Chorlton-upon-Medlock site clearance 1965

[TheProfRobin]

One day in May 1965 as I was about to finish my PhD thesis, I popped out of the Physics department in Coupland St with the intention of taking some pictures of the demolition and clearance of large swathes of Chorlton-upon-Medlock to allow for new University buildings.


I managed to take about 6 pictures before an "engineer" advised me to get back inside.  There were random gas leaks and random fires and I was at risk.  Here are the 6 pictures I managed to take.


People were living in these houses until a few months before I took these photographs.  District midwives from Hathersage Road were cycling into the area to deliver babies in conditions ten times more primitive than what was shown in the TV series "Call the Midwife".  Hot water often had to be brought from next door if the mother didn't have the means to heat her own.


Here is my first pic; just a random shot of the area;


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[TheProfRobin]

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Even up to a few weeks previously, these were floorboards and door frames of somebody's home.

[TheProfRobin]

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Even up to a few weeks previously, these were floorboards and door frames of somebody's home.

2 up, 2 down and "facilities" in that bit jutting out.  Access to toilet "facility" meant braving the weather.   


I do not mock, demean nor pity this type of housing.  I grew up in something like it in a Yorkshire Dales village.  At 6 am before going out on my paper round, I'd have to break the "ice" with a hammer, to avoid/reduce splash-back.


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[TheProfRobin]

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Now we could to the interesting bits.  I never printed these negatives in 1965, I just filed them away for the future and the future is now, 49 years on.


Looking at this scan superficially, I went off to find Cowgill St on the map, no luck. Then when I looked more closely, I saw it is Cowcill St, also not on Qooqle maps, but findable when searching archives.   I found it on the City of Manchester's Chief Engineer's maps of bomb damage in WW2.  I'll say a bit more in the next post.


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[TheProfRobin]

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Here is a snip from the Engineer's map and it shows Cowcill St running parallel to Higher Cambridge St and Higher Chatham St.  It now lies at rest under University car parks and new buildings.


On this map, red circles mean fire bombs and red buildings mean demolished, either by a German bomb or afterwards to render other buildings safe.


The BBC talk about the Blitz as if it only happened on London. Manchester knows better.  When seeking clues to Cowcill St I found that a large number of houses in the Street were destroyed on 23 Dec 1940 as a Christmas present from Hitler. The following text from the official records does not convey the human tragedy of a mother and her daughter, not living in plush Victoria Park, but probably awaiting Christmas with mixed emotion.  Their home and lives were annihilated within seconds by someone who had no quarrel with them.  The target was probably the Dunlop Rubber Works, which got off relatively lightly.


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Joyce Rydings
Died 23/12/1940 Age 9
Daughter of Martha Rydings.


Incident address 76 Cowcill Street, C-upon-M
Died address 76 Cowcill Street, C-upon-M
Cemetery/Memorial: Southern Cemetery


Martha Rydings
Died 23/12/1940 Age 46


Incident address 76 Cowcill Street, C-upon-M
Died address 76 Cowcill Street, C-upon-M
Cemetery/Memorial: Southern Cemetery
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++


Joyce and Martha, Cowcill St and many like you, Rest in Peace.

[TheProfRobin]

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This is similar to the Cowcill Street picture and can't have been taken too far away because I wasn't out that long.


But so far, I haven't found Dundalk Street on the Engineers map where he marked the bomb damage on the 1932-35 revision of the OS.


Curiously, when the University of Manchester joined with UMIST during the last decade, it needed an Act of Parliamentary to transfer the assets of the two universities to the new legal body.  In the appendix to the Act there is a list of all the property that the University had acquired, including those houses long since demolished to make way for new buildings.  I found Dundalk St in this annex and the index numbers of the Registered Title numbers for houses in the street.  It appears in close conjunction with Mahogany St and Ludlow St, so I should find its location soon.  But if anyone knows . . . .


