottages on Oswald Field died in 1838 and like Charles was a Methodist.  If the properties passed to Charles on John Hall’s death then either he was already here or settled here around that time.

The income from all the properties and land amounted to £54 a year which is not a substantial amount and will explain why he worked variously as a cordwainer, gardener and labourer.

I doubt that we will ever know his prime occupation and it maybe that some were seasonal or dictated by circumstances.  In the June of 1841 he had been lodging with Joseph Brundrett who was a shoemaker and a decade later he gave his occupation as the same while in 1861 when he was living at Clough Farm he described himself as a retired gardener.

And yet as a man with a vote he was one of a small and significant section of the community.  There were only 27 of them entitled to vote in 1840 out of a total adult population of 341 and given that only men could vote this marked him out as one of only 18% eligible to participate in Parliamentary elections.

And as a Methodist he made up a large proportion of those who could vote in all the elections from 1832 through to 1854. In 1835 just over a quarter of the electorate were Methodists.

They were a close knit group who married into each other’s families lived close together and no doubt discussed the issues of the day.

Sadly nothing that Charles said or thought has survived, but we do have his likeness.  It was published in the Wesleyan Church Souvenir Bazaar Handbook for 1908.

It shows a man with a mass of white hair, but even this presents a mystery.  The name below the picture is of a James Bracegirdle, which I take to be Charles.  Again I might be wrong, but there is no record of a James in the township either in this period, or for the rest of the 19th century.  So I guess this must be he, or it may just be another mystery to add to the rest.

Picture; Charles Bracegirdle & the Wesleyan Chapel from Wesleyan Church Souvenir Bazaar Handbook for 1908, courtesy of Philip Lloyd 

*The Row is now Beech Road and his acre of pasture land is today the site of the gated poperties

Oswald Field, five cottages, a slice of rural Chorlton, and a bit of a mystery part 2

Oswald Road

 I  recently walked the field boundary of Oswald Field and today I want to think about the cottages.

There were five of them and they might have looked something like Grantham’s Buildings which stood on High Lane from the 1830s through to the late 1970’s.

I think we can date them from sometime after 1832 and maybe more exactly to around 1835 because in that year a John Hall qualified for a Parliamentary vote here in Chorlton on the strength of owning freehold houses on Oswald Croft.

Five years later the properties appear to have passed to Charles Bracegirdle who is listed in the electoral register for 1840 and with the changed ownership has come a slight change in the name from croft to field.

Red Gates farm, 1845

Now at this point I become a little pedantic.

It is possible that Oswald Croft and Oswald Field are not the same place, but there are no similar properties close by, and the boundary between Oswald Field and High Meadow was in the 1840s known as Oswald Lane, a name it retains till this day.

So I think we can be pretty sure they are one and the same.

But I am not sure of what these five cottages would have been like.

They might like Grantham’s Buildings on High Lane and Brownhill’s Buildings on what is now Sandy Lane have been two up two down properties, but it is equally likely that they consisted of just a single ground floor room with another on top.  There were plenty of one up one down cottages and rows of such across the township.

What I think we can be certain is that they were made of brick.  In the 1840s there were still upwards of fifty wattle and daub cottages but all the new build does seem to have been in brick.  Now I have written about our cottages  and perhaps it is enough to say that they would have been fairly basic, with a brick or slab floor resting directly on the bare earth, a privy and a communal well.

There was a wide disparity in the rents that were paid on the five, with one commanding an annual rent of £16, another £13 and two at £6 and the last at £4.

But I am not sure that this had anything to do with the houses themselves but more to do with the accompanying land.  The higher rented two were described as houses with land while the remaining three were with either “house and garden” or just “house”.

And this fits with the occupations of the tenants.  So Peter Langford who paid an annual rent of £13 in 1845 described himself as a gardener which may mean he derived some of his income from growing food for the Manchester markets.

Certainly he was perceived as a notch up from his neighbours because it is his name which appears as the lead tenant in the properties which allowed Charles Bracegirdle a Parliamentary vote in 1854.

And indeed three years earlier he had described himself as a market gardener on an acre of land.  While others living in the block described themselves as labourers.

