Britain Under Construction group

Hi OldiePhil,

thanks for your post. I would say that the fact that your house will be build a few years later in the same spot is not an excuse but a very good reason to post the image!
Maybe we should open a new category in this group to collect images which show the building sites where the houses of users will be or are being built ... I can't compete, unfortunately, the house I currently live in was already built when the picture was taken in 1920.

There are a couple of planned factory towns on the Wirral. Port Sunlight is the best known, it still stands next to the Lever Brothers factory, now Unilever. I think you can just see it in the top right of this picture.
http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/image/epw025167

Also Prices Candles had a workers village, which can be seen here. ..

http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/image/epw021620

Sir Ebenezer Howard (1850 –1928) is known for his publication Garden Cities of To-morrow (1898), the description of a utopian city in which people live harmoniously together with nature.

This resulted in Welwyn and Letchworth garden cities near London. The ideas were also used in relation developments, such as Bournville by the Cadburys in Birmingham and the Rowntrees in York. I have annotated EPW001104 Bournville.

The concept of the garden city is in contrast to the planned city. There are numerous examples of geometric developments in the Britain from Above collection, for example Billingham EPW032188. However, these do not always carry with them the philosophical approach to the relationship between those dwelling in the garden city and the landscape. For example, Cadbury insisted that the housing provided for workers in the chocolate factory should include a garden with an apple tree, thus encouraging a productive relationship with the land. Indeed, many of the Bournville’s houses might be described as cottages, reminiscent of those built on the more well-found English country estates from the shire countries. The garden city was attempting to bring the country to the town.

Hi Class31, thanks for helping us with identifying this picture! Your new identification will have gone through to our Cataloguing Team who will be getting back to you in due course. I did like the sound of that Portuguese Cafe you mentioned, too ...

Interesting to read your recollections, Cath. I effectively moved away in 1964, when I went off to university and life, and with it my focus of interest, changed radically. I was away for almost exactly twenty years, and when I came back, my childhood and teenage haunts had of course changed radically too.

But up to autumn 1964 I used to cycle regularly round and about the Baguley/Timperley border area, as it was the nearest bit of open countryside still surviving close to where I grew up. I remember Butcher Lane and Sandy Lane pretty well: the tree-shrouded bit north of the railway line, the railway bridge itself which was still cobbled, and then the drop down to Shady Lane at the south end, with little Butcher Farm on the east side near the junction.

But I can't recall "the Cottage" - was it the house at the end of the track, opposite Sandy Lane? I recall long greenhouses close by there, in the triangular block of land east of Baguley railway station which was bounded by Butcher Lane, Shady Lane and Altrincham Road; and long lines of lettuces in the early summer grown in the open. And the rhubarb field between the station forecourt and Brooks Drive ...

No - farm gate sales were less common back in the late '50s and early '60s, though I do remember a couple of farms in Dunham Massey, west of Altrincham (not an area caught on these photographs) which sold potatoes in bulk.

Nothing so glossy as farm shops - you saw the sign at the farm entrance, drove in the yard, and just knocked on the back door. And you bought them in 56lb sacks, like it or lump it - no small size option. But they were cheap, in comparison with shop prices.

Rather more common at that time in the market gardens which predominated over arable or dairy farming in the rural pockets in by then mainly urbanized areas like Timperley and Baguley was the sale, in spring and early summer, of bedding plants to surburbanites keen on having a colourful garden. Quite a lot of nurserymen went in for that.

Along with the sale of rhubarb (known humorously as "Baguley beef") which grew really well locally; there's even a variety of rhubarb called "Timperley Early" because it was developed locally. Every market garden had a rhubarb field, or at least a patch alongside the long straight lines of lettuces and cabbages.

Thanks for this contribution, YorkStories! It's somehow really sad but also admittedly fascinating to follow up like this on the lifespan of a building. Do you happen to know what is planned to replace these buildings after their 86 years in the service of producing chocolate?

It looked prettier back then!