A little bit of our unremarkable past ...... that hut in the Rec

Now here is a little piece of our past which makes me very happy.

The picture was taken in 1980 and confirms that I wasn’t imagining that once the Rec which new comers call Beech Road Park did indeed have its own hut.

I have no idea when it was built.

I know that it doesn’t appear on photographs from the 1900s but is there by the 1940s, because it shows up in a picture of our own barrage balloon.

Nor am I quite sure when it vanished.

All of which I suppose is indicative of the state of my memory.

But there it is, and for those now in the 40s who sat on its bench on long winter’s nights passing the time till they were old enough to visit a pub, here is a memory.

And soon after the story was posted, Bruce Wemyss commented, 

"Andrew Simpson I remember it well in the sixties and would guess it was removed in the early 70s 

It was turned on by the Park Keeper each spring and back off again in the Autumn Chorlton Park and Longford park each had a couple 

They where double sided and operated by pressing a Brass button on the top of the font 

They we’re all the same design I suspect Manchester Corporation will have some pictures hidden away somewhere 

As a footnote In the sixties and early seventies we local lads played football in the Rec most weekends and summer evenings sometimes with games going on all day and well into the evening breaking off to go home for lunch and tea it was not unusual for there to be 12 to 15 on each team Great times I feel very lucky to have grown up in Chorlton back in the day"

All of which was repeated by my own kids, who did the same Bruce, and had to be called in at night
  

We even had a special box full of their friends football boots for the games, and my lads would exhaust shed loads of their friends which came and went.

Location; Chorlton.

Picture; the hut on the Rec and football games, 1980, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The Lost Chorlton pictures ......... no 15. .........

 Now I am pretty confident that this one will bring up a rich collection of memories.

It continued trading into the 1980s and was a wonderful place where the chesses were piled high and there was pretty much any cheese you wanted.

And l have been corrected by John Paul Moran who tells me it continued trading well in to the 1990s. Thanks John.

Location; Wilbraham Road










Picture; the bacon and cheese shop, 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The Lost Chorlton pictures ......... no 8. ......... giving the graveyard a make over

This was when the parish church yard got its last makeover.

But it will have been in the early 1980s and involved clearing away many of the old gravestones, and landscaping the area including picking out the footprint of the old church, which had stood on the site since 1800 and replaced an earlier chapel which dated back to around 1512.

I can’t exactly remember the old cluttered grave yard or when the makeover happened but the picture will date from the early 1980s soon after it had been completed, when the trees and bushes had yet to grow.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; the churchyard, 1981 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The Lost Chorlton pictures ......... no 9. ......... Beech Road

Now I had quite forgotten this picture, which had sat as a negative in the cellar for four decades.

And I am rather pleased it has come to light.

We are on Acres Road and to our right is the box factory which had once been a laundry, and opposite is the hair dressers which was to become Cafe on the Green.

Directly ahead is the pet shop which closed earlier in 2019, and beside it The Village Wholefood Shop.

Back then there was a debate about that bit of open land, with some of the traders urging the Corporation to make it into a car park which the Council agreed to if the traders made a contribution to the cost.

This never happened and what had once been a fine house before it was demolished remain open land for another decade.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; Beech Road, 1979 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The Lost Chorlton pictures ......... no 2. ......... on the corner of Stockton Road

This is the second in the short series of the lost and forgotten pictures of Chorlton.

It sat in our cellar with a heap of other old negatives, waiting for the moment I began using chemicals again to make prints.

Instead I got a scanner for Christmas which does the job without smelling out the house.

This one was taken on the corner of Beech and Stockton Road, long before the shop became a deli after being a gift shop.

There may even be some who remember it as a part of the Co-op which occupied the corner plot.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; Stockton Road, circa 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The Lost Chorlton pictures ......... before the trend

This is Beech Road as it was just forty years ago.

Where today there is a studio, a gallery, and a clothes shop, there was a flower shop which offered a selection of fruit and veg as a side line, an old fashioned hardware store and Dave the Butcher.

Now if you are of a certain age the smell of a hardware shop is a powerful reminder of how we once did things.

The floor was invariably always the bare timbers, and there was that pungent smell of paraffin, and waxed string.

