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England (Counties as in 1851-1901) => England => Lancashire => Topic started by: Matt7924 on Saturday 08 May 21 17:14 BST (UK)
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I have been reading about the history of Coronation Street and found that the most famous and best-known opening titles (that also featured the ginger cat) had scenes that were shot in the Beswick area. The coronationstreet.fandom.com website mentions that these scenes showed Myrtle Street, Albert Street, Carmen Street and Morley Street in one shot and that most of the buildings are now gone. The scenes were shot in 1975 and google maps shows that Myrtle and Albert Streets still exist although they are rebuilt. I was wondering when all the terraced houses came down and why the area was redeveloped? This title sequence was the longest running in Coronation Street's history as well.
The article also mentions the famous cat shot as being filmed by a building known as Arnold's garage near Ashton Old Road. Does anyone remember the garage as I have looked at old phone books on Ancestry and not found it. Apparently the famous cat just came onto the roof and the director liked the shot.
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This is a 1948 view of Myrtle Street
https://www.old-maps.co.uk/#/Map/386508/397894/13/101329
On the left are later "old maps" - click on later old maps to view development. You may have to use zoom function to produce an image.
Cannot answer your specific questions.
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Spotted an advert in the Manchester News, 17 Mar 1945, which mentioned "... 3 Brookville Place, C.-on-M, M/c 13, opp Arnold's Garage"
C.-on-M presumably Chorlton on Medlock
Old Maps - Brookville Place, there's a coach works across the road.
https://www.old-maps.co.uk/#/Map/384860/396687/13/101329
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A 1914 advert mentions "Arnold, coach builder, Up. Brook Street, Man'er."
Brookville Place runs off Upper Brook St.
All this not quite "Ashton Old Road" - but in the locale.
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There is a website with the Ordnance Survey revision points photographs of the Manchester area. I am not linking as the site as it is semi commercial - watermarked images are free. These photographs were taken by the OS in 1949/50. The photographs are held by Manchester Central Library.
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Thanks for all the details. I have looked at the maps and seen where the old streets ran and the Arnold coach builders does seem like it could be the Arnold's garage close to where some of the the scenes were filmed.
As Coronation Street and Weatherfield are based on Salford, I have always been a bit surprised that the crew went to the east side of Manchester to film some of the scenes for the 70s title sequence, especially as I read some of the other shots in the same titles were in Salford. The same article also says streets in Old Trafford were used for the first colour titles in 1969. I wonder why they didn't stick to using Salford?
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As far back as 1948 (I think) the local authority had identified the area of Beswick aka Bradford in Manchester as suitable for redevelopment, stating that the housing was poor quality and the area was effectively a slum. My father was born and raised in the area and says that the housing looked (& was) dirty and grim, due to all the pollution from coal fires in houses and local factories. However; it was solidly built and was capable of being modenised for example, his family lived in an end terrace on the corner of School street and Mill street and his parents had one of the upstairs bedrooms made in to a bathroom.
Sadly, the postwar period is littered with the 'we know best' attitude of local planners who recited the blunder headed mantra that 'all old is bad, all new is good' and (ignoring the importance of communties) proceeded to demolish most of the area in the late 60s and 70s. Many of the local industries also close at this time including the Stuart Street Power Station; Richard Johnson Wireworks and Bradford (coal) Pit. All that was left standing were a few pubs and the odd church (though many of these have gone since). As a child in the early 1980s, I can recall my father driving me around the area where he use to live. Aside from St Bridgets Catholic Church, there were no buildings. All I could see was the original roads (cobble visible in many places) and pavements. Just beyond (but running parallel to the pavements) was a continuous grassy mound (about 4ft high), underneath which, was the rubble of the former buildings. I wish I'd at least saved a brick because even this has all gone now and in its place stands Alan Turning Way.
My grandparents (and other family members and some old neighbours) were rehoused in new accommodation on Ramage Walk & Palmeston Street, near Ashton New Road, but they were lucky as although they were still in a terraced houses; each house had a front and back garden and was well built from brick. Compare that the Council's 'premier' redevlopement scheme of panel built flats, which resulted in the infamous 'Fort Beswick' development on Wellington Street, completed in 1972. Poorly designed and badly constructed; the developement was plagued with problems and eventually demolished from 1982 onwards.
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Phil I agree with so much in your post.
I know the area well, my in-laws lived there and Ancoats Hospital Accident Dept was very familiar to we children who often played in the still standing
ruins of bombed houses.
The houses still standing were capable of being modernised ,two knocked
together etc.
