A first for Salford ........... Bailey’s Patent Steam Kettle as seen in Slater’s Directory of 1850

Now I don’t actually know if W H Bailey & Co of the Albion Works Regent Road Salford, were the first to make a steam kettle, but I would like to think they were.

Either way their claim was pretty impressive and came as a full page advert in Slater’s Directory for 1850.

Their machine offered  “HOT WATER for BREAKFAST or TEA for Works, Hotels, Steam Ships, Hospitals, Prisons , and Ayslums, ......... Direct from the Waterworks Main of from an Overhead Cistern”  

It was "CLEAN, SAFE, ECONOMICAL EXPEDITIOUS, INSTANTANEOUS IN ACTION.”

It came in two sizes.  The Nu 1 stood 4 feet in height  and costs £8 10s and the Nu 2 which was two feet taller,  was suitable for 500 men and was priced at £15.

And had I a mind to I could have seen them at work around Manchester and Salford at Johnson & Nephew, Bradford Iron Works, Topp & Hindley, 19 New Brown Street, Manchester and Robert Neill & Sons Builders Contractors, Strangeways as well as the firm’s “works and a great many more at home and abroad.

Location, Manchester & Salford

Picture; Slater’s Directory, 1850

*Salter’s General & Classified Directory and Street  Register of Manchester and Salford and their Vicinities, 1850.

A day in the Quays ......... celebrating Salford

There may be some who mutter this isn’t really Salford, not the one I remember, and that will be true.

But all places change and reinvent themselves and Mr Muggins in 1760 may well have reflected that the grand Victorian buildings that rose on the streets of Salford weren’t to his taste.

So here are some of Andy Robertson’s pictures of Salford taken on a bright sunny day in 2017.

Location; Salford

Pictures, Salford, 2017 from the collection of Andy Robertson

Down on Powis Street in Woolwich in 1905

It is one of those images of Woolwich which pretty much speaks for itself.

We are on Powis Street in 1905, although our card was sent three years later to a Mrs Warrington of Cromewell Road, Wimbledon.

E. Klean just wanted  “to let you know that I arrived safely last evening.  I did not get wet as it was pouring with rain when I was in the train at Baker Street."

And just to show that these scenes of Woolwich travelled.  E. Klean had sent it from Crickewood South on the morning of September 24th 1908.

Which is enough detail for now.

Picture; Powis Street, from the series Woolwich Town and City, issued by Tuck & Sons, courtesy of TuckDB http://tuckdb.org/history

That impressive building on Canal Street ................ once the offices of Michael Nairn & Company

Now I will have passed this building on Canal Street countless times in the early 1970s.

The old College of Knowledge which had me as one of its students is just around the corner, and Canal Street was a convienent short cut which avoided the busier bigger roads, and of course it had the canal.

Back then the Rochdale Canal had seen better days but it was still a fascinating spot to stop, and just watch the water cascade over the closed lock gates and ponder on what you did to rent that house that straddled the water.

All of which is leading up to Andy Robertson’s latest set of pictures taken on a bright sunny day down by the canal.

As ever there is a shed load of interesting pictures, but this one of the door way of nu 4 Canal Street caught my attention.

M Nairn & Co Ltd were the firm of Michael Nairn, specialising in floor-cloths, power looms and linoleum.

And according to that excellent site Grace's Guide to British Industrial History "at the 1862 Exhibition in London and the 1867 Paris Exhibition Nairns Floorcloth came into its own and won the prizes.  

In  1870 Nairn and Co built a six-storey factory in Kirkcaldy and by 1877 with the introduction of linoleum, Kirkcaldy soon became the largest producer of the new floorcovering in the world.

In the 1920s the family joined forces with a supplier in Erie, Pennsylvania, which manufactured a three-foot wide simulated wood grain product used to border area rugs and linoleum. 

This product was known as "Congoleum", because the asphalt materials used to make it came from the Belgian Congo in Africa. 

The new company called itself Congoleum-Nairn.

Congoleum-Nairn continued to sell "Congoleum Gold Seal Rugs" and "Nairn linoleum" through the late 1930's, until its researchers started experimenting with a new material called vinyl. 

However, further research into developing vinyl flooring was interrupted when World War II began. 

Following the war, the company continued to grow in the rapidly expanding housing market of that period.

2008 Forbo-Nairn is now the UK's only linoleum manufacturer. Forbo-Nairn have their own website."*

None of which I had a clue about when I regularly walked past the building.  

Nor would I have clocked the Latin inscription the meaning of which escapes me.  

And yes I did go to google translate but that didn’t help over much.

In time I will start looking for the history of the building.  I know it was there by 1903 which just leaves a patient trawl of the directories.

