Joy Winder - History

History

Whalley Range was one of Manchester's first suburbs, built by Manchester banker and businessman Samuel Brooks as "a desirable estate for gentlemen and their families".

Brooks bought 63 acres (25 ha) of land, then called Jackson's Moss, drained it, and built villas for wealthy businessmen such as himself. He was born near Whalley, Lancashire, after which he named his own home Whalley House, which may be the origin of the area's name. A toll gate guarded this exclusive area and this place (where Chorlton Road and Withington Road meet) is still called Brooks's Bar (pron. Brooks Bar). The charging of tolls came to an end on June 10, 1896.

The residents never tried to incorporate the area as a separate local authority, as in the age of light-touch government they saw no need. The area was more or less equally divided between the Moss Side and Withington Urban Districts (some existing street furniture remains from that period). The urban district councils in turn sub-contracted some functions to Lancashire County Council, notably policing (see 'Murder most foul' below). Additionally the residents paid for a private police force, to collect tolls and protect property. This arrangement seemed to be quite effective, as the area rarely appears in Victorian and Edwardian crime reports, with the one exception below. The private police survived the elimination of toll-charging and incorporation into the City, only becoming defunct with the manpower shortages of the First World War. Residents to the south of the area could also call on the Cheshire Lines Committee Police, and Manchester City Council maintained a Park Police. The unique nature of the area has given rise to some myths, notably that no alcohol could be sold in the area. Brooks was a High Church Anglican, so there was no religious reason for any restrictive covenants, rather a desire to keep up the tone of the area. Whalley Range had several private members' clubs (see the Carlton Club below), as well as a Public Hall and a cinema in Withington Road, at the end of Dudley Road. Also in Withington Road was the 'Caught on the Hop' pub on Withington Road, as well as the much older 'Whalley' and former 'Seymour' pubs.

The original plans for the area envisaged it as much larger. For instance, Hough End Crescent was meant to be an arc of very large houses, linking the ends of Alexandra and Withington Roads. This idea was made impossible by the difficulty of draining the area, and the later building of the railway. Drainage difficulties are a feature of the area, as it was crossed by a large number of streams, some being notable as open sewers. Many roads are in fact culverts, notably Upper Chorlton Road and Brantingham Road. As late as the 1930s significant drainage work had to be carried out in the Manley Road area. Clarendon Road was built on the site of clay pits, and needed remedial work on gable-ends due to subsidence in the 1980s. Even today the remaining open streams are regularly worked on to prevent flooding.

Incorporation shrank the area considerably, thanks to ward and constituency boundary changes. West Point was lost to Chorlton, and Darley Park to Old Trafford, as well as the eastern side at the north end of Withington Road. Postcode changes, made necessary by the inter-war development of the Egerton Estate, meant that the southern end of the area was lost. By the 1960s the area became synonymous with bedsit-land, the encroachment of property developers, and gained a poor reputation as a red-light district. There has been a recent return of this phenomenon. Estate agents took to describing it as 'Chorlton Borders', and the City Council made a short-lived attempt to rename it as East Chorlton. However the area had two redoubtable female defenders: one of these was Ingeborg Tipping, the Chair of the Residents' Association, who made great efforts to ensure the area was properly policed, among many other matters. City Councillor the late Kath Fry was a highly pro-active champion of the area. On June 24th 2012 the Olympic Torch passed along the full length of Upper Chorlton Road on its' nationwide tour.