Strange that they had fires AND gas leaks!!
My grandparents house was the other side of Cambridge Street, close to the Dental Hospital and it was demolished so my secondary school could be built - St Ignatius.
As to the pubs being left standing, the demolition crews used them to slake their thirst after working hard all day! It was the same in Hulme, whole blocks demolished but the pubs left standing until the very end.
I remember how people had to put signs in their windows saying This House is Still Occupied but even then a stray stone would hit the wrong house! I have to say that breaking windows in houses about to be demolished was great fun. I didn't like running across floors that had had the floorboards removed leaving just the joists but my brothers and their friends seemed to think that was great fun.
Great photographs - have you seen the book Shirley Baker did showing photographs taken around the same time? Great memories and I now enjoy seeing other people's reactions to those photographs, civilised looks of horror on their faces but to me, it was normal. That was my childhood.
Dear MargaretB
Yes, quite normal.
I was living in Oxford Place and doing my PhD in Coupland St of which the Western end, towards the Dental Hospital was where they said there be dragons.
Except there weren't dragons. My gf was a (pupil) midwife who lived in Hathersage Road and would cycle to those 2 up 2 down houses to do home deliveries. I would accompany her and sit downstairs with the father and the existing children listening to the screams upstairs whilst telling the children, especially the girls, that they were screams of delight. I always made sure that I had 4 big pennies in my pocket £4/240 = £1/60 = 1 and 2/3p in modern dosh Actually gf made sure I had them.
If there was a "problem" I'd get a shouted coded message from upstairs "Ow ya doin Robin?" upon which I would dash to the nearest phone box (checked out beforehand) and phone Hathersage Rd for the "Flying Squad". If they were engaged, (another fraught delivery phoning in) I just pressed button B, which took a lot of physical effort, and I'd get the 4d back. If somebody spoke, and said something remotely midwiferish, I'd press button A. If I heard "Ardwick gas leak emergency service" I'd press button B and get my money back. In those days, if not properly connected, you did not pay.
The Flying Squad was two more bikes with more experienced midwives carrying a few more gas and air cylinders (on their bikes) and if they couldn't cope, they'd use another 4d to call an ambulance which would take the mother to St M Whitworth St West, now a car park. Two of my 3 children were born in a car park.
[size=78%]
[/size]
Few Chorlton-upon-Medlock delivering mothers realised that their lives and that of their as yet unborn were in my hands up to a point. Yet having heard my mother give birth to 4 of my younger sisters in a 2 up 2 down in a Yorkshire village, I was not going to let them down. It did put me off sex though, for a while.
It was an "engineer" chap, not wearing a not yet invented yellow jacket who frightened me off with fires and gas leaks. I could see the fires so who was I to disbelieve him? And he was bigger than me,