The changing face of Beech Road

More by luck than good judgement I landed up on Beech Road in the winter of 1976. Of course back then it was a pretty ordinary collection of houses at the eastern end and the sort of shops and pubs that could be found anywhere across south Manchester running down to the green.

In the mid 1980s it went through a bit of a crisis as shops closed and stayed empty but along came the Lead Station and Primavera and the rest as they say is history.

Back then I was not fully attuned to the history of my road. Most of the buildings date from the 19th century and look pretty ordinary but there are still glimpse of its past which may date back to 16th century. The last wattle and daub cottage only went just over a hundred years ago and two of the oldest commercial buildings in the township are still there at numbers 68 and 70.

Almost opposite is the Wesleyan chapel built in 1825, replacing an earlier one and standing next to it the home of Daniel Sharpe who lived there from the 1840s through to the 1860s.
Sadly his home has not fared well and at present is empty with half its roof missing. But at least it is still there. Not so the once beautiful house on the corner with Acres Road which was demolished one day with little ceremony.

Of course things change, and so it is with Beech Road or Chorlton Row as it was known till the 1870s. And Peter’s painting captures some of that change. To the left the modern shop, office and residential block was the site of that beautiful house while to the right was the Co-op, whose yard in the 1980s had been taken over by the firm of Strippo who for about a tenner a door would strip decades of old paint away to reveal the original wood.

But amongst all the shiny new premises, there tucked away is Leo who has run his plastering business Gazelle since the 1980s from the tiny lock up between the old Co-op building and the new block.

There are plenty more of Peter’s paintings on display in venues across the township and at https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures

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

One Hundred Years of one house in Chorlton ...... part 14 events

The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over fifty years and the families that have lived here since.


Live in a house long enough and there is a danger that past events slide into one another, and only when you think really hard do they tumble out one after another. Now I have been here since 1976 and that is a long time but none of the memories has overwhelmed me, all fit comfortably together and act as a gentle backdrop to what is going on right now.

As you would expect in that thirty six years the house has been a home at times to many of our friends and also somewhere which has touched many more.

Just last week I met up with an old flat mate. Greevz who I had last seen in the summer of ’73 but as we sat in the dining room he remembered being here and the talk naturally turned to other friends and people we had known who passed through 41.

When I washed up here in the December of 1976, John Mike and Lois had been in for about a year. Mary Ann had died in the April of ’73 and the house had been left to an animal charity which had not really known what to do with it but eventually put in the market.

Lois always maintains that her first impression of the place was that despite the old fashioned wall paper and the slightly musty smell it seemed a comfortable place, and I must admit that I have felt the same. It is somewhere to come home to and as I said a place where many others travelling through have said the same.

In the early years while we were all working we were all single and it was like being a student again but with money. So John built his boat, from scratch bending many of the timbers on the dining room floor by simply fastening them to the floor boards in the angle he wanted. The screw holes are still there. And when the time came there was boat turning day. Jenn who came for a week and stayed three months helped Lois, while Jack and Whispering Dave provided the advice and I, well I just pushed when told.

Even now I don’t know who gave Whispering Dave his name, although I guess it was Lois who at the time watched the old Grey Whistle Test and thought there was more than a passing resemblance to Bob Harries. Certainly they both had a way of talking which made you strain to pick out the next four sentences. But then most of our conversations only really began in the hours after we returned home from the Trevor, replete with four pints and the promise of a carry out.

It didn’t really matter when you got into the pub, you always seemed to drink four pints except on a Friday night when the first pint disappeared in the time it took to sit down and acknowledge everyone. Then and on Saturday you doubled up at last orders and the journey home was but a slip of a trip.

This is not to say there weren’t other diversions. Lois and would go up to the Essoldo and catch a movie and it was here that we saw Gone with the Wind which seemed appropriate enough since we were in a cinema which had opened in 1937. And I did regular trips to the Royal Exchange and Library Theatre.

Now Joe and Mary Ann I am sure would have approved of the Library Theatre. It was a no nonsense place and the first time I went in late 1969 they not only displayed adverts on the safety curtain in the interval but also had that wonderful light display where slides with different coloured wax were allowed to slide and drip across the screen. It would be another five years before I came across a java light in a pub off Penny Meadow in Ashton under Lyne.

