Four things to do with a closed Chorlton supermarket

Now I concede that the story is about just one way to use a disused supermarket, but in that mix of entrepreneurial flair and total disregard for the environment it has been done three times.

I don’t approve of fly posting, and while it might brighten up an empty site, all too often it is blatant misuse of someone else’s property, a headache for the owner and ultimately becomes shabby and forlorn.

More so when bits of the wall/window/doors are over posted, creating a jumbly confusing mess.

But then the historian in me can look back at photographs of said messes and track a bit of history, and of course fly posting has always been with us. 

The Romans advertised gladiator contests as well offering up the names of election candidates along with their promises, awhile the Victorians and Edwardians did more than their fair share.

These come from what was once the Co-op on Barlow Moo Road, and before that a Hanbury’s a Tesco, a workshop and at the very beginning a cinema.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; fly posters, 2022, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Back in the Clarion Cafe at number 50a Market Street in 1908

Yesterday I introduced the Clarion Cafe which was on Market Street and was opened by Robert Blatchford on Saturday 31st October 1908.

It was a place I had no idea had existed, but must have been a pretty impressive place.

And so with that ever present wish to bring the forgotten past alive here are some pictures of the interior of the place from when it was opened in 1908.

Pictures; courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, Clarion Cafe fireplace, 1908, m57134, The entrance doors, m57136

Posting a letter in Woolwich …….. a little bit of fun and a challenge

Now here is a bit of our history, and for those who will always be Woolwich not Greenwich, this will have a special place.

I am looking at one of those bits of crested porcelain, which everyone buys at some point.

 Usually they are an impulse purchase on a wet day at the seaside and after a period on the mantle piece they get consigned to the back of a cupboard, and finally to a charity shop, and on the way acquire at leas one chip.

When I was growing up they  would fascinate me, and later in my teenage years I dismissed them as tacky.

But now, as I enter my seventh decade I am drawn back to them, and in particular those produced during the Great War when the ceramic companies switched to war time themes, turning out china tanks, ambulances, and battleships, all with a coat of arms of a different city, or town.

All of which brings back to the postbox, for which I don’t have a date, but could be anytime from 1900 when the borough was created, to its demise and its merger with Greenwich.

There are still some lingering bits of the old borough around, in the form of the coat of arms, on park gates, proudly announcing our connection to the Royal Arsenal.

And that might well be the challenge for everyone, to find and post them.

But for now I have this one from the collection of David Harrop.

Location; Woolwich






Picture, ceramic crested posted box, Woolwich, date unknown, courtesy of David Harrop

A little bit of gentle fun at the seaside in the 1930s ............. no 18 "Ask a Policeman”

A short series reflecting on a bit of gentle fun from the seaside.

Location; at the seaside in Wales

Picture; courtesy of Ron Stubley

A bit of history ….. the new book on Chorlton ..... and an appreciative audience

Now if you are going to have a second launch of a new book on Chorlton, there is no where better than Chorlton Good Neighbours.*

Gathering in expectation of the talk, 2022

After all its members have lived here for a long time and will have heaps of fond memories and more than a few stories.

And so, it was when we spoke to them at their coffee morning today.

Over 40 turned up to hear us talk about the second in our series on “nothing to do in Chorlton Martledge Lost and Found”.**

Martledge is the old name for the area stretching from the Four Banks to the library and out to Longford Park.

Of course, the term the Four Banks has itself now slipped into the past, but there were plenty there who remembered it as Kemp’s Corner, and one who told me that just before her dad died he confessed he had played the piano in the Savoy Cinema on Manchester Road accompanying the silent movies.

The book, "nothing to do in chorlton, Martlege Lost and Found" by Andrew Simpson & Peter Topping, costs £5, is available from Chorlton Bookshop or from us at  www.pubbooks.co.uk

Location; Chorlton Good Neighbours

Pictures; Gathering in expectation of the talk, 2022, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Chorlton Good Neigbours, https://chorltongoodneighbours.org/

**A new book on nothing to do in chorlton, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/A%20new%20book%20on%20doing%20nothing%20in%20Chorlton

On Market Street at the Clarion Cafe

I grew up with stories of the Clarion Cycling Club which for me was pretty exciting stuff.  

Very simply the idea was to “combine the pleasures of cycling with the propaganda of Socialism” and it arose from a meeting of six young men in Birmingham in 1894.

They regularly read The Clarion the socialist weekly paper started by Robert Blatchford four years earlier in Manchester which announced that it would follow a “policy of Humanity; a policy not of party, sect or creed; but justice, of reason and mercy.”  The first edition sold 40,000 copies and then settled down to about 30,000 a week.

