King Cholera ......... stories of Public Health

I have been reflecting on those awful diseases that stalked our cities, towns and villages just over 170 years ago.

Of these Cholera was regarded by many as the worst and was often referred to as “Deadly” or “King Cholera” It is an infection caused by contaminated food and water. The main symptoms are diarrhoea and vomiting, and if untreated will continue until the patient becomes severely dehydrated. In the final stages a cholera victim will bring up what was called rice water and is almost clear liquid with fishy smell and resemble living skeletons.

Its impact was always going to be worst in the overcrowded and unsanitary parts of the city where large numbers were crowded together in back to back housing and narrow enclosed courts.

Span Court off Artillery Street is a fine example of a court and survived into the 1960s.

There are vivid descriptions of these places in the 1840s by writers like Frederick Engels, Leon Faucher and Dr Kay, as well as official reports.

The Report of the General Board of Health on the Epidemic Cholera of 1848 & 1849, drew attention to the fact that in the Market Street district of Manchester half the cases of Cholera were from the inhabitants of courts and cellar dwellings, which were in close proximity to open privies where the water supply was of a “poor quality” often served several cottages and was generally only “turned on for an hour day”

More revealing are the case notes of Dr Henry Gaulter who experienced the first outbreak of Cholera during the May to December of 1832. He kept a detailed record of the first three hundred patients he attended describing their physical condition, the onset of the disease and their living conditions but was forced to abandon the exercise as the numbers increased.

 Here are the fit, not so fit and in many cases undernourished residents of streets which were overcrowded and dirty, like Martha Chorlton aged 57 of 10 John Street Ancoats, who lived in a “locality, crowding, filth, &c. Street in a very populous and poor neighbourhood.”*

Or Thomas Cavanagh aged 5 and his mother Elizabeth who lived at 5 Wakefield-street Little Ireland which “fronted an open area but an impure stream whose channel does the function of a sewer, passes by the door to adjoining field where it collects and stagnates: house and inhabitants very filthy: three children and two adults on a straw bed.” 

And so it goes on but not all the streets were dirty and not all those who would contract the disease were poor. The rich had servants who may have had relatives in the more depressed parts of the city and might walk the disease in by the servant’s entrance.

Nor should we forget that the wealthy often lived in close proximity to run down areas. So that very posh set of late 18th century houses on St John Street off Deansgate was just  next door to Spam Court and surrounded by roads where there was overcrowding and Cholera.

Perhaps also we should be careful not to over state the impact of the disease on the city. There were just over 142,000 people in the city of which according to Gaulter 1,325 died.  But then there is the danger of falling into that callous numbers game which judges deaths in terms of statistics while for the individual just one death is a tragedy.

And the chances were that for those who contracted it death was a pretty strong out come. So for those who caught Cholera in Manchester over 50% would die while in Chorlton on Medlock the figure was 38% and in Salford 30%. These are not odds that I would fancy.

Nor I think should we feel that it was just the cities and towns that suffered. Rural areas were equally unsanitary and diseases like typhus and typhoid were according to the Poor Law Commissioners real threats in the countryside.

Which of course brings us to Chorlton, and in the next few weeks I shall be reporting on child mortality, sickness and public health in our own township but in the meantime I am happy to say that the worst is over here on Beech Road.

Picture; Span Court, south side of Artillery Street, J.Ryder, 1965 m00211, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass & New Wakefield Street, Little Ireland today from the collection of Andrew Simpson

 Sources, Gaulter Henry, The Origin and Progress of the Malignant Cholera, 1833, London, & Appendix A, To the Report of the General Board of Health on the Epidemic Cholera of 1848 & 1849, 1850, London

* Gaulter

Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester ................ nu 53 Silver Street, a bus station and some nasty history

Now this is Chorlton Street Bus Station in the 1960s and the image presents a bit of mystery, but more of that later.

Chorlton Street Bus Station, 1964

For now it is that gap between the office block and the ramp to the right of the picture and Chorlton Street which gave its name to the bus station which interests me.

