Calling in at the Castle on Oldham Street in 1971

The Castle © 2014 Peter Topping

The Castle on Oldham Street is one of those wonderful old pubs which constantly surprise me.

It is a place I went in regularly in the early 1970s and have been drawn back to it again more recently.

It dates from the late 1770s has undergone changes of name and appearances but remains a fascinating place and is a remarkable survival of the sort of drinking place you could have found on almost any street corner in the city centre from the 18th century onwards.

It consisted of just three rooms and while the front was the biggest we preferred one of the small back ones.

From memory I don’t think you could have got more than a handful of people in either of the back rooms and the decor was basic to say the least.

More recently I went back.

The back of the pub was closed off, but the front room with its tiled bar counter was fun to be in.

Painting; The Castle © 2014 Peter Topping, Paintings from Pictures,
Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk
Facebook:  Paintings from Pictures

"The Lost Railways of South Manchester"

Now like many of my generation I have always had a fascination for railways and really for the time when they were given over to steam locomotives.*

Chorlton Railway Station, early 20th century

Even now that heady smell of steam, warm oil and smoke take me back to standing on platforms waiting for a train.

It was a love for all things steam that I shared with my father who could never quite accept that the old L.M.S and L.N.E.R had become a division of British Railways.

That said mother had a less romantic take on steam trains pointing out that if you lived close to a railway line the washing  dried with smudges of soot from passing locomotives.

Despite that jaundiced view I shall be going to the talk with Chorlton History Group on "The Lost Railways of South Manchester" by Roy Chapman which will at 1.30pm  today in the  St Ninian's Church, Egerton Road South,

“A lifelong railway enthusiast, Roy has contributed to transport
training material, is a co-author of three railway books, has contributed to a number of reports on transport issues, and is an occasional writer of journal articles on transport and business management. 

Roy is currently Rail Services Planning Officer at Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM). 

In the talk he will focus on the growth and decline of the railway network around South Manchester.”

Bernard Leach

Picture; Chorlton Railway Station looking east, date unknown, from the collection of Tony Walker

*Chorlton Trains, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Chorlton%20Trains

At the Towers in Didsbury

Now I am back with the Towers on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury.*

For most of the last century it was called the Shirley Institute and it is a building with a lot of history.

It was built between 1868 and 1872 by John Taylor who founded the Manchester Guardian in 1821.

Here in 1882 the decision was taken by a group of businessmen to build the Manchester Ship Canal and in 1920 it was bought by the British Cotton Industry Research Association and renamed the Shirley Institute after the daughter of one the main contributors to the cost of buying it.

And today it is surrounded by a business park which has recently become home to Cosgrove Hall Fitzpatrick Entertainment, the animation company which once was based in Chorlton.

Now I have always wanted to get into the Towers but have always missed the open days.

So I was pleased when Andy Robertson who is fast becoming the northern photographer for the blog sent me some of the pictures he took on a recent visit.

I could say more but I think the pictures speak for themselves.








*A building called the Towers, the Ship Canal and a certain animation company  http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/a-building-called-towers-ship-canal-and.html

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Robertson

One hundred years of one house in Chorlton part 41, making breakfast

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

Now I don’t like making porridge.

It either turns out like lumpy concrete or runny and undercooked.

But the family continue to insist on it and I just don’t get any better.

And that got me thinking to what Joe and Mary Ann did for breakfast during their fifty years here.

I suspect it would have been a cooked breakfast and apart from the war years when was food rationed it would have included lashings of bacon, eggs and toast and I guess porridge.

After all oats were cheap and mixed with water or milk were pretty filling.

My own grandfather always made his the night before and Dad preferred salt rather than sugar.

Later when John Mike and Lois lived here in the 70s breakfast was a cup of coffee usually drunk in the car or on the bus on the way to work.

I preferred toast eaten cold with ginger marmalade. although I did have a brief flirtation with muesli bought from the Eighth Day .

But for many in the past whether it was in inner city Manchester during the early 19th century or in rural Chorlton breakfast was eaten on the move.**

Most of the working class lived in rooms not houses with just a fire place for rudimentary cooking extending to boiling a kettle or a pot of something, and anyway lighting a fire was a costly affair which would then continue to burn long after everyone had left for work.

Likewise water was not always readily available and might only be available from a street pump and then not all the time.

On the way to work there were the coffee stalls which had the added bonus that in cold weather the mugs would warm the hands as well.

Some stalls were just simply a board laid over a pair of sawhorses and a can of coffee kept warm by a charcoal burner and others elaborate tent like structures.  A cup of coffee and “two thin” – two pieces of bread and butter might cost half a penny.

Of course the cheap food policy and the growing imperial markets offered up a new range of breakfast possibilities.

So that Joe and Mary Ann by the early decades of the 20th century had plenty to choose from.

But somewhere on that table would have been porridge which I suspect Mary would have cooked and I bet did it better than me.

*The story of a house, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house

**Fast food for the workers on our Victorian streets http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/fast-food-for-workers-on-our-victorian.html

Pictures; Suggestions for breakfast, Ministry of Food Leaflet, 1946, from the collection of Vince Piggott

Who lived here in these houses in Christ Church Square in 1902?

Now I shouldn’t be surprised that the residents of Christ Church Square do not feature in the street directories of the early 20th century.

After all none of the occupations listed could be described as high on the income bracket.

