Well hello everyone, another Cheetham Hill ex-pat here slowly reading through the list (now up to pg 40) and will try and avoid reintroducing old topics. Like many here I am now retired and getting curious about the sights and places of my earlier life.
More of an import than a native Manc, I was part of a dirt poor single parent family and my (Polish, came to the UK at the end of the war) mother struggled to bring up 2 kids, one mentally handicapped (mongoloid they called it then) and me, in the slums and near slums of Manchester. She succeeded beyond her wildest expectations with me and thanks to the enlightened attitudes of the day I went to University on a full grant and didn't really return for 40-odd years. I had a reasonable career in the computer industry and now have a decentish pension and live in Scotland.
Very little of what I knew still exists and I spent some time looking for maps to jog my memory (annoyingly I left Manchester in 1972 with a then current street map but that is now stashed away in a box somewhere and I have yet to dig it out). What I did find (and I think this appears to be new to this forum) was in the John Rylands map collection. During WW2, in 1940, they produced a map of all bomb damage by marking up the 1930 ordnance survey maps of the city. Obviously there were changes by the 50s/60s/70s. (Oh, I can't post external links so look at John Rylands online map collection and look for the bomb damage maps). Strangeways is on the map called 104 pt 6. The maps are a bit murky but you can zoom in to quite high levels of magnification using the little control in the lower centre of the map (there is also a little map at bottom right for moving around as well). The very murky index sheet shows the position of each map in roman numerals, so CIV 6 is 104 pt 6, if you zoom in high it is surprisingly useful. Broughton/Cheetham is towards top left
I'll provide more detail later but for an overview, we lived in rooms around the Moss Side/Cheetham/Broughton areas and near Strangeways prison, also in Kennet House (s*it hole), the deck access flats in Hulme (utter, complete, s*it hole); then I left. As a kid I practically lived in what I thought was called Cheetham Hill Library (apparently it was called Crumpsall Library), that was what led me to Uni. My secondary school was St Gregory's Technical High (later, Grammar) in Ardwick and had early experiences of s*x, dr*gs and rock and roll at the UMIST, Poly and Uni student Unions.
Sorry this has been a bit rambling and disjointed but wanted to say something relevant without getting bogged down in detail as a first post.