Assuming then that the properties were all much the same it might be possible to get some idea of what they were like by comparing rents across the township.

At £6 a year a tenant would have paid 2s 3d or 11p a week while the lower rent of £4 would have worked out at 1s 6d or 7½p a week.  This put them broadly in the middle of the rented properties in 1845.

Rents as % of the total in 1845

Of course this still might hide enormous differences in the quality and repair of the houses but it is a start, and I guess means that our people on the edge of the township were living in homes which were much the same as their neighbours across the township.

And like all our people the length of tenancy seems mixed, some like Peter Langford stayed on Oswald Field for twenty years while others upped and move on in a fairly short space of time which I suspect is another area for some interesting research.

The rate books begin in 1845 and detail landlord and tenant throughout the rest of the century so it should be possible to plot tenancy times.

The last part of the story is still unclear.  Charles Bradshaw died in October 1864 his will was published in the following January and the houses did not them come to auction until the September of 1865.

I don’t know who bought them but I do know they were gone by 1871. I have yet to find out what happened to the tenants or an exact date for their demolition, but that is all possible.  The rate books for the 1860s will reveal when the date of their going and a trawl of the later census returns will show where the tenants settled.

But that is for another time.  Tomorrow I want to pursue the mystery of Charles Bracegirgdle.

Pictures; Grantham’s Buildings High Lane,  m17675, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass detail from the 1847 Tithe map of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, advert for the auction of the five cottages and land, Manchester Guardian 1865

Sandy Lane and the lost cottages

This is one of those pictures in the collection I keep returning to but which continues to retain its secrets.  

The caption states “old cottages in Sandy Lane after abandonment but before demolition.  The nearer was occupied by Mr Morris the Sweep.  His parrot was hung outside during good weather and he had a cylinder phonograph in the window.”

I am pretty sure that we are on the corner of Fairhaven Avenue and Sandy Lane and that the building behind the lean too is the side of number 2 Fairhaven.  It has the distinctive pattern of brick which you can still see today.

But we don’t have a date for the photograph or for the buildings but I rather think they may date from 1850 if not a little earlier, and the picture from the middle decades of the last century.

A trawl of the street directories and rate books  should pin the time Mr Morris and his neighbour last occupied the properties but that is for the future.

In the meantime there are a few things that we know about them.  They consisted of just two rooms and by the end of the 19th century into the 20th were both occupied by very old widows.

Mary Anne Nield at number 8 was 80 years old in 1911 and living with her unmarried daughter who described herself as a corset maker.

Her neighbour Charles Samuel Walker was 76 and gave his occupation as gardener and seems to have supported his 37 year old daughter.

And while we don’t know when they were demolished it must have been sufficiently late into the last century to make these some of the last one up one down brick dwellings in the township.

Finally I am left intrigued by Charles Morris.  He had been one of our three chimney sweeps in 1911 when he was aged 57.  In that year he was living with his wife Florence at number 12 Sandy Lane, which was a four roomed house. So we are with presented more questions.

Did he move into number 8 sometime later in the century, or has John Lloyd got the caption wrong and number 8 was never occupied by Mr Morris the Sweep, his parrot cylinder phonograph in the window?

All of which is why I keep returning to the photograph with as yet little success.  Ah well I suppose it will all turn on those directories and rate books.  But that is for another time.

And a little after I posted the story Ted Harris and Gary Page came back with information that narrows the time slot of when the picture was taken.
“I was wondering” Ted wrote, “if the road sign might help with dating.  A quick search has found that after 1947 new signs had a '+' rather than a 'x' on them.”

And Gary added, “the bill board in the picture is advertising wrestling at Belle Vue. The first wresting match at Belle Vue was in 1930 at the King’s Hall. The bill boards must have been there for some time as I remember them,  born 1958”

So possibly after 1930 and before 1947.

But having revisited the census records for 1911, I now know who lived in them, and their size.  Starting at the first which was no 4, closest to the hoardings, this consisted of 2 room, no 6, three rooms and no. 8, 2 rooms.

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester

Picture; from the Lloyd collection

A correction ………… down at Oswald Field with John Anthony Hewitt

Now, I like the way that stories on the blog are often followed up by contributions by people.

