Thoughts from Manchester's birthplace

As part of some of the research I am doing into Manchester's History,I took a walk down to Castlefield basin early yesterday morning.

It was a cold clear day and the water in the canal basin was frozen,the only sound that percolated the cold silence being the roar of the trams and the trains across the Victorian viaducts.It seems strange that this was once part of the bustling heart of Manchester.




My main purpose was to look at the Roman park.What was left of the Roman ruins were wiped away during the late 18th and 19th centuries as first the Rochdale canal and then the railways were built.
The reconstruction of the North Gate is built on what was found of the original foundations,a rough stone plinth.
The gate we see today is an interpretation of how it would have looked around 200AD.The Roman Road headed North from here,running parallel to Deansgate across Liverpool Road before heading towards where the cathedral now stands.

This photo captures the old and the New Manchester with 21st Century Hilton Tower overlooking the North Gate of the 2nd century fort






Just along from the reconstruction are the Roman gardens.it was here that excavations in the 1970's first established a civilian town outside of the fort servicing the garrison

Mapping Manchester-Saxton's lost map and 1650

If you haven't been following it,Manchester Archives have been tweeting a map a day to celebrate this year's history festival which is being held at the end of February.

The first published map comes from sometime in the 1600's and is reproduced here by kind permission of Chetham's Library.

You can see a better version of it HERE on their flickr site.

The date is put at 1650,although as J Lee writes in his maps of plans of Manchester,it has a somewhat confused history but there is much speculation that an earlier map of the town was produced.

According to John Dee who was as the time,master of Collegiate chapel,now better known as Manchester Cathedral,the famous English map maker,Christopher Saxton had turned his attention to what was then the small town of Manchester at the end of the 1500's.

Writing in his diary dated July 10th 1596,he says "Manchester Town described and measured by Mr Christopher Saxton.

Saxton was born in Yorkshire in the early 1540s and during his early life gained an enthusiasm for and understanding of map-making under the direction of a local vicar John Rudd.

During the reign of Elizabeth 1,he was commissioned to survey the whole of England and Wales. A huge undertaking given the times and the means available to him and he probably used a team of surveyors who may or may not have come to Manchester.

The survey was completed in 1577 and Saxton produced an atlas which comprised a general map of England and Wales and 34 others of either individual or grouped counties.

The county of Lancashire was one of the plates produced which was engraved by a
Remigius Hogenberg .It may have been this that Dee was referring to but if an individual map of Manchester was ever produced and published, it has so far alluded historians who hope that maybe it will turn up in a dark corner of Chethams.


But to the 1650 map of which no original exists but has been reproduced on many occasions.According to Lee,there is evidence that the map was produced at least two decades later than 1650 with evidence that in 1669,the Court Leets in Manchester ordered that a survey "of the land and tenemants of the said town of Manchester so that everyman should bear an equal proportion in the said taxes."

The map offers a unique perspective of a bird's eye view of the town.Centred on Collegiate,some of the roads that survive today can clearly be seen,including Deansgate,Market Street and across the Irwell Sacred Trinity Church is shown.
The course of the Irk entering the Irwell under where the MEN arena now stands can also be seen and the river which is bearly visible today can be seen meandering north through open fields.

The medieval part of the town,centred on what is now the Shambles and Exchange square is also clearly defined and somewhere where Marks and Spencer now stands was the Sessions House where the Court Leets sat.Past there to where St Ann's square now stands was Acres Field and fields also ran from Deansgate down to the banks of the Irwell

In praise of Manchester's buildings-No. 81 King Street

As you stand at the top of King Street in Manchester today,you may spot at No 81 an elegant building.

On its ground floor you will see the pink lit windows of a lady's fashion shop and around the side an elegant cocktail bar where for seven pounds you can relax over a Black Russian,a cherry pop or a Scarlet o'Hara.

The second floor is now occupied by amongst others the city's management company City Co but 150 years ago it was the site of Manchester's reform club,in its day a hotbed of liberalism.

The club was set up in 1867 to providing a place of resort for Liberal politicians and supporters of the Liberal cause in the Manchester area. It started life in three rented rooms above the warehouse of John Bright & Brothers in Spring Gardens but at the end of the decade it had outgrown these premises and commissioned local architect Edward Salomons to design the building.

No lesser person than William Gladstone was on hand to open the building in October 1871.

It was a club for Liberal Gentlemen,indeed women were not invited to join for over one hundred years and as this piece from the John Rylands library says,its up and downs reflected those of the Liberal Party in Manchester and beyond.

After World War 2,membership had declined to such an extent that the Club was facing the real prospect of closure.
In  1967 it merged with another Manchester gentleman's club, the Engineers Club, to form the Manchester Club,

However  as membership continued to decline while running costs rose and with insufficient income from its membership the Club became financially unviable, and was finally forced to close its doors in 1987.

We still though have the building.As Claire Hartnell writes in Pevsner,Solomon's work was his best city centre building in his romantic of Venitian gothic

"The two storey hall has a range of large windows,matched in the soaring oriels...beneath is a fanciful portal,richly adorned with carvings including large winged beasts,a motive repeated with variations amongst the lively foliage carvings of the freize"

Writing in 1880 an unknown writer said this about the building:

“at the very top of King Street we are met by what auctioneers would call a splendid ediface,elaborate without an luxorious within….the very porch overhanging like a  beetle brow.seems to indicate that momentous subjects on which may hang the fate of nations are daily discussed within its portals”

Salomon himself was a pupil of J. E. Gregan, who designed the Mechanics Institute building on Princess Street.He set up his own practice in Manchester in 1852 and have a left a collection of buildings doted around Manchester including Trinity Court on John Dalton Street and Manchester's Jewish museum in Cheetham Hill.

He also won the competition for the masonry shell of Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition Building of 1857. He died at Ireton Bank, Platt Lane, Rusholme, Manchester in May 1906, and was cremated at the German Romanesque Manchester Crematorium

Manchester's Invisible History walks return

Three new Invisible History walks which will be taking place in November

Here are the details which you can also get from the website

Wednesday 9 November 2pm Alison Gill and Helen Ostell 'Safety in numbers: life in Prestwich Asylum in 1900'.

A glimpse into the history and daily life of this self-contained community which has cared for a forgotten sector of society for over 150 years. Includes hands-on experience of original artefacts from Greater Manchester County Record Office's collections.

Wednesday 16 November 2pm Tim Gee ‘Counterpower'.
Co-hosted with the University of Salford

Counterpower is the power the ‘have-nots' can use to resist the power of the ‘haves'. No movement has achieved lasting change without it. From the revolutions of the 18th century to the Arab Spring of 2011, in his new book Tim Gee investigates the campaigns of the past and the present day and reveals the dynamics of social change.

Wednesday 30 November 2pm George McKay - ‘Radical Gardening'.

George McKay is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Salford and his new book, Radical gardening: politics, idealism & rebellion in the garden, aims to show how notions of utopia, of community, of peace and of activism for progressive social change, are practically worked through in the garden.