That gap was the continuation of Silver Street.

You can still walk down Silver Street from Aytoun Street which ran on to David Street but my bit has vanished.

Back in the 1850s Silver Street and its neighbours were a warren of small closed courts leading off narrow alleys and filled with small back to back houses.

They were not perhaps the worst the city had to offer but they were neither the best.  In his case notes during the cholera outbreak of 1832, Dr Gaultier offers up a a vivid picture of the area. Chorlton Street he wrote “was tolerably clean and open but the vicinity crowded and populous.”*

Silver Street, 1849

But the home of the Bullock family was dire.

Mr and Mrs Bullock lived in one room with their two children and Mr Bullock’s mother.

The room was on the upper storey of a “filthy and crowded house” and was equally as “filthy.”

Even before they contracted cholera none were seen to be in good health and baby Martha aged eight months was “ricketty, and emaciated.”

In the course of just one week all of them died of cholera.

A month later our doctor was back in Silver Street attending Jane White who lived in a cellar and who died just days after contracting the disease.

Today Chorlton Street and Silver Street look far removed from the mass of courts, alleys and crowded houses of 1832 and that stretch of Silver Street occupied by Jane White is now underneath Chorlton Street Bus Station.

And here is the puzzle with that first picture, because read the histories of the bus station and they all agree that it was opened in 1950, redesigned in 1967 with the addition of the multi story car park and went through a major rebuild in 2002.

Major Street and the lost Silver Street, 1963

Now all of that is fine, but the caption on the picture offers up a date of 1964 which means that somebody is wrong.

I am confident someone will offer an explanation for the date of the rebuilt bus station and while I wait I suggest that those wishing to walk the past can just step back into the past can get a stab at it, because that vanished bit of Silver Street is now the entrance to a small car park between the back of Yates’ and the car park ramp, while the small road that runs along the bus station is the continuation of Major Street, but that is for another time.

Silver Street, 2016

But that is not quite all, because soon after I posted the story Andy Roberston sent me this picture of the corner of Silver Street where it joins Princess Street.

In may haste to complete the story I had failed to go looking for any more of Silver Street.  So the intrepid seeker after lost streets of Manchester can walk along another bit of my street, although it does end in a car park.

Location; Manchester

*The Origin and Progress of the Malignant Cholera in Manchester, Henry Gaulter M.D., 1833case notes no 5-8, page 162 and nu 71, page 178

Pictures; Chorlton Street Bus Station,  W. Higham, 1964, m56893, the ramp under construction 1963, W. Higham, m56982, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass  Silver Street from Andy Robertson  2016, and detail of Silver Street 1849 from the OS map of Manchester & Salford, 1849, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

Travelling on the railway in 1830

I wish I could  have rattled along on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway sometime in the 1830s.

But I can't so instead I will offer up the memories of one man who travelled from Manchester to Liverpool during the first decade after it had been built.

This was the remarkable; J.T.Slugg who came to Manchester as a young man and in 1881 published a description of the city of his youth.  He was there at the opening of the railway and recalled that “the morning opened most propitiously as to the weather and at about half past ten I set off with my brother and friend to witness the wonderful sight of a train being moved without a horse.”

But for me it is the comments on the daily running of what was the first passenger railway in the world which are more fascinating.

There were only seven trains a day each way and first and second class passengers had their own trains.  The last first class train left at 5 p.m. and the last second class at 5.30.p.m., but at a time  when the Manchester markets were still a significant factor in the city’s economy “on Tuesday and Saturday, which were then the two principle market days, the last train left at 6 p.m.”

Slugg also seized on the fact that while this was a first the railway still straddled both the past and the future, so the some of the carriages resembled the old stage coaches complete with luggage on the roof with the guard sitting beside it.

Just as every stage coach was designated by some name, so each first class carriage was designated in like manner.  

Amongst the names I remember were King William, Queen Adelaide, Duke of wellington, Sir Robert Peel, Earl Wilton and William Huskinson.”