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[Hideaway69]

Dundalk Street is a real mystery, in the 1963 Kelly's Directory it isn't listed, however if you check on Ludlow Street, Dundalk Street comes  between Higher Chatham St and Higher Cambridge St, checking a similar era A-Z,  Dundalk St is listed but has no reference number ? , the hunt continues.

[TheProfRobin]

Dundalk Street is a real mystery, in the 1963 Kelly's Directory it isn't listed, however if you check on Ludlow Street, Dundalk Street comes  between Higher Chatham St and Higher Cambridge St, checking a similar era A-Z,  Dundalk St is listed but has no reference number ? , the hunt continues.

Hi Hideaway


The Schedule of the The University of Manchester Act 2004 lists all the property acquisitions by the previous (Victoria) University.   There are 3 that contain Dundalk Street


Dundalk Street and Mahogany Street, Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester (Registered Title Number LA187940) [/color]

[/color]
1/13 Dundalk Street, 100/102 Higher Chatham Street and 17/21 Ludlow Street, Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester (Registered Title Number LA366473) [/color]

[/color]
4-8 and 23-25 Ludlow Street, 55, 61 and 63 Higher Chatham Street, 4-12 Dundalk Street and 1-11 and 2-10 Woodville Street, Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester (Registered Title Number LA62321) [/color]

[/color]
I'm guessing now but:[/color]
to acquire the land to extend the university, it makes sense to buy it in parcels, rather than individual houses - fewer legal transactions and title registrations.  So I reckon these 3 transactions are for all even numbered houses on one side of Dundalk, all odd numbered on the other side and of course the street between them.  The City probably compulsory purchased the individual houses and then sold/gave a package to the Uni and threw the street in for good measure.


From the 2 packages containing houses above, it looks like Dundalk, Higher Chatham and Ludlow Streets were contiguous on the odd numbered side of Dundalk
and
Ludlow, Higher Chatham, Dundalk & Woodville were contiguous on the even side of Dundalk.
Mahogany is also in there.


I only need to find one of those other streets on the 32-35 OS and it should pin the area down.


Dundalk is cobbled in the photo, so it was adopted.  It also has a normal/trad street sign.
There were only 7 odd numbered small houses and 6 even, so the street is short, a stub almost.

[TheProfRobin]

Dundalk Street is a real mystery, in the 1963 Kelly's Directory it isn't listed, however if you check on Ludlow Street, Dundalk Street comes  between Higher Chatham St and Higher Cambridge St, checking a similar era A-Z,  Dundalk St is listed but has no reference number ? , the hunt continues.

OK Hideaway69
It's not made any easier by the suspect street being right at the corner of four OS maps.  But I have a strong suspicion that Dundalk is bottom right in this image, not marked as such on the OS map.


Just above the corner of Higher Chatham and Ludlow St, are some short streets of 7 houses which matches Dundalk. 


My guess is that when I went out to photograph, the houses between Higher Chatham and Cowcill had been demolished leaving just the West side of Cowcill standing. So I could walk over wasteland between Cowcill & Dundalk.


A curious thing was that the pubs were left standing and operative.  I was going to photograph one when I was sent away.  Possibly the owners had the resources to resist compulsory purchase for a while, or it needed an extra legal step because the pubs couldn't just be designated as unfit for habitation.  They probably still had students as customers.

[Manx]

All very interesting, the Dundalk Street shot appears as if renamed (note the faint outline of a longer street name sign just below)

Old maps show the Manchester 'Corn Brook' which ran below and across Chatham Street diverted here to Tuer Street and ultilised by the brewery, in other words the seven houses on Ludlow Street would have been on the bank of the Brook.

[TheProfRobin]

All very interesting, the Dundalk Street shot appears as if renamed (note the faint outline of a longer street name sign just below)

Old maps show the Manchester 'Corn Brook' which ran below and across Chatham Street diverted here to Tuer Street and ultilised by the brewery, in other words the seven houses on Ludlow Street would have been on the bank of the Brook.

Well spotted Manx.


I have rescanned that part of the negative with higher resolution and it looks like 3 of pairs clips were used on the old sign compared to 2 on the new. 