And today I am pleased that John Anthony Hewitt took the time to offer up a personal recollection on a story I ran yesterday, which was all about Oswald Field.*

Anthony wrote,

“Hi Andrew Simpson, good story, but I could feel my ears burning. Please allow me to correct an error in your narrative. You have referred to Claridge Road and Fielden Terrace in the same context, but that is not historically accurate. 

It was only during the 1950s that the name of Clarence Road was changed to Claridge Road. 

The 1894 map records Fielden Terrace as mentioned in your story, however, the 1915 map shows the name had changed to Fielden Avenue, a name retained to the present day. 

In fact, I have reason to believe that Fielden Terrace was the name of the road, whereas the row of houses was named Sunnyside. These houses have been demolished and bungalows built as replacement homes. A photograph of Sunnyside, aka Fielden Terrace, below is no m17819 from the ML Collection and dated 1873. 

The houses are numbered left to right 26-2, the house with the street and terrace names is no. 26 (ML has the numbers reversed). My childhood home was no. 22, third from the left. As a further anomaly, all the houses had 3-room cellars, including the coal storage room, except for nos 22-26, which had only 2-room cellars. 

The cellar room at the back of the house had not been dug out with the handed down reason that the space was occupied by a very large tree. Now that I am older and have become more familiar with local history I rather suspect that the real reason may have concerned possible marl pits, although this is no more than a suspicion”.

To which I shall just say thank  you to John Anthony

John Anthony Hewitt © 2019

Location; Chorlton

Picture; Chorlton-cum-Hardy, 2-26 Fielden Avenue, Sunnyside (2-4), 1973 m17819, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

* Oswald Field, five cottages, a slice of rural Chorlton, and a bit of a mystery part 1, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2019/06/oswald-field-five-cottages-slice-of.html

Living at Lane End in two rooms, more stories of one up one downs, part 2

This is a familiar enough picture and has cropped up in various collections over the years. It may date from the 1890s and there will be many who still remembered this junction of High Lane, Barlow Moor Road and Sandy Lane by its old name of Lane End, and a few might still have referred to it as Brundrett’s corner by virtue of the Brundrett family who had run a grocery shop at this point since the early 19th century.

And in away the Brundrett’s are the starting point to the story. Back in the 1840s Jeremiah Brundrett had owned the collection of four houses to the left of the white building which was the home and workshop of William Brownhill the wheelwright.

I suppose most of us looking at the picture would be drawn to the large house on the corner, and then to Brownhill's home, while the 4 terraced houses in a row would scarcely count a glance.
But that is a pity because they are another example of those one up one down cottages which the casual visitor could have seen across the township. These may well have been here by 1818 and certainly date from 1832 when their ownership qualified Jeremiah for a vote in the reformed Parliament of 1832.

Now looking at them it is hard to work out that they were one up one down properties, but the census returns record them as such. The internal lay out is lost to us but the front door would have opened directly into the downstairs room and a steep boxed in staircase would have led from the back of this room to the one upstairs. Earlier more simple properties dispensed with the stairs and just had a ladder made from a plank of wood with hand and foot holes. The ground floor would may have originally just been beaten earth or more likely stone slabs lay directly onto the bare earth.

In common with most such dwellings the lavatory would be at the back, and may have been shared. The rate books for the 1840s suggest that his tenants were paying about 2/6d a week. They were mainly manual workers and while by the end of the century the link with the land was broken there was still a gardener, a labourer, a chimney sweep and lamp lighter. In the earlier part of that century tracking how long families stayed is difficult but in the eight years from 1903 to 1911 each property changed hands at least once and in some cases twice in one year.

There were also cases of severe overcrowding. At the first of those houses in 1911, John and Margret Evans shared their two rooms with their three children while by contrast in another two the widowers Mary Ann Neild and Charles Walkden lived out their last years in the company of ageing children.

All three along with Brownhill’s home and business have long gone, and been replaced by two early 20th century semis while the land next to them which were the site of three slightly larger doubled fronted two op two downs is still and empty space. These also date from sometime in the early 19th century but I shall leave them till another day.

Picture; the Lloyd collection