But I guess for me it was the nights we entertained. To call them dinner parties would be to over stretch the event, but they were good. Plied with wine from litre plastic bottles and the food Lois cooked the evenings had a momentum of their own. Even now over thirty years later long after I have forgotten what we ate I can remember the fun and conversation and I think it would have been a first for the house. I doubt that Joe and Mary Anne entertained like that but it set the seal for the future and has been how we have lived since.

Pictures; from the collection of Lois Sparshot

Stories of the Rivoli and Essoldo

Now there are plenty of stories yet to be told about the Rivioli or Essoldo on Barlow Moor Road. None of them are page turners but they were recounted by people who lived through the years of this now long gone cinema.

It was opened in 1937 and our own brass band played at the opening ceremony. My old friend Alan Brown was there and the icing on the cake was that he got into see Errol Flynn in Captain Blood which was one of his better swashbuckling movies. Made two years earlier it had got the lot, including the infamous Hanging Judge Jeffrey’s, wrongful arrest, the inevitable romance and of course the triumph of good over bad.

The Rivoli was last to be built and was aimed at the new council estates which were being built south of Chorlton. We forget that in the absence of TV picture houses were one of the main ways of entertainment when it was opened.

I guess this was why it was rebuilt after it had been bombed during the war. Now it might be possible to recreate the events of that night. There are records made by local ARP and defence volunteers who tracked aerial attacks as tracings on maps.

The destruction of houses around Corkland Road on May 1st 1941 were recorded and are in the National Archive and it is likely that there is a similar report of the stick of bombs which fell across Barlow Moor and Claude Road destroying the cinema and nearby houses. It is still possible to see the route of the aircraft from the new houses on Claude Road which stand out from their Edwardian neighbours.

The cinema was reopened in 1954 and as part of the advertising campaign the manager offered complimentary tickets for the restaurant. Ida Bradshaw remembers her father receiving tickets and getting off work early to attend. She tells me it continued to run through the rest of the ‘50s and was popular as a lunch time venue.

But it is the mystery surrounding the painting by J Montgomery that most fascinates me. I first wrote about the artist back in November http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2011/11/who-was-j-montgomery.html hoping that someone might know him. He painted pictures of Chorlton and Whalley Range during the late 1940s through to the mid ‘60s. Most if not all were painted from postcards or photographs which led me to wonder if was not local. There are a lot of his paintings in the digital archive of Manchester Library but so nothing has come to light, except one brief entry in a catalogue.

And it was there that I came across this one. It was painted according to the catalogue in 1965 and based on photograph taken in 1945. Looking at it it’s not clear what damage the cinema had sustained but perhaps it had been to the roof or the rear of the building. I have to admit it is not one of his best but if it is accurate it tells us something of what it had once looked like and the changes that were made in 1954.

The tile frontage was retained but the shape and size of the windows was dramatically altered as was the entrance. It is and may remain one of those little mysteries which does not matter over much but has got me wanting to know.

Now it is possible that a snap of the old place will turn up, it usually does, although a search through the local papers has drawn a blank.

Perhaps when it does it may also reveal something of J Montgomery including the picture he used. We shall see.

Pictures; The Rivoli by J Montgomery, 1976, m80107, and the Essoldo, R E Stanley m09200 May 1959, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

A view of a new Chorlton

Now local artist Peter Topping and I have been collaborating successfully for some time. He as you know paints pictures of Chorlton and I think of something to say about them.

Of all his pictures this one best captures how the township has changed during the last 50 years. There will be plenty of people who remember this stretch of Wilbraham Road as a collection of late Victorian shops and houses, and the buildings to the right of the painting are all that is left of them.

Here were a collection of the usual shops that can be found on any high street. In 1959 when A E Landers walked this way he caught on camera a tobacconist, a wallpaper and paint shop, The Stocking Shop and the Flower Shop along with the Wilbraham Garage.

It was still possible to see the concrete stumps which were all that was left of the petrol pumps outside what was in the 90s the pottery co-operative and is now a pizza takeaway.