1965 was not long after smokeless coal regs were introduced so the new sign cant have been put up more than a few decades before, or else the brick would have blacked again where the old sign was. 

[TheProfRobin]

All very interesting, the Dundalk Street shot appears as if renamed (note the faint outline of a longer street name sign just below)

Old maps show the Manchester 'Corn Brook' which ran below and across Chatham Street diverted here to Tuer Street and ultilised by the brewery, in other words the seven houses on Ludlow Street would have been on the bank of the Brook.

Ive now found where Woodville St is - one of those stubs not named on the map I showed above.  There are two unnamed stubs on the map here which might be Dundalk and Mahogany.  From the orientation of houses on the map, it's possible Dundalk is the unnamed stub just North of Woodville, the one that points at the school.


I just noticed that the map I showed above is 1893 and not 1932-35.  This one is '32.

[TheProfRobin]

All very interesting, the Dundalk Street shot appears as if renamed (note the faint outline of a longer street name sign just below)

Old maps show the Manchester 'Corn Brook' which ran below and across Chatham Street diverted here to Tuer Street and ultilised by the brewery, in other words the seven houses on Ludlow Street would have been on the bank of the Brook.

And 1908 map seems to clinch it.
Of the 4 streets named in the University property schedule in association with Dundalk, we have them all close together on this map- Higher Chatham, Ludlow, Woodville and Mahogany, but no visible Dundalk - and an interloper Honduras St, right where we expect Dundalk.  And with Manx spotting that Dundalk was a renaming of a longer name, we have the highly plausible possibility that Honduras St got renamed Dundalk St, some time after 1908.


And with that Holmesian result, at 00:45, I'm off to bed.

[TheProfRobin]

And 1908 map seems to clinch it.
Of the 4 streets named in the University property schedule in association with Dundalk, we have them all close together on this map- Higher Chatham, Ludlow, Woodville and Mahogany, but no visible Dundalk - and an interloper Honduras St, right where we expect Dundalk.  And with Manx spotting that Dundalk was a renaming of a longer name, we have the highly plausible possibility that Honduras St got renamed Dundalk St, some time after 1908.


And with that Holmesian result, at 00:45, I'm off to bed.

And the Engineer's map of bomb damage shows a red circle (German fire bomb) on one side of Honduras/Dundalk St corresponding to the gap in the row in the photograph and the fact that the Uni bought 7 houses on one side of Dundalk (odd) and 5 on the other (even).Thus my photo was taken from Higher Chatham St, looking into Dundalk.   The house is completely gone so there may have been fatalities, in which case the event will be listed among the 1,389 Manchester fatalities during WW2.  I'll look for an event in Dundalk/Honduras. The cluster of fire bombs suggests they were after the aluminium foundry which would have burned with ferocious white hot flames.  Not a good idea letting your enemy have detailed bombing maps of all strategic factories.  It was a chocolate factory in 1908 and best described as such in a war.

[TheProfRobin]

And the Engineer's map of bomb damage shows a red circle (German fire bomb) on one side of Honduras/Dundalk St corresponding to the gap in the row in the photograph and the fact that the Uni bought 7 houses on one side of Dundalk (odd) and 5 on the other (even).Thus my photo was taken from Higher Chatham St, looking into Dundalk.   The house is completely gone so there may have been fatalities, in which case the event will be listed among the 1,389 Manchester fatalities during WW2.  I'll look for an event in Dundalk/Honduras. The cluster of fire bombs suggests they were after the aluminium foundry which would have burned with ferocious white hot flames.  Not a good idea letting your enemy have detailed bombing maps of all strategic factories.  It was a chocolate factory in 1908 and best described as such in a war.

I was wrong.  Honduras Street did not become Dundalk Street. Honduras Street was also acquired by the University in 1965, along with Dundalk St.  But I found a remark on this page
http://genforum.genealogy.com/hampson/messages/263.html
which says Dundalk Street used to be Cornbrook Street.


Manx was on to it.