Location; Canal Street

Pictures; Canal Street from the collection of Andy Robertson

*Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History, http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Michael_Nairn_and_Co

Cinemas I wish I had visited …………. The Rivoli, Denmark Street

Now the simple basic rule, when starting to write about a Manchester cinema, is always go to Derek Southall’s book first.

The Rivioli, 1972, Denmark Street

It is a delightful slim book packed with information, and I chose to ignore it in my quest for the story of the Rivoli on the corner of Denmark Street and Aberdeen Street, opposite the Whitworth Art Gallery.

Preferring instead to trawl the directories, the newspapers and those equally wonderful guides to all things cinema, which are the Kenematograph Year Books.

I have four for the years,  1914, 1928, 1929, and 1947 and they contain a mass of information, including a full list of all the picture houses, across the country.

And all this was because while doing something entirely different I came across the 1934 OS map for the area around Whitworth Park, and there on Denmark Street was a reference to the Picture Theatre Picture.

That got me going, but also threw up an obstacle because trawl as I did I couldn’t find the Picture Theatre, which of course was not its name.

Leading me back to Mr. Southall and the discovery that the Picture Theatre was the Rivioli, which opened in 1914, and closed in 1960 after its final showing of Pork Chop Hill and Crash Drive.*

The Rivoli, 2015

It had just over a thousand seats, with a stage and three dressing rooms.  In the early 1920s it became a dance hall before reverting back to a cinema in 1929.

It was perfectly positioned to take advantage of the student population and ironically was part of the properties acquired by the University for the redevelopment of the area.

By 1972, it was part of the Music Faculty, and a sign outside tells you that it is now part of the Business School.

Looking up Aberdeen Street to the Rivoli, 1972

I have to say in all the years that I have wandered past, I never gave it a second glance, and only now looking at it with fresh eyes I can see the clues that would suggest it was a cinema, with its entrance on Aberdeen Street.

Location; Denmark Street

Picture; The Tiviloi, 1972, D Wildgoose, m18606 and m18604, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass the Rivoli in 2015 from the collection of Andy Robertson, and extract from The Kenematograph Year Book, 1947

*Southall, Derek, The Golden Years of Manchester Picture Houses, 2010

**ibid Southall, page 54

On Shooters Hill at the hospital in 1905

The Royal Herbert Hospital on Shooters Hill was one of those places I took for granted and treated as just part of the landscape.

You passed it on the bus going to Woolwich and it was just a big stone building set in its own grounds surrounded by trees.

This is pretty much how I left it till mum spent some time there in the early 1970s and even then I knew nothing of its history other than that some people referred to it as the military hospital, which of course was what it had been.

And so it is only now that I have chosen to delve into its past and realized just how significant the place was.

It had been built for the nearby Woolwich garrison and was opened in 1865 with 650 beds and was the first specially designed military hospital in the country.

And it was also the first to use the pavilion design advocated by Florence Nightingale which consisted of six parallel ward blocks connected by a central corridor.  

Nor is this the only connection to Ms Nightingale because some of its first patients were soldiers who had fought in the Crimean War and who no doubt took full advantage of the 19 acres of parkland which surrounded the hospital.

But just like I took the place for granted its closure in 1977 passed me by and I only vaguely remember looking at its boarded up windows and over grown areas on visits home and wondering its fate.

It could have gone the way of many such buildings, admired, but neglected till nature, and the vandals did enough damage that its demolition was assured.

In fact it was bought by a developer in 1990 and was converted into a block of apartments.

Picture; The Herbert Hospital, 1905, from the series Woolwich Town and City, issued by Tuck & Sons, courtesy of TuckDB http://tuckdb.org/history

What’s in the colour of the water? …………….. down with Andy Robertson at the canal

Yep ……… this is nothing more than a water story, occasioned by the recent heavy rain.

July 2019

One of Andy Robertson’s favourite haunts is Pomona, and like so many of us, he is drawn to water.

And so, for no reason other than that I too like canals and water, here are two of those then and now pictures, although I grant you, they are only separated by a few months.

Andy was there yesterday, sent over the images adding “I am sure the canal in Pomona land doesn't always look as brown as it did today”, which led us to speculate on the impact of the amount of rain we have experienced.

April, 2019

That said I bet a full century ago, that same canal would have offered up a full range of colours, depending on what was being discharged directly into it from the many warehouses and factories which lined its banks.


Leaving me just to reflect that "the water ain't what it oughta".*

Location; Pomona

Pictures; the colour of canal water, 2019, from the collection of Andy Robertson

*With a nod and smile to a classic Heineken advert, 1985, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86CZQGdxyMs