Step back just another forty years and this stretch would have all been private houses one of which was the home of Mr Moorhouse who bought the Pavilion on Wilbraham Road turned it into a cinema and created the Moorhouse chain of cinemas across Greater Manchester in the 1920s and 30s and then went on to be a founder member of the Manchester Studios on Dickenson Road.

What is now the Co-operative store was until recently Somerfield’s and a closer look at the building reveals that it is older than the block which includes Oddbins down to the Red Cross. It was built sometime around 1959 or 1960 while the remaining seven shop fronts and flats date from the ‘70s.

But in another way Peter’s picture records a typical row of Chorlton shops. Here is a fashionable off license, a restaurant, and cafe and of course the collection of charity shops and takeaways. There are plenty more of Peter's paintings which can be seen in venues across the township and at https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures

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

One hundred years of one house in Chorlton ....... part 13 the coalman comes

The continuing stories of the house that Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since.

Now I miscalculated with the coal order this week and we are down to the bottom of the heap. Coal is pretty much all that we have delivered, although not so long ago it would have been the papers, the milk and even fruit and vegetables which Muriel would drop off if I was unable to call down for it. To me to have the papers and the milk delivered was the hall mark of a civilized life but then I grew up in the 1950s when such things were just how it was.

Go back another thirty years and all the tradesmen and shop keepers offered a delivery service which might arrive at the same time as the laundry van while somewhere not so faraway were the knife grinder and rag and bone man.

It is all there in those old pictures of Chorlton which have been cropping up on the blog. Look down some roads and there were two or even three vans plying their trade, and all pulled by horses, which of course begs the question where were the horses kept?

But back to coal. Now as you would expect in 1911 when Joe and Mary Ann were settling into married life there were lots of coal merchants and coal men. In that year Slater’s Directory listed something like 1200 business directly involved with delivering coal to the door. Some had multiple outlets across the railway yards of Manchester, others were operated by the co-op and the rest were small time businesses and most relied on the 8 collieries around and just outside the city for their coal. Here in Chorlton we had fifteen, some with their offices on Albany Road by the station and others listed from their homes.

I have no way of knowing who the Scott’s used. Amongst the Chorlton coal merchants in 1911 there was William Percival who lived on the green while a little later in the 1920s there was Norman Bailey whose brother ran Park Brow Farm and later still the Royle family. My old friend Alan tells me that William Percival was not the best of men with horses and had one die while hauling coal across the township.

Coal of course is messy stuff and after Joe and Mary Ann died our downstairs fireplaces were ripped out by John and gas became the way the house was heated, all of which I mentioned earlier when I told the story of our return to open fires. http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2012/01/100-years-of-one-house-in-chorlton-part_20.html

All of which is how my miscalculation has caused a little hiccup on the domestic heating front. Still the weather has remained mild and our delivery is within sight. So not so bad then. It will arrive in the afternoon and just maybe will compete for delivery space with the supermarket vans, specialist food companies and those express parcel people. We shall see.

Picture; Enoch Royle and his father with their coal wagon on Albany Road circa 1930 from the Lloyd collection

When this was a fish pond

This was the site of Blomley’s fish pond, which stretched from the corner of Acres Road up to what is now Chequers and was big enough to have a bridge. It not only supplied the water for the wattle and daub cottages on what was then the Row, but was used by the Methodists when they built their chapel almost opposite.

It got its name from the family who had lived in the fine house just on the corner of the Row and Acres Road at the beginning of the 19th century.
I guess it was filled in around the time these houses were built.

And I have fond memories of the block. I first met my partner in the deli which is now the Spanish bar, bought my veg from the middle shop when it belonged to Richard and Muriel and long before the end place was a restaurant I would gaze into the window of what was then a piano shop. Of course go back another few decades and the deli was an off license, next to a saddlers and an ironmongers.

So in the nature of things Peter’s painting has just caught another one of those moments in the life of Beech Road. The romantic in me trips back to the place as a pond but the practical side remembers that with the Deli and the green grocer’s I rarely had to leave Beech Road to get all I needed.
Murial not only allowed me an account which I settled at the end of the week but would cash cheques for me and look out for special items she knew the kids liked. So in the week to the consternation of other shoppers Muriel not only supplied me with the veg and fruit I wanted but asked how much money I needed and handed both over. More than once I could see people mutter that this was not how it worked and that I should give Muriel the cash in return for the produce.