You could buy anything from a small nut and bolt, to sheets of brown wrapping paper and sealing wax.

And had I been on Beech Road a full decade earlier I could have asked Mr Heger, the relative merits of pink paraffin, and just how many nails I would need to fasten down a lose floor board.

That said back then we did have our own photographic shop which traded from what is now Pottery Corner.

So some things haven’t changed.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; Beech Road, 1979 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The Lost Chorlton pictures ......... no1. ..... out across the fields

Now some will already have picked up on the  series, The lost Manchester Collection, and the story behind how the pictures came to light.*

And this is the off shoot, being an occasional series from The lost and forgotten pictures of Chorlton.

It will have been taken around 1979 and strictly speaking isn't in Chorlton.

For those who want to know, it was taken in front of the weir built in the 18th century to break flood water from crashing into the viaduct of the Duke's Canal.

The spire is the chapel at the local cemetery beside Hawthorn Lane.

The lane  originally ran as far as St Mathew's Church.

Location; Chorlton and Stretord

Picture; from the collection of Andrew Simpson, 1979

*The lost Manchester Collection, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20lost%20Manchester%20Collection

Eighty-six years in the story of the Rec on Beech Road

I don’t usually do then and now pictures, and certainly not without a story, but today I shall.

Here are two both from the Wilton end of the Rec.

They are separated by about 80 years, and in the interval we had a bowling green which many remember, but not me.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; on the Rec, sometime in 1900 from the Lloyd Collection and again in 1980 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The Lost Chorlton pictures ......... no 7. ......... snow across the meadows

The meadows are a special place for me.

During the time the lads were growing up it was a place we went to a lot, often with the dog and always looking for adventures.

More recently it became a subject for research, because long before it became a nature reserve, a place to tip household rubbish or even before the sewage works, it was farmed as meadowland.

This was a particular form of farming which involved the flooding draining and flooding again of the open land in a specific way and designed to grow “early grass” for feeding to the cattle.

Sometime in the winter of 1978 or '79 I wandered across the stretch from Brookburn Road to the Mersey.

It was a bitterly cold day, more cold than we get these days and the snow stubbornly refused to melt.

I suppose if I checked back using the weather records I could pinpoint the exact year but I won’t.

Location; Chorlton






Picture; the meadows,1978-79 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

A familiar scene of Chorlton Green .............. with a few twists

Now at first glance, this appears a run of the mill picture of Chorlton Green with the lych gate, parish church yard and the pub in the distance.

Look a bit closer and there is still a telephone kiosk at the head of the lane, the church yard has yet to have its makeover and the United Servicemen’s Club was still selling pints.

We are on the green in the late 1970s or early ‘80s and it would be a full thirty years and a bit before the village school would be converted into residential properties.

The small housing development along Finney Drive was not more a than a decade old and the large barn which once belonged to Mr Higginbotham the farmer and which was on our right was still used by the building firm of Walkers.

Which just leaves me to say that the little lane behind the telephone kiosk will be as old as the church yard which dates back to the 16th century, and had you strolled down it at any time from the 18th century into the 19th  it would have taken you  past a farm and its out houses to the pond beside the old Bowling Green which a series of landlords rented out to gentlemen anglers.

Later after the pond vanished it was still used as a cut through and at one time was known by Marion's children as the Bumpy Way.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; Chorlton Green circa 1978 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The Lost Chorlton pictures ......... no 17. .........

It’s odd just what you forget.

Now Richard and Muriel’s green grocer’s shop on Beech Road is remembered with fondness by many of us but its neighbour on the corner with Acres Road has long been a mystery to me.

I know that back at the beginning of the 20th century it was an iron mongers and later before the last world war was a cycle shop that also did repairs.

After that I am a bit hazy until in the late 70s it was briefly a piano shop before its long association with food and booze, first as Cafe on the Green and then a succession of bars and restaurants.

My old friend Marjorie remembered that after the war it became a hairdressers which in 1969 was listed as “Joan Newman ladies Hairdresser”.

And I just assumed that by the time I washed up on Beech Road in 1976 it was already a piano shop.

But not so because in 1979 I took this picture of Richard and Muriel’s and clearly it was still a hair dressers, which begs the question did I imagine the piano shop or have I just got my chronology a bit wrong?