And like so much of what the railway laid down as not changed over much.  

Steam locomotives more or less resembled the winning design, and carriages as these from the late 1830s testify looked very similar.

Pictures; Traveling the 1830s way, 2008, from the collection of Andrew Simpson Greater Manchester Science and Industry Museum

*Slugg, J.T., Reminiscences of Manchester, 1881 page 234

Looking for our memorial to Manchester’s Cholera deaths

Now I may well have missed it, but I don’t think we have a memorial to those who perished in the great Cholera outbreak of 1832.

The Cholera Monument, Sheffield, 2006

And I say that because today I came across Sheffield’s monument to its Cholera victims, which stands just a bit west of the railway station, situated in grounds that were laid out in 1850, fifteen years after the monument was completed and seventeen years after the epidemic which killed 402 people.

402 victims of the disease were buried in grounds between Park Hill and Norfolk Park adjoining Clay Wood. Money from the treasurers of the Board of Health was set aside for a monument for the site.

Cholera was regarded by many as the worst of the killer diseases that swept through our towns and cities in the 19th century.

It was often referred to as “Deadly” or “King Cholera” and is an infection caused by contaminated food and water.

The main symptoms are diarrhea and vomiting, and if untreated will continue until the patient becomes severely dehydrated. In the final stages a cholera victim will bring up what was called rice water and is almost clear liquid with fishy smell and resemble living skeletons.

Its impact was always going to be worst in the overcrowded and unsanitary parts of the city where large numbers were crowded together in back to back housing and narrow enclosed courts.

New Wakefield Street, 2004

There are vivid descriptions of these places in the 1840s by writers like Frederick Engels, Leon Faucher and Dr Kay, as well as official reports.

The Report of the General Board of Health on the Epidemic Cholera of 1848 & 1849, drew attention to the fact that in the Market Street district of Manchester half the cases of Cholera were from the inhabitants of courts and cellar dwellings, which were in close proximity to open privies where the water supply was of a “poor quality” often served several cottages and was generally only “turned on for an hour day”.

More revealing is the case notes of Dr Henry Gaulter who experienced the first outbreak of Cholera during the May to December of 1832. He kept a detailed record of the first three hundred patients he attended describing their physical condition, the onset of the disease and their living conditions but was forced to abandon the exercise as the numbers increased.

Little Ireland, 1844

 Here is the fit, not so fit and in many cases undernourished residents of streets which were overcrowded and dirty, like Martha Chorlton aged 57 of 10 John Street Ancoats, who lived in a “locality, crowding, filth, &c. Street in a very populous and poor neighbourhood.” *

Or Thomas Cavanagh aged 5 and his mother Elizabeth who lived at 5 Wakefield-street Little Ireland which “fronted an open area but an impure stream whose channel does the function of a sewer, passes by the door to adjoining field where it collects and stagnates: house and inhabitants very filthy: three children and two adults on a straw bed.”

And so, it goes on but not all the streets were dirty and not all those who would contract the disease were poor.

The rich had servants who may have had relatives in the more depressed parts of the city and might walk the disease in by the servant’s entrance.

Span Court, 1965

Nor should we forget that the wealthy often lived near run down areas. So that very posh set of late 18th century houses on St John Street off Deansgate was just next door to Span Court and surrounded by roads where there was overcrowding and Cholera.

Perhaps also we should be careful not to overstate the impact of the disease on the city.

There were just over 142,000 people in the city of which according to Gaulter 1,325 died.  But then there is the danger of falling into that callous numbers game which judges deaths in terms of statistics while for the individual just one death is a tragedy.

And the chances were that for those who contracted it death was a pretty strong outcome. So, for those who caught Cholera in Manchester over 50% would die while in Chorlton on Medlock the figure was 38% and in Salford 30%. These are not odds that I would fancy.

Nor I think should we feel that it was just the cities and towns that suffered. Rural areas were equally unsanitary and diseases like typhus and typhoid were according to the Poor Law Commissioners real threats in the countryside.