Here was a window cleaner, some general labourers, a few charwomen and carters and an office boy.

None of which seem to have interested the compilers of those street directories.

In 1903 the place does not even rate a mention while eight years later the only two entries were for W.W.Buckley & Son, gear cutters and Dalton Lacquer Manufacturing Co.

So the 59 inhabitants of the 15 occupied houses are lost to history.

Well not quite because they all appear on the 1901 census which gets me closer to who was living in the houses in the two pictures but not exactly.

The houses can be seen on the OS map for 1894 but tracking them on the census return is less easy.

The caption on the photographs refers to numbers ?3 to 24 and these could be the three on the OS map and standing outside one is a man in a long leather overall while in the other there is that hand cart.

If pushed the man in the leather apron might just be Thomas Pollit, a 39 year old coal carter from number 24 or George Bough also a carter who shifted confectionery, and the lad beside the hand cart might Mr Bough’s son who was just 13 and worked as an office boy.

But all of that is just speculation.

Either way these three properties were back to backs houses and their mirror three houses faced on to Barrack Street which ran from Chester Road down to Queen Street.

The street directories are no more helpful on who occupied those mirror three.

And so that just leaves me to comment on the properties themselves in Christ Church Square.  They have that distinctive lime wash which I remember from my own home and which was less a way of brightening the yard and more a simple way of curbing infestations.

As for Christ Church Square it had seen better days.

Back in the 1840s the square faced out onto a burial ground and the “the Bible Christian’s Chapel called Christ Church and the Christ Church School (Day and Sunday).

By 1902 when our pictures were taken the chapel had gone and the burial ground seems to have become open land.

The school has expanded into the chapel and our house just faces it.

It’s a place and a story I will return to if only to establish that we are dealing with the same properties for one caption does also refer to numbers 25-35, Christ Church Square which do not appear on the census.

So confusion all round and perhaps a visit to Barrack Street and the mirror three.

We shall see.

But I shall  finish  with that outside lavatory which like the white wash walls I remember from my childhood.

Look very closely and you can make out the exterior door which night soil men would have collected the contents.

Pictures; Christ Church Square, A Bradburn, 1902, m25499, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and detail from the OS map of South Lancashire, 1888-1894 courtesy of Digital Archives, Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

Just when you thought that was all there was to know about the Masonic Hall on Edge Lane

Now sometimes a story about a building just catches on.

© 2014 Peter Topping

And so it is with the Masonic Hall on Edge Lane which has featured a few times on the blog and always draws an audience.*

For most of the 1970s and into the 80s it was a place I passed by giving little thought to.

My grandfather and uncles were all masons but Dad chose to walk away from all of those secret handshakes, odd looking regalia and much else.

So Masonry was something I gave little thought to and in turn the hall on Edge Lane was just a building set back from the road which seemed quiet and deserted.

And then the Masons vacated the place and it entered an uncertain period, when according to some all the stained glass and internal features were “lifted” and it became a haunt of vandals with spray cans.

Nor did the granting of planning permission to develop the site arrest the decline.

The application was passed in 2012 but a year later my friend Adge took a series of pictures of the hall which revealed that nothing had happened.

A year on and Andy Robertson caught the moment the developers started work, and as you do I wondered about the history behind its time as a Masonic Lodge and before when it was private residences.

All of which brings me to Peter’s painting which captures a time when it was still doing the business as a home for the Masons and a place to hold functions.

Two private residences in 1907 to the east of Waltham House

Now what I particularly like about the painting is that it allows you to trace the history of the building from when it was converted from two semi detached properties which date from the late Victorian period.

These were Gildabrook which was number 10 and Westbrook which was number 12.

I can’t be sure but the conversion was later than 1911 when the two were still private residences and more likely sometime after the Great War.

What is certain is that by 1935 the site had become the hall.

And Peter’s picture perfectly reveals the additions to the left and right.

I have to say that the architect made some attempt to make the larger extension in keeping with the original two houses.

Since beginning the stories plenty of people have shared their memories of the hall as a place they had a “do” to those who lived in the property.

I guess there will be more stories to come.

*What we are losing, ........ the old Masonic Hall on Edge Lane and a lesson in how history is not always what it appears, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/what-we-are-losing-old-masonic-hall-on.html

*The Masonic Hall on Edge Lane, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20Masonic%20Hall%20on%20Edge%20L

Painting; The Masonic Hall on Edge Lane  © 2014 Peter Topping, Facebook; Paintings from Pictures, Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk

Map; Edge Lane from the OS map of 1907

Hydes in Moss Side 1899-2012

There was a time when you could smell the work of our breweries drifting across the city.

With the wind in the right direction the work of the brewers at Boddingtons in Strangeways was a reminder that beer was still made here.

But the brewery closed in 2005 and the site was demolished two years later.

So I am pleased that Andy Robertson was out recently recording the Hydes brewery in Moss Side before it too is overwhelmed by change.

It closed in 2012 which makes the Hydes connection with Moss Side just over a century and a bit.

The Hyde brothers had inherited the brewery in 1863 and in 1899 acquired the Queens Brewery in Moss Side and the rest is as they say beer across the counter.

I have passed the place countless times over the last forty years and never gave it much thought other than that I should take some pictures.

But I never did and so I am grateful than Andy did.

Pictures; from the collection of Andy Robertson