Location; Chorlton




Picture; Beech Road, 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The day I thought I was in the country …… urban tales from Chorlton-cum-Hardy

Now, the purist will immediately point out I was not in Chorlton nor the countryside.

But on a hot summer’s day sometime at the end of the 1970s I rather thought I was.

I had taken myself off across the meadows and discovered the old weir at that bend in the Mersey.

The weir had been built in the 18th century to break the force of a flood surge which might have damaged the aqueduct carrying the Duke’s Canal.

The river regularly flooded in earlier centuries and once in the 1840s the force of that surge was so strong it damaged the weir itself.

Even now the base of the weir can still be marshy and after a wet winter the water will stretch out into the surrounding land.

On the day I discovered the spot there was just a hint of water but enough for the cows who grazed on the grass.

And it was the cows, the pasture and the steeple that offered up the illusion of somewhere rural.

Although I did have to frame the picture to miss the tower block and get the chapel of Stretford Cemetery in the centre.*

And before any one sneers, .... yes the quality of the pictures was poor.  In my defence I was just beginning to develop and print images using smelly photography and the negatives have sat in our cellar for over 40 years.

Location; the meadows west of the Mersey, circa 1978, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Stretford Cemetery, https://www.trafford.gov.uk/residents/births-deaths-and-marriages/burials-and-cremations/cemeteries-and-crematoria-in-Trafford/stretford-cemetery.aspx

The mystery at Ivygreen ..........

Now I know I am on Ivygreen Road and the date will be around 1980 but exactly where almost defeats me.

So, hence the mystery.

My very first inclination was that I took the pictures at the top end, but that wouldn’t have given me that clear view across to the pumping station.

All of which means that we are at the Bowling Green end, and this is the site of Allan Court.

And that offers up a surprise because it means that the blocks of flats post date my arrival, although I have no recollection of them being built.

But the entrance in the photograph corresponds to what is now the drive into the car park so I am fairly certain where I was on that winter day in 1980.

Added to which other pictures in the batch include views of the rear of the parish churchyard and a shot up St Clements Road to the village green.

So it follows that I was at the bottom of Ivygreen.

At which point there may be those that mutter about a non story, but not so, because both images give a very clear idea of what the meadows once looked like, before the trees and bushes were planted and before they matured to make it impossible to see far away across to the river.

All that we now need, is for someone to describe what had been here on this bit of land beside the road.

I rather think it was a builder’s yard which may have belonged to Joe Scott, and at one time also used by the Walker Brothers who later moved into the barn at Higginbotham’s Farm.

Well we shall see

Location; Chorlton

Picture; Ivygreen Road, 1980, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Standing on Chorlton Green ....... remembering the Oven Door

Now there is enough detail in the picture to anchor it in a time long before, but well within living memory.

We are of course on the old village which for a big chunk of the 19th century had been the Wilton family garden.

Directly ahead is the Horse and Jockey, but clearly not the one of today and off there to the right is the Oven Door which at one time was a competitor to that other bakery further up Beech Road.

And there will be some who remember when the Oven Door, was two shops of which the first was a pet shop.

Not that anyone will now know that the first of the two which stands next to the Beech was itself a pub called the Traveller’s Rest.

Although strictly speaking the Traveller’s Rest was actually a beer shop which had opened in the mid 1830s and for many years was run by the Nixon family who also ran that pub over the water.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; Chorlton Green, circa 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The Lost Chorlton pictures ......... no 3. ......... Barlow Moor Road ... 1979

Now I am not one to shout about the passing of the traditional high street.

I do wish that they hadn’t vanished, but online shopping, the big supermarkets and out of town retail trading have pretty much done for the time when Barlow Moor Road had a shoe shop, green grocer’s, along with a jewellers and an off license all in a short walk.

That time hasn’t yet passed out of living memory, but it will be fading, replaced by debates on the name s of the bars, cafes, and estate agents that have come and gone along the same parade of shops.

So for those who wanted to be reminded of Timpson’s and Victoria Wine and for those who never you knew they existed on this bit of Barlow Moor Road, here they are from 1979.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; Barlow Moor Road, circa 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The Lost Chorlton pictures ......... no 10. .........