So where are Manchester’s memorials.?  I can think of the inscription on the foot of the cross in St John’s Gardens, and the plaque in St Michael’s Fields in Angel Meadow, but I am stumped as to a specific Cholera one.

That said I bet there is, and someone will tell me.

I hope so.

Picture; Cholera Monument, Sheffield, Gregory Deryckère, 2006,** New Wakefield Street, Little Ireland 2004, from the collection of Andrew Simpson,Little Ireland, 1844, from the OS of Manchester & Salford, 1844, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/  and Span Court, south side of Artillery Street, J. Ryder, 1965 m00211, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass 

 *Gaulter Henry, The Origin and Progress of the Malignant Cholera, 1833, London, & Appendix A, To the Report of the General Board of Health on the Epidemic Cholera of 1848 & 1849, 1850, London

**Gregory Deryckère, permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation

The shock of the new ...........travelling the railway in 1830

Now I am not sure that some of the detail is completely accurate on this painting by A.B. Clayton of the “Inaugural journey of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway 1830” but what I like is the way that it captures the shock of the new.

There rattling along at an impressive speed is the future while looking on are two oldish chaps who were no doubt born in the previous century when the canal was the cutting edge of transport technology and the horse the fastest you could travel.

One of the men leans on the sign warning the curious of the dangers presented by the innocent line of railway track.  And it was at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway that William Huskinson the MP for Liverpool was killed when he was run over by Locomotive.

Now there are plenty of descriptions of the opening day and memories of people who travelled the trains from Liverpool to Manchester but my favorite is from J T Slugg’s wonderful book Reminiscences of Manchester published in 1881, and describing the city in the 1830s*.  Slugg lived here in Chorlton and knew Thomas Ellwood whose writings on the township are still required reading by anyone who wants to know what the village was like in the 19th century.

Likewise Slugg paints a detailed picture of “this system of travelling” which “it seemed impossible to jump from old practices and habits into a new order of things without passing a transition stage [so] as there had been two classes of passengers by coach – inside and outside- so there were at first only two classes of trains. The first class trains went at 7 and 10 a.m., and 2 and 5 p.m.; and the second class at 7-30 a.m., and 1 and 5-30 p.m."

And of course the accommodation varied with the cost of the fare.  For 7s you got to sit in a first class carriage holding four passengers and for a shilling less you shared with five others.  Second class cost 5s for “glass coaches and in open carriages, 3s.6d.”  Those who had not booked in advance were not permitted to travel.

But perhaps the most revealing insight into that age of transition was that “there were no wayside stations except at Newton, and [so] the train stayed anywhere on the line to suit the convience of passengers.”

Moreover the “directors announced that they were determined to prevent the practice of supplying liquor on the road, and requested that passengers not alight, [but] before this regulation as to liquor was issued I [Slugg] took a journey to Liverpool in the stand up boxes, and well recollect on the return stopping at Patricroft, opposite to an inn on the left-hand side and seeing a young woman, carrying a large tray of glasses containing liquors and cigars, which she supplied to many of the passengers.”

But that is enough for now.

Pictures; Inaugural journey of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway 1830, A.B.Clayton, in the public domain and the rest  from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Slugg, J.T.,Reminiscences of Manchester, 1881

Walkng the streets of Manchester in 1830 in the company of J. T. Slugg and in search of Antonio Preduzzi.

St Ann's Church, 1793

I am on the streets of Manchester in the early 1830s in the company of J T Slugg* and in search of Antonio Preduzzi.

Over the last few days I have been exploring that Italian connection with the city and it has led back from Little Italy in Ancoats at the end of the 19th century  to the Preduzzi brothers who came from Lombardy and settled here in 1810 starting up a series of successful businesses.

They were living in what at the time was reckoned to be one of the most exciting places in Britain and which was talked about  as a model of the new age.

Here could be seem the raw enterprise and keen innovation of the new capitalism reflected in the ever increasing number of cotton mills, dye works and the acres of poorly constructed homes for a workforce which was increasing every day.