In the same way the Clarion Cyclist Club went from one group to 30 by the end of the following year and 70 by 1897.  It was that potent mix of serious politics and fun.  As Tom Groom one of the founders said

"We are not neglectful of our Socialism, the frequent contrasts a cyclist gets between the beauties of nature and the dirty squalor of towns make him more anxious than ever to abolish the present system.”

And there were Clarion Cyclist Club houses which my old friend Lawrence had told me about, but what I didn’t know was that here in the centre of the city there was a Clarion Cafe and Restaurant.  It was my new pal Graham who first posted a picture of the pace to me and then followed it up with a wonderful collection of interior photographs.

The Cafe and restaurant was opened by Robert Blatchford on Saturday 31st October 1908 at 50a Market Street and continued till 1936.

“According to Harry Pollitt, the Cafe was the work of ‘skilled men from eighteen trades built decorated and furnished’

The salon was imposing with a Dutch fireplace and ceiling lantern ships lanterns and the walls decorated with oak panels.
William Morris's ‘A Kings Lesson’ was pictured in a frieze by the great artists Bernard Sleigh.  

The windows had coloured glass figures representing Justice, Knowledge, Progress and fraternity.


On the floor above the Clarion cafe was a large and luxurious Clarion clubroom, with murals by Walter Crane.”*

So over the next few days I shall be featuring pictures of the place.

*Manchester Clarion Cafe 1908-1936, hayes peoples history, http://ourhistory-hayes.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/manchester-clarion-cafe-1908-1936.ht


Pictures; courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, Clarion Cafe, 1908, m57126, The Morris Room, 1908, m57128, 
http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Harold Morris of Eltham and Welling, a life lived out in service to the community.... part 2

In that great sweep of history marked by revolutions, wars and natural disasters most of us will not even get a footnote in some long and detailed history of the 20th century.

Ours are “little lives lived out in a great century.”  That said it is the stories of the little people who fascinate me most whether they be the woman who cleaned up after Alfred burnt the cakes, the lonely herdsman who watched the passing of a Roman legion as it made its way westward to Maiden Castle or the family who didn’t watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on TV.

In an age all too ready to be impressed by celebrities and the autobiographies of people who have yet to reach their third decade I revel in the stories of men and women who quietly got on with life, providing for their families, looking to improve their communities, and leaving their mark in a far more positive way than a headline in a Sunday newspaper.

One such of these was Harold Morris, born in 1902, died in 1976 and a milkman for over 50 years.

Not perhaps the stuff of a Hollywood blockbuster but nevertheless a story which spans the last century and pretty much reflects how that hundred years rolled out and the changes that it brought to people’s lives.

When Harold was born virtually all the technologies we take for granted had yet to be developed or were in their infancy, but in that span of 74 years he was a party to the age of cheap air travel, the first landings on the moon, along with television, and much more.

At the age of 13 he could have followed his father and school friends  into the Woolwich Arsenal, instead he set up his own business as a milkman.

“There was no milk delivery service for the villagers around Welling where he lived. If they wanted milk they had to take a  jug or container of some kind up the hill to the dairy farm on Shooters Hill.”*

And being an enterprising young lad he walked “across the fields to Eltham to visit his grandparents, who lived in Courtyard.  Thomas Tillings, the omnibus company, had a yard full of horses, carriage and carts of all kinds just behind his grandparents' cottage.  

And he persuaded them let him have the use of a horse and cart so that he could set up a milk delivery service to serve the villagers of Welling.”

It was a job he would continue to do for the rest of his working life during which time the horse and cart was replaced by an electric float.

Holidays as for so many people of his generation were spent beside the seaside, and like his northern counterparts who were drawn to Blackpool and the resorts of the east coast and north Wales, the Morris family would have had their week by the sea in Kent in a  B&B made easier by the introduction of a week’s paid holiday.

Cheap rail travel added to the opportunities for that break by the sea, and by the early 20th century places like Blackpool and the resorts south and east of London boomed in the summer months.

His niece Jean remembers a generous man who was a "very special brother to his young sisters, Hilda and Dorothy.  

On pay day he used to tell them that he had dropped some coins on his bedroom floor and that if they found any they could keep them. 

They never found less than 6d apiece.

It was at his home that the family's wakes were held, when all the aunts gathered in the front parlour drinking tea.

But never ever taking off their hats because of  the bother of hat pins.  

Since his passing in 1976,  there have been no family wakes and his death took with it the heart of the Morris family.”

Now I can’t think of a better tribute to a man’s life.

*Jean his niece

Pictures; courtesy of Jean Gammons