The area bounded by Cambrian St, Mill St, Ashton New Road and Gt,Ancoats St was Beswick .
The high rise buildings that took the place of the little terraced houses were part of one of the worst social experiments ever to be forced upon working class people .
Many other people were moved to places like Langley ,houses yes,but no shops,no social facilities etc.Dreadful, the isolation - hard to get to visit family
still in Manchester - a couple of buses at least - all added to the misery.
On Pollard St, there was The Star Hall, started by the Crossley family of Crossley’s Springs and Motors.
A beacon of light in a very poor area.
Very philanthropic people ,they opened a Maternity Hospital so women got a rest and good care for a few days at least after having theit babies.
This was late 1800’s early 1900’s .
The Round House had been a Church but became a Youth Club for the deprived youngsters in the area.
Mary Kingsmill Jones the Mayoress I think opened it and some new “ Social Housing” ,that quickly became slums, shoddy building etc.
Beswick St branched off and my M in L was born in Junction St.
Manchester Council was a Labour Council at the time .
Sorry to correct you but the roads were oblong granite setts ,cobbles are large pebbles on end.
Often called cobbles I agree.
Viktoria.
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Here we go again - blame the planners!
The choice to declare a slum clearance area is an environmental health matter and, whilst “the planners” might have a say in what might replace cleared houses, if you have any spleen to vent, this should be directed at the environmental health officer/public health/sanitary inspector; or whatever they chose to call themselves at the time.
That said, there were perfectly good reasons to renew housing in may cities as much of it was both cheaply and badly built, lacking in facilities and incapable of economic improvement but those problems seem to have been lost in the mists of nostalgia.
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But Ray, yes the houses were substandard ,but they could have been improved .
What was lost by their demolition was something that meant a great deal ,not reproduced on the new estates until the communities had been there for a good few years. In the meantime loneliness , no shops close by, not your usual Church with the familiar members of the congregation and the social
life there was with many churches .
The old community spirit ,neighbourliness,extended family not too far away in times of illness etc, corner shops and shops for almost all needs very close by.All gone.
Longer distances to travel to work with bus fares to pay.
A way of life that was based on neighbourliness.
That was never quite the same again.
The price of those changes was loneliness, distance from close family, the poor souls in high rise flats stranded as lifts broke down frequently .
Black mould on walls not insulated ,nowhere to hang washing so dried inside exacerbating the damp problem .
Children unsupervised where before every woman in the street looked out for
the children playing ,how do you supervise children from seven floors up with a broken lift ?
Carrying a weeks groceries up flights of stairs?
No communal areas, so intense loneliness and that led to psychiatric illnesses.
It was a social disaster, and a heavy price was paid by the very people it was supposed to help ,trouble was even with all the evidence from Doctors etc
Manchester Council ignored it all.
Did you live near such a rehousing area? I did, knew people who had been rehoused, my auntie being one but she was in a house with a little garden at Langley ,but no shops or bus service for good while ,my uncle worked at the Co - op on Balloon St Manchester ,centre near Victoria Station.
Imagine his journey to and from work .
People only knew it was “ The Council “ or “ The Corporation “ who effected the demolitions and re - location programme.
They would know nothing of the bodies you quote .
People were the last consideration ,otherwise the new builds that became modern slums would have been better built ,on areas cleared in the old neighbourhoods ,gradually replacing the old so there was still some community and continuity
still there and the isolation and loneliness with the resulting depressive conditions would not have been anything like the serious problem it did become.
Doctors surgeries were inundated with women begging for a letter to say they
were suffering greatly from the conditions both physical and mental .
It truly was a social disaster .
Viktoria.
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Victoria - I don't want to write an essay on this so I'll try to be brief!
Yes, the houses could have been improved but you also have to recognise the scale of the problem. The movement of the rural population into the towns and explosion of urban housing during the 19C resulted in thousands of, generally sub-standard, terraced housing. It's one thing renovating a one off bijou cottage but a totally different matter when you have street after street of them to contend with.
For starters, many of the houses had inadequate foundations. Most had no damp proof course and they were not built with cavity walls. For those with electricity, it was something of an afterthought and bathrooms and indoor toilets were available for the minority. Add to that the necessary repairs to roofs, doors and window frames, the Authorities, at the time were faced with something of a problem.
The houses were in a multiplicity of ownerships and co-ordinated improvement would have been difficult if not impossible. Meanwhile the condition of the housing was getting worse as was the health of the people forced to live there.