And because these men of industry wanted a quicker and cheaper way of transporting their products to and from Liverpool they built a railway which was not just a railway but the first passenger railway using technology which would define how locomotives were built and pretty much set the seal on how a railway would be run.

Of course we all know that behind those smoking power houses of cotton manufacture and great show warehouses there were the mean and narrow streets leading to even meaner and darker courts where little light or fresh air penetrated but which were home to all those who toiled for long hours and little remuneration.

This is that other side of the new way of doing things and was much commentated on by Dr Kay, Dr Gaultier, Frederic Engels and a possession of curious visitors.

And as revealing as these accounts are of the horrors of Manchester they are often paraded at the expense of the more benign descriptions of the city in the 1830s and 40s and for this I have turned to J.T. Slugg who arrived fresh faced and not long out of his teens from Bacup in the March of 1829.

The Infirmary, 1824

Fifty years later he set down his memories of the place which began with a walk up Market Street to Piccadilly and the Infirmary.

Less than a decade before he had arrived in the city this main thoroughfare had still been a narrow way flanked on either side by buildings which dated back a century or more.

These were home to taverns, sweet and bookshops the odd warehouse and a number of coaching offices. And in an age soon to be dominated by the railway it is a fitting reminder that for long distance travel the stage coach was still supreme.

And this was still at a time when “there was a very heavy duty on all kinds of glass, and as a consequence not a single shop-window contained any plate glass, but were composed of small squares of ordinary glass.”**

These would have been the sort of shop fronts that would have been familiar to Antonio and his brother.

He had opened a shop as a picture dealer in Spear Street around 1810, and later moved to Tib Street before settling at 31 Oldham Street. By this time, he was trading as a carver and gilder, and maker of looking glasses and picture frames. Oldham Street in the 1820s was a wide street containing ‘some very elegant shops and houses’.  Antonio's shop was above a confectioner's on the right-hand side from Swan Street.

The Infirmary, 1793

Here he framed and glazed needlework, drawings and pictures; re-gilded and silvered old frames and mirror plates; and made and repaired barometers, thermometers and hydrometers.

He also had premises at 44 Deansgate in the early 1820s and in 1831, to larger premises at 33 Piccadilly, opposite the Infirmary.

Like his previous shop, this one was on the first floor with a flight of steps leading up to it. The shop extended quite a long way back and had two long counters and a little sitting room beyond. There were also workshops on the premises.“***

This placed him in a prime position  which he shared with a few other shops, some rather fine houses and the offices of the Manchester and Salford Waterworks Company which supplied the town with its drinking water.

33 Picadilly, the shop of Preduzzi & Co

Directly opposite was the Infirmary which “was a plain brick building  [and also] included the lunatic asylum.  Infrontwas the sheet of water known as the Infirmary Pond, separated from the footpath by palisading.  

At the Infirmary gates stood the public baths, the income arising from them being appropriated to the support of the Infirmary.  

The charge for the cold bath to non subscribers was 1s.; to subscribers of half-a-guinea, 10d.; and to those of a guinea, 9d.  

The price of a vapour bath was 5s; of a vapour and hot bath when used together, 6s.; and of the shampooing bath, 7s.”****


And while we are familiar with the huge show warehouses like S & J Watts on Portland Street which were built expressly to showcase the products of our textile mills, there was not a “single warehouse in either of these streets, Mosley Street, Portland Street, Peter Street, Oxford Road or Dickenson Street” but soon enough they would make their appearance at the cost of hundred of buildings in the neighbourhood which would be destroyed.

I don’t know what Antonio made of these changes which were transforming his adopted city.  When he had arrived in 1810 it was still possible to walk in to open fields just a short way along Oldham Road while to the south all of Hulme, Moss Side and Chorlton on Medlock were pleasant open space.

And yet by his death in the Chorlton Workhouse in 1846 great swathes of these spaces were the preserve of terraced houses, cotton mills and dye works.

