One camera ….. 1965 ….. and a collection of lost scenes

It is 60 years ago that this collection of images was taken.

"Clearance in Hulme", 1965

They cover Manchester, Stretford and out to Chorlton and Wythenshawe and are a mix of industrial scenes, some old historic buildings and more than a few of well-known city centre sites.

What they have in common was the year they were taken and that originally they were colour slides.

The collection was donated to me by the daughter of the photographer, but somewhere along the line their identity was lost, although I am still looking for the letter, email or Facebook message which alerted me to the names of the woman who donated them and the photographer.

"Old Shambles' 1965

I hope by posting them the donor will come forward and I can change the credit from the 1965 collection to a name.

The first two are both of lost Manchester.

I have no idea where in Hulme the clearance area was, and I only have vague memories of the old Shambles.

But they are a unique record of how the City was in 1965 and just how it was about to change.

Location; Manchester

Pictures, “Clearance in Hulme” and “The Old Shambles showing Wellington Inn and Sinclair’s Oyster Bar,” 1965, from the 1965 Collection

Market Place 1894

We are on Market Place which ran directly north from Market Street opposite the Royal Exchange.  

It has gone of course.  Wiped out in the late 1960s when this part of the city was redeveloped and changed again after the IRA bomb in 1996  when the rather brutal 60s build was swept away creating the walkway to Shambles Square and Exchange Square.

In one of those odd bits of historical coincidences this walkway almost follows the line of Market Place and puts us back at the site of the photograph which dates from before 1895.

Now I can be fairly confident of the date because by 1895 the licensee of the Wellington Inn was no longer Samuel Kenyon but Eliza Kenyon who was still there in 1909.  She may have been his widow or his daughter and there are two Samuel Kenyon’s listed in the Manchester Cemetery one who died in 1892 and another in 1894. But to find out more I shall have to crawl over the license records which is easy enough but not for today.  Suffice to say that Samuel was there in 1886.

Digging deeper William Chambers was established by 1895 and the Tweedale Restaurant had ceased trading sometime after 1903 and by 1909 was the premise of Robert Roberts & Co Ltd, tea and coffee merchants.

We shouldn’t be surprised because postcards of the period had a long shelf life  and I doubt that any one sending a card would be over bothered if a few of the traders had moved on.

And it is the postcard rather than the picture that interest me more.  It was sent on Saturday March 19th 1904 at 5.30 arriving in Italy on the 22nd.  It was addressed to Mr Bruno Zuculie, at Camp Martio 63 in Rome and Nellie of Humphrey Street One, Old Trafford wanted to know if Bruno “will keep up the exchange?”

The romantic in me wonders at what had gone on before and what might go on in the future, But alas we shall never know.

Pictures;, from the collection of Rita Bishop courtesy of David Bishop and a detail from Goad’s Fire Insurance map, showing the Market Place, circa 1886-1901, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

Back on Market Street sometime before 1908

I am back on Market Street sometime on a summer’s day in 1908.

I was last here a few days ago and have been drawn back to the detail in this postcard.

Today this side of the road on the way up from High Street to Piccadilly is dominated by the big white slab which is Debenhams and was once Pauldens.

But back then contained fifteen different businesses, ranging from the London City and Midland Bank, the Angel Hotel, H Samuel watchmaker, a tobacconists, a tourist agency and my own favourite Finningans Ltd, portmanteau manufactures.

Finningans' operated from numbers 113 & 115 Market Street and it is their shop front which can be made out in the detail of the picture.

 But no blog post would be complete without a tram and so here is tram car number 486 bound for Belle Vue about to enter Piccadilly accompanied by a hand cart on one side and surrounded by horse drawn cabs.

All of which reminds us that the horse was as much a part of our streets as the car is today.

There would have been horse drawn cabs, as well as carts and wagons.  All the main railway companies maintained stables near their warehouses and there were still blacksmiths listed in the city street directories.



Pictures; from a postcard of Market Street in the collection of Rita Bishop, courtesy of David Bishop

Our card was sent not from Manchester but from Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire and it was part of the Milton Series produced by Woolstone Brothers of London  and was a  hand coloured card which may have actually been produced in Saxony

In Shambles Square

Now the Old Wellington Inn was not somewhere I regularly went to.  

I guess that was because it was hidden away behind all those concrete buildings which went up in the 1970s as part of the Arndale development.

No matter how many umbrellas and tables were put out even on a sunny day sitting outside the pub was like sitting in a yard.  But ironically it was those very buildings that protected it from IRA bomb in 1996 and prompted the redevelopment of the area.

This led to the pub and the adjacent Sinclair’s Oyster Bar being dismantled, and moved 300 metres and rebuilt closer to the Cathedral and creating a  more pleasant open space than the one it had inhabited before.

I have to confess it is still not a pub I often go to, partly because it gets so busy and is still a bit off our beaten track.  But I think it works and Peter's painting does show it off to its best.

It is also somewhere I have written about already, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/market-place-1894.html

Pictures; the Welllington and Sinclairs circa 1976,  from the collection of Rita Bishop by kind permission of David Bishop and the painting of the Welllington Inn and Sinclairs today,  2011, © Peter Topping, web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk  facebook: www.facebook.com/paitningsfrompictures