Any discussion on which is the oldest retailer still in business will feature Etchells the newsagents.

Once the answer would have been Burt’s the Gentleman outfitters on Wilbraham Road which opened for business in the early 20th century, and followed by Richardson’s the bakers who started up on Beech Road in the late 1940s.

And while Etchell’s has a long pedigree, the title actually falls to Ken Foster’s Cycle shop on Barlow Moor Road.

That said the shop on the corner of Beech Road and Chequers has been a newsagents since it was built as has the chippy next door which is now a Chinese takeaway.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; Beech Road, 1979 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The Lost Chorlton pictures ......... no 5. ......... a shop

Now in the early 1980s there were those that believed the formation of the SDP would prove a mould breaking event which would transform British politics.

Extravagant claims were made about the future, and with that in mind the SDP rented out a shop on the corner of Barlow Moor Road and Wilbraham Road in what was a very prominent position for the General Election of 1983.

Some in the Labour Party feared that they might be beaten into third place, while others in the Conservative Party smiled at what they saw as a splitting of the vote on the centre and left of politics.

Here in Chorlton where we had joined the constituency of Manchester Withington, the four candidates, were Fred Silvester who was defending the seat for the Tories, , Francis Done for Labour, Bernard L Lever for the SDP and Michael Gibson who stood as an Independent.

In the event while the Tories were returned there was a swing of 3.4% away from them and Labour achieved 34% of the vote, with the SDP polling 24%.

Four years later the seat was won by Keith Bradley representing Labour, with a swing of 4.8% with third place going to the Liberals.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; the shop, 1983, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The Lost Chorlton pictures ......... no 11. ......... the start of a trend?

It is easy to pass glib comments about the demise of the traditional shops in Chorlton and the rise of the bar culture.

And there will be those who make the point that as I wrote a history of Chorlton pubs and bars with Peter Topping I may be a little biased.

But not so.  Long before we published the Chorlton edition of Manchester Pubs- The Stories Behind The Doors, I had been writing about the emergence of the “night economy”.  The coming of online shopping, the giant supermarkets and the Arndale have pretty much done for that tradition retail model I grew up with.

I am sad to see it go but with its disappearance there was a real possibility that across the township there would just be lots of empty premises which could not be filled with charity shops or fast food outlets.

Nor is this a recent phenomenon as the picture testifies.

As early as 1983 shops were becoming vacant, in a trend which was to continue into the next two decades.

So the shop which was Booker’s the butchers was briefly the campaign headquarters of the SDP before becoming part of the bank, while next door what had once been Robinson’s the bakers, had been trading as Villains and in ’83 was a charity shop.

Of course all high streets are in a constant flux but around the 80s some would argue that here in Chorlton we were on the tipping point.

I await comment.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; Wilbraham Road, 1979 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*A new book on the pubs and bars of Chorlton, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20on%20the%20pubs%20and%20bars%20of%20Chorlton

Our lost graveyard .........

This is another of those scenes I have pretty much forgotten.

We are in the parish graveyard, sometime before the make over, which landscaped the area and made it a pleasant place to sit.

But the cost of the landscaping was the removal of many of the historic head stones which recorded those who had lived here since the 18th century.

These have vanished and with them lots of stories.

That said it is clear that the graveyard was in a poor state and had been since the demolition of the old church in 1949.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; the old graveyard 1980, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Of buses, barns and a Wesleyan church service

Now I wonder who caught the 132 or 134 from this bus stop opposite the parish churchyard, or for that matter where the bus went.

I can remember at one time there was a bus that came from town and dropped you on the green, but its number has long ago passed out of my memory.

On the rare occasion I did catch it, I ended up near the Horse and Jockey, which was always a surprise.

Leaving that aside the picture offers up a host of detail.

Just beyond that fence was the old barn which had belonged to the Higginbotham Farm and in the 1980s was used by the Walker Brothers.

Years later in a conversation with Tony Walker, it turns out that in the barn there had been a stone block with an inscription that in the barn the Wesleyans had held religious services which was confirmed by Thomas Ellwood, who during the winter and spring of 1885-86 wrote 26 articles on the history of Chorlton-cum-Hardy.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; looking up St Clements Road, 1980 from the collection of Andrew Simpson