Pictures;St Anne's Church and Manchester Infirmary from the Laurent map 1793, 33 Piccadilly and the Infirmary from the 1844 OS of Manchester & Salford, by permission of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ the buildings opposite the infirmary including the premise of Peduzzi & Co, 1824, m5291, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council  

*J.T. Slugg, Reminiscenes of Manchester, 1881
** Slugg, chapter 1
*** Collections Department, Museum of Science & Industry
**** Slugg, chapter 1

"swifter than a bird flies," travelling by train in 1830

I am back at Castlefield and getting a sense of what it might have been like to travel in the first ever passenger railway from Manchester to Liverpool.

Now there are plenty of accounts of the thrill and novelty of taking to the rails and that by Fanny Kemble well conveys the magic,

“..swifter than a bird flies … you cannot conceive what the sensation of cutting the air was; the motion is as smooth as possible …when I closed my eyes, this sensation of flying was quite delightful and strange beyond description…”

So instead I want to start at the beginning of a journey which is the bit often missed out.  It was a world of hand written railway tickets, of luggage that to was stored on the roof of the railway carriage and where the wealthy had their own trains.

And it began with buying the ticket.  The company opened an office in the heart of the city on the corner of New Cannon Street and Market Street where passengers could be booked and where first class passengers would then be taken by coach for free to the station on Liverpool Road, second class passengers having to make their own way.

It was just one of the many distinctions that reflected the great social divide and it extended to the fact that there were separate trains for the two classes which departed at different times.

On arrival at the station first class passengers entered a much larger booking hall and sat in an equally grand waiting room.  By comparison the booking hall and waiting room given over for second class passengers was smaller and appears to have had just one fireplace compared to the two which warmed their wealthier travellers.

But the divisions extended beyond just a first and second class service, because within each there were further distinctions.

“The first class carriages contained three compartments, the middle one resembling the body of a stage coach, something like a capital U, whilst before and behind were smaller ones, resembling a post chaise.  The carriages containing outside passengers were oblong boxes, painted blue, without seats and without roof.  In a little while seats were provided, and after that a roof was supplied supported by iron rods.”*

All of which was reflected in the cost. For 7s you got to sit in a first class carriage holding four passengers and for a shilling less you shared with five others.  Second class cost 5s for “glass coaches and in open carriages, 3s.6d.”  

Now it is perhaps worth noting that an agricultural worker might earn between 11s and 20s for a weeks’ work while a builder’s labourer was paid about 18s and a police constable 20s, so travelling on our brand new railway was not cheap.

And in many ways it was not so different from the old stage coach which given that the company copied much of that older form of transport shouldn’t be surprise us.  So at the station there were no platforms and passengers climbed into the train just as you would a stage coach, and departure was signalled by the guard blowing a horn.

But the train was not a stage coach and it was fraught with many more dangers.  The death of the MP William Huskinson on the opening day was a timely reminder that far more care needed to be taken.  He had been run down by an oncoming train and this very much underlined the need for a timetable and an accurate and universally agreed time which would be the same in Manchester as it was in Liverpool.  No one wanted to see two trains on the same track colliding with each other because one had got the time wrong.

So by 1840 we had “railway time” which was the quaint name given to the practice of standardising time along a railway route.

It was first adopted by the Great Western Railway in 1840, just a decade after the first trains left Liverpool for Manchester.  Within three years all the railway companies had adopted it and across stations everywhere local time gave way to the same time based on “London Time” which in turn was set at Greenwich by the Royal Observatory.

It was as Ruskin reflected “your railway, when you come to understand it is only a device for making the world smaller.”
And this attention to detail extended to refusing to wait for passengers who having booked a seat were late to arrive at the station.  As the Company noted “in order to insure punctuality in the time of starting, which has frequently been prevented by persons claiming to be booked after the appointed time, no passenger, unless previously booked will be admitted within the outer door of the station after the clock has struck the hour of departure.”

But we were still in a world of transition and so “passengers too late to take their seats or otherwise prevented going may receive back half the fare paid, if claimed not later than the day after that which the places were booked.”