Admittedly there were lessons to be learned with respect to what happened to the population when they were re-housed but we had never been here before so everything was something of an experiment. The cost of renovating an inadequate terraced house is also relatively high compared with demolition and re-development and the life expectancy of a renovated terraced house is also relatively short without further investment. The likelihood was that in say fifty years time, we would be faced with the same problem all over again but then with a higher number of sub-standard properties.
And, yes .... I grew up in a a terraced slum with a shared toilet in the back yard and a once a week tin bath in the kitchen. I have no nostalgic feelings for those days and, fortunately, we were able to get ourselves out before the houses were demolished.
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I agree with much of what you say but much of the replacement housing stock has been demolished anyway now,especially the tower blocks .
So that was an expensive ruinous cruel exercise!
Not just bricks and mortar ,peoples mental well being!
It was the way it was handled too ,choice one ,then two ,then the last .
All three usually unsuitable re distance to work especially .
My brother in law with two very young children ,lived in Manchester worked at Middleton .
They were offered unsuitable choices one and two so it was three or
homeless .Choice three was Bramhall!
It was high handed and no thought given to the close knit community life that was destroyed ,nothing ,just row after row of ,houses ,not even a Church for quite a time.
Yes small gardens , and fresher air ,but the loneliness and no one from your immediate area to chat with.
People withdrew in to themselves .
I see both sides to some extent ,but the infrastructure took a long time to come in ,a pub ,off licence , a shop or two ,in the meantime women especially were really suffering .
No chat across the street as they swept the front flags ,no corner shop where gossip was exchanged etc .
Very sad.
I know how bad were the houses that were demolished ,but the new were also damp through condensation , cold and no open fire especially in the tower blocks so air circulation and ventilation were compromised causing respiratory disease especially in children ,from the mould growth that
ensued.
We each have our points ,and something needed to be done ,but it should have been more compassionate ,done more slowly and as far as possible in the areas to be demolished , new housing replacing the old in the same area.
Communities kept together as far as possible .
Thanks for the interesting facts,you know I am fascinated by Manchester ,especially near the inner city ,and the rapid growth that made slums even as they were being built .
Concilio et Labore!
Cheerio .Viktoria.
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Thereby hangs the other problem; experienced by your brother-in-law, insofar as replacing the unsatisfactory housing required sufficient space to decant existing residente. Space was not readily available in a number of the larger local authority areas. The solution? Either build upwards or, in your brother-in-law’s case build elsewhere; i.e. “overspill”.
Liverpool moved a fair bit of the population to Skelmersdale (... have you seen Will Russell’s “Blood Brothers”?) and Manchester moved people to places such as Hattersley, Handforth and Bramhall. At least the overspill in Bramhall had (and still has) a row of shops, ready access to public transport and the town centre of Stockport is a short bus ride away. In fact the North Park Road area is quite a desirable place to live even today on the edge of the “footballer belt”!
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There was a programme (Granada) I think a while ago which looked at St Mary’s Ward, Oldham in the 1960s.
I recall a friend, discussing it, saying ‘they said we were living in slums and it wasn’t true.’
Many houses were well maintained but looking back now you can see how poor most were.
To replace the ‘slums’, flats were built using a new system.
The programme looked at the vision and then years later the reality.
The flats are now demolished.
At the time our house still had cold water and an outside tippler toilet. We weren’t part of that clearance - that was later.
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I have described the very basic house my parents had in Manchester and then the cottage to where I was evacuated even more basic ,however,everything in those houses was scrubbed polished,blackleaded, bleached etc.
The outside steps back and front in M/c too, most of that work was daily .
Most houses I knew were also clean and neat.
The morning I had my first baby,at home ,was the day for the weekly scour of the back street steps ,my husband was putting the bin out and a woman from across the street complained that I had not cleaned our steps, “ No ,and she won’t be doing ,our new baby is twenty minutes old .”
She did them for me ,can’t let things slip,especially as it was Whit week!
I used to wonder why building did not start on the bomb sites ,then a street mostly could be rehoused quite near their home that was to be demolished .
Communities kept together.
Not impossible , and much kinder.
All in the past now ,North Park Road was where my b in l ‘s new home was.
Right next to the posh private houses! That did not go down well .
But they were good tenants and bought the house later.
It is a small world isn’t it!
Viktoria.
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Viktoria
I doubt many children have ever heard of a 'granite sett' let alone be able to identify them and that includes me.