There are plenty more of Peter’s work on display in venues across the township and at https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures

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

A victory celebration 67 years ago and a view now lost forever

Sometimes a picture reveals different stories which stretch back and encompass different people and different events.

This particular photograph is of the old school hall on the night we celebrated Victory in Europe which brought the European war to a close in May 1945.

During the spring of that year it was clear that the war was drawing to a close. In March the Western Allies had crossed the Rhine in to Germany and in April the Red Army was in Berlin. The death of Hitler on April 30th moved things on and on May 7th in the early hours of the morning the German army in the west surrendered. Despite no immediate official announcement the news spread that the war was over and later in the day the Government confirmed that Germany had surrendered and that May 8th would be a national holiday and designated it Victory in Europe Day.

The Manchester Guardian reported that here in the city,
“At ten o'clock Albert Square had become a great dancing floor, upon which partnerships were formed on a free and easy plan. Music came from the town hall and reached the crowd through loudspeakers. A popular prank was to climb on to the roofs of the air-raid shelters to dance - probably it was the men of the navy who began it. But whoever set the example found abundant followers, and presently the girls of the WAAF and the ATS showed a readiness to participate. Without ceremony dozens of them were hauled to the top amid a good deal of cheering. Fireworks were occasionally thrown into the air, and there was an unexpected supply of paper hats, streamers, confetti and other carnival accessories which, after years of a paper famine, would have been thought to be unobtainable.” *

I am not sure that our own celebrations happened on that night. These were spontaneous events and what was clearly a formal sit down affair needed planning. I have every confidence that someone will have recorded the evening in their diary and we will learn the date and perhaps something of the mood in the school hall.

The Government had already said that
“Bonfires will be allowed, but the government trusts that only material with no salvage value will be used.” And that “until the end of May you may buy cotton bunting without coupons, as long as it is red, white or blue, and does not cost more than one shilling and three pence a square yard.”

Strangely for such a momentous event the expressions on the faces of the group seem sombre. There are a few who are smiling and some who look slightly baffled but the rest just stare back at the camera. Perhaps the time lag between the victory news and the celebration party was enough for the euphoria to wear off, or maybe uppermost in many people’s minds was the sacrifice in treasure, lives and lost time.

I remember an old friend saying to me that her abiding memory of the war was how it had robbed her of a good six years of her life. “Instead of just growing up and having the sort of fun a teenager should have there was always anxiety. You were worried about your own safety and that of your family and the knowledge that any boy you grew fond of might be killed.”
In the same way I came across a diary entry for May 7th 1945, the day the fighting stopped in Europe. The entry was simple “Today” she wrote “I will go to bed knowing that everyone I love will be safe”


But the picture is also a wonderful record of what the old school on the green looked like. It had been built in 1876 by public subscription and replaced an earlier one dating from the 1840s.

There had been plans out forward in the summer of 1897 to build an additional level which would have almost doubled the capacity, because despite the fact that when built the school was “considerably in excess of the requirements of the Parish ................ the abnormal growth of the parish within the last five years has rendered a further enlargement imperative.”**


The inside was not unlike the Board School I attended which also had a huge fire place and tall windows. Now I never now look these late 19th century school buildings. They were built to last and were warm in winter and cool in summer. The tall windows allowed in plenty of natural light but made it difficult to stare out of.

All very different from the new all glass and steel constructions of the 1950s. The mass of windows made them hot in the summer and uncomfortable cold in winter and of course afford fine views to distract the bored student. So while the Board and National school buildings have survived for over 140 years many of their bright post war successors didn’t even make it into the 21st century.

There are still some in Chorlton who remember the inside of the old school and others who saved each Friday night with the Penny Savings Bank which used the building, but I suspect there are few photographs of what it was like, which makes this one so important. Even more so as the work to turn the school into modern private houses moves into its final stages.

Pictures; the old school hall from the Lloyd collection circa 1945 and the school and school house 209 from the collection of Andrew Simpson
*Manchester Gurdian May 9 1945
** St Clements Handbook 1897