And tickets were still had written, with the clerk “holding books made of yellow paper containing foil and counterfoil, on each of which your name was written, with one part was torn out and given to you”

Now I know I would never have been one of those passengers but just maybe I might have been a guard or fireman and perhaps here there are more stories after all.  In the meantime a little of what it might have been like can be gleamed from the permanent exhibitions at the station which is now the Manchester Museum of Science and Technology, where they have reconstructed the first class booking hall, all a little different from John Lloyd’s picture of the same place during the 1950s when it belonged to British Railways.

Pictures; Replica of Planet under full steam, the station front on Liverpool Road, and Planet and a blue box from the collection of Andrew Simpson and the interior of the First class booking hall from the Lloyd collection

* Slugg, T.J., Reminiscences of Manchester, 1881

Liverpool Road Railway Station, at the cutting edge of techonology

How do you design and build something which has never been done before?

A daunting enough challenge in the 21st century but even more so just thirty years into the 19th century.

And this is the railway story for the day, when an enterprising group of Manchester businessmen set about creating a cheap and quick way of transporting goods from Liverpool to Manchester and back again.

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway did it by both looking back and forwards and in the process made some delightful history.

Who today would float a competition to see which form of traction would be used on the railway and open the contest to everyone from professional engineers to eccentric amateurs?

This was the Rainhill Trials conducted in the October of 1829 with a prize of £500 and the possibility that the winner would make transport history.

And this was a major civil engineering project which called on the knowledge, skills and workforce which had built our canal network and it was the canals which offered a way of storing goods which would be coming in and out of the station complex on a daily basis.

Canal warehouse design had been perfected during the last half of the 18th century.

The main features of the design were a series of loading points called loop holes on each floor and access points for barges to move directly into the building.  Similar loopholes were situated on the roadside of the warehouse.  This enabled goods to be moved from one side to another.  One of the best of these is sited opposite Dukes 92 and has recently been renovated.

The original 1830 warehouse used a combination of loopholes and arches designed to allow wagons to be pushed into the building.  After the great fire in 1866, which destroyed the two newer warehouses, this practice was stopped. It is still possible to see where the lines ran into the building. Turntables existed to turn and push wagons into the warehouse.  Maps of the period show these turntables all over the site. The last one was only torn up in the late 90s.

All along the rail side it is possible to see changes that have been made to the original design.   One of the arches has been enlarged and one of the loopholes adapted.  It is possible to see some of the early winding gear above one of the loopholes, and the different brickwork above other loopholes can see the evidence for where others once were.

And now of course the warehouse along with the station is part of the museum.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson, 2002

Liverpool Road Station, the first and always my favourite

Of all the stations this one is my favourite.  

It was opened in 1830 and closed to passenger traffic just 14 years later, a victim of its own success.   It is a place I return to regularly and one that I have already written about. *

So I don’t intend to go into its history right now.  But it is a place to visit, and standing in the carriage shed built in 1831 you get a sense of just how important the place is in the history of our railways.

Its roof would not have been out of place in a medieval barn with its wooden beams supported on cast iron pillars, and substitute the iron for wood posts and it could be any building across a thousand years.  But in the distance is the sweeping curve of the roof of Central Station all glass and iron gracefully rising 27 meters from the platform floor.

Here then are the beginnings of our railway architecture and its high point separated by just 50 years.  It was an uncertain beginning with the railway company unsure as to whether to have locomotives to haul the passengers and wagons or rely on static steam engines placed along the route which would use steam powered capstans and cables.

Even the station buildings are a compromise.  The station master’s house on the corner of Liverpool Road and Water Street had been the home of a local industrialist and the booking halls had been designed to imitate the fine homes of the wealthy.

Not so Central Station which originally was to have a grand set of railway offices and a hotel at the front of the place, or the even more ornate and impressive sweep of the redesigned Victoria Station.

Tomorrow; how do you design and build for storing goods at the first proper railway complex in the world?

* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/castlefield-story-part-five-coming-of.html 

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson