Month: February 2017

Ordsall in Salford is sandwiched between the A57 and Salford Quays and close to the border with Manchester.  An area of housing, Ordsall has had an important place in the recent history of Manchester and [in a way] a place in the heart of the nation.  Walking around Ordsall you can still get glimpses of why the now demolished terraced streets of Ordsall were the inspiration for Tony Warren’s long running soap opera Coronation Street.  You might also meet Smith’s fans who still come to Ordsall to stand outside Salford Lad’s Club [on the corner of Ordsall’s own Coronation Street] to recreate the photograph on the sleeve of The Smith’s The Queen is Dead album.  Salford’s Lads’ Club opened in 1904 and is now a listed building, its tiled interior unchanged and a fantastic example of this type of community provision.

Known as the New Barracks Estate, the houses of Ordsall were built on the site of a former army barracks in the early 1900s.  Before the barracks the area had been countryside and it was the development of the docks that led to the need for decent workers housing.  The estate was designed by Manchester architect Henry Lord following a competition in 1899 and was Salford’s first public housing scheme.  The scheme was ambitious and community buildings were an integral part of the plan for the estate along with the housing.  During the 20th century many of the streets were cleared and by the 1980s the area had became derelict.  Since then local residents have worked tirelessly to renovate the houses and the area.

St Ignatius’ Church, next to Salford Lads’ Club, had a different architect to the houses.  Alfred Darbyshire, a local architect who also worked on various theatres in Greater Manchester, designed the romanesque style building in red brick and terracotta.  The design of the church compliments Salford Lads’ Club and the houses of the New Barracks Estate and is a local landmark, although no longer in use and falling in to disrepair.

Ordsall today has a profusion of new housing built on the cleared areas of land but it is the older houses near to Salford Lads’ Club and around Regent Square that are the most attractive.  These handsome Edwardian terraced houses with gardens face in to a small park and yet, in a clear example of how important location is, when occasionally offered for sale [they are mostly social housing] these houses fetch around £160,000, whereas a similar house in the south of Manchester would cost you two or three times that amount.

 

 

In any city I will seek out the parks, those green spaces that are important for the health of people and wildlife.  I therefore found my way through the streets of Salford to Chimney Pot Park soon after we had moved here.  Although this handkerchief-sized park is not the most beautifully landscaped it is unusual and I always make the effort to walk through it when I am nearby as I love the airy views this elevated park gives across Salford.  Everyone calls the park Chimney Pot Park, although Salford City Council call it Langworthy Park on their website and local people are familiar with and pass down the park’s singular story.  That first day I came looking for Chimney Pot Park I was initially confused as at street level all I could can see was a long brick wall facing Liverpool Street.  Exploring I found the sloped entrance from Highfield Street through St Ambrose Gate, with a plaque remembering those who worshipped at St Ambrose Church nearby and I climbed up to find a small park that has everything a park needs and an unrivalled view over Salford; to the south the lights of Salford Quays and to the north the neat rows of red brick terraced houses.

The park was opened in 1915 on the site of the former Highfield Reservoir and Salford Online reports that there were originally plans to create a boating lake here.  Instead, a park with bowling greens and tennis courts was built for local people.  Whenever I walk along the paths looking across the rooftops of Langworthy I think about the enormity of the task of filling in the reservoir to create this park early in the 20th century.  Salford Online reports excerpts from the Mayor’s speech on the opening of the park, when he suggested that ‘ladies could “bring their sewing and mending to the park” and sit in comfort doing their work in pleasant surroundings.’  Today you are more likely to meet dog walkers in the park than anyone with a sewing basket.

Harold Riley, a local artist and friend of LS Lowry, dedicated his working life to documenting life in Salford in paintings and photographs, although he is best known as a portrait painter.  His dark and brooding stylised painting of Chimney Pot Park  shows the small park lost in the circle of terraced streets and tall chimneys.  This isn’t the park I know today and on a sunny day it feels to me that the park suspends me above the bustle of the streets and the houses to somewhere just a little more peaceful.

The memory of the reservoir survives in the surrounding street names; there is a Reservoir Street, Wall Street and Highfield Street.  The former two streets were part of a recent award winning and innovative redevelopment by Urban Splash that turned the terraced houses upside down, putting the living areas on the first floor and the bedrooms on the ground floor.  The development got caught up in Urban Splash’s financial difficulties and failing to deliver the final phase this was handed over to another developer in 2014 and the houses are now almost completed.  Many of the brick terraced houses here retain the attractive ornamental brickwork fans over the doorways that always catch my eye.

You might forgive me for thinking I was in Cheshire when I stepped off the number 33 bus at the end of the line in Worsley, surrounded as I was by handsome black and white timber framed buildings.  Think of Salford and many people will bring to mind rows of terraced streets in the style of Coronation Street but on the edges of Salford are suburbs that challenge that stereotype in a big way and demonstrate the variety of this city.  The Tudor-style building in the photograph is The Packet House which dates back to 1760.  The building stands on the banks of the Bridgewater Canal and is where you would have bought your ticket for the packet boat.  By 1781 there were daily sailings from here to Runcorn along the Bridgewater Canal; the boats were pulled the thirty or so miles by horses and the journey took eight hours.

I had taken advantage of a wintery and yet sunny day to explore Worsley, a suburban village cut through by the Bridgewater Canal, often described as England’s first canal.  Opened in 1761 the canal is named after its owner Francis Egerton the third Duke of Bridgewater.  He lived nearby in Brick Hall and limited his personal spending so that he could secure the best engineers of the day to build his vision of a canal system to transport coal from his Worsley mines to Manchester and later Runcorn.  This now peaceful suburb of Worsley was once a bustling industrial village with lime kilns and boat building as well as coal mining.  At the delph, a watery hollow below cliffs, is a tunnel entrance that once took barges in to 46 miles of underground canals to access the coal; two main underground canals were built, one 100 feet above the other.

Recreating the Tudor style became popular in the nineteenth century and Worsley is teaming with these attractive buildings, including the Court House.  After walking around the lovely buildings in Worsley and Worsley Green in the sunshine I followed the canal towards Boothstown.  I soon lost the roar of the traffic on the motorway and I was surrounded by fields and trees on this lovely and rural-feeling section of the canal.  I returned by Worsley Old Hall, now a country pub in the city and followed the paths through Worsley Woods and Old Walke Dam.  To reach the bus stop I crossed the interestingly named Alphabet Bridge in Worsley, so called because it is made from 26 planks and local school children would practice their alphabet as they crossed it.