Whilst not wishing to contradict you, my memory is quite clear as to whati saw. Even at that junior school age, I knew what cobbles were and what I saw (exposed in many places where the road surface had been removed / damaged / eroded etc), were cobbles as they were neither rectangular nor grey.
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Phil you said all that was visible were the original roads, given the context of that in your earlier post I assumed you meant all that was left of the streets where the demolished buildings had been.
You gave no idea what you saw must have been exposed parts of the the earlier cobbled roads which will have been resurfaced with setts when later housing that replaced much earlier ,perhaps even Georgian houses ,was built.
It is Alan Turing Way, you had a “ typo”.
Viktoria.
PS, as most streets were granite setts until many were asphalted over in probably the late 1950’s ,,children of that time would certainly know what setts were .
Our street not a million miles away ,off Hulme Hall Lane was setts ,we left in 1965. and it was never asphalted ,Demolished in the 70’s.
We played with the tar - that softened in the sunshine - which had been poured in all the gaps to make the roads a bit smoother and also prevented weeds growing .
It stained our clothes ,Eucalyptus oil helped to remove the stains.
V
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Granite setts are often confused with cobbles and the main difference is their size, shape and origin.
Setts are rectangular - the size of a small loaf of bread - and manufactured. Not all setts in the north of England were granite - some were made of sandstone.
Cobbles, on the other hand, are round and natural; quarried from old river beds along with sand and gravel.
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Exactly , however some paviours now describe small square setts as cobbles!
You can pave with cobbles but you can’t cobble with paving stones ;D ;D
V.
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I think ths chat is starting to stray somewhat from the original posting so in order to conclude the matter of setts & cobbles I would say the following.
My paternal Grandmother and most of my Great Aunts & Uncles lived most if not all their lives in Beswick whilst my father and his two siblings grew up there. Despite this, (to the best of my memory), I never heard any of them use the word setts to describe the local road surface.
None of us can know (and I doubt there are complete records to show, even if anyone wants to go digging in the archives) what type of stone was originally laid on all the streets in the area. Over more than century, alterations to the road layout; repairs by various teams from the Council or utilities; bomb damage; RTA's; vandalism; Town Hall budget restrictions; mining subsidence etc., will no doubt have resulted in a 'patchwork' of stones used across the road network. The massive redevelopement of the area in the late 60s and then again since 2000, will have destroyed/erased much of the patchwork whilst complicating what little still remains.
Accordingly, there is nothing to say that any or all of us are right or wrong in our memories.
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As you will but I refer you back to post 17.
Viktoria.
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Thanks for all your interesting comments. I had started the thread last year and it's interesting to hear what it was like to live in Beswick as well as hearing about being re-houses in overspill areas. I agree it would have been better to build new houses on bombed sites. Although I am not from the North West I know Manchester city council covers a smaller area than some people realise and it seems the council weren't able to build as many new homes within the city boundary.
Going back to the original subject of my post, can anyone remember a garage near the main road in Beswick, as this was close to the famous rooftop cat scene in Coronation Street.
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Viktoria & post 17.
I'm not saying you are right or wrong. I just don't see any evidence to support a claim that one person knows about the road surfaces (& all the various repairs etc) across the entire area and can be trusted as the expert over anyone else.
Even experts who are knowledgeble about specifc fields of study never claim to know everything, there are always unknowns.
And yes, I meant Alan Turing Way.
To: Matt7924
Don't know if this is what your looking for, but when I read your question about a garage, I remembered seeing this image recently (of a garage on Mill Street,) which was one of the main roads of the area.
https://images.manchester.gov.uk/Display.php?irn=13092&QueryPage=index.php&QueryName=BasicQuery&QueryPage=%2Findex.php%3Fsession%3Dpass&Restriction=&StartAt=1&Anywhere=SummaryData%7CAdmWebMetadata&QueryTerms=garage+mill&QueryOption=Anywhere&Submit=Search
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To: Matt7924
Don't know if this is what your looking for, but when I read your question about a garage, I remembered seeing this image recently (of a garage on Mill Street,) which was one of the main roads of the area.
https://images.manchester.gov.uk/Display.php?irn=13092&QueryPage=index.php&QueryName=BasicQuery&QueryPage=%2Findex.php%3Fsession%3Dpass&Restriction=&StartAt=1&Anywhere=SummaryData%7CAdmWebMetadata&QueryTerms=garage+mill&QueryOption=Anywhere&Submit=Search
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Thanks. It could be the same garage, I read online that the garage was called Arnold's and it was on or near Ashton Old Road and the famous scene with the cat was filmed near the garage. The original Coronation Street historian gave these details