John Ellis's profile

Sorry, Stephen, no knowledge of it, or even detailed memory. I only know of it because I grew up about three miles away and still have a collection of old maps which I got hold of back in the 1950s. The name of the house appears on one of them.

I notice you put a pin on Brockhurst. This was a house that my Great Great Grandfather lived in. Do you have any more information about it?

Interesting to read your reminicences of Sale. My memories run between the early 1950s and the mid-'60s when I went to university and, in the usual way, my focus of interest shifted elsewhere. My memory of Sale Council's tip is that it was accessed off Rifle Road, the lane that led from near the Old Hall (north-east of Sale Moor) across the river to Chorlton via the Bridge Inn, Jackson's Boat and Hardy Lane. It covered the tract of land north-west of Rifle Road and extended roughly to Cow Lane, north of Dane Road and adjacent to Arnesby Avenue. That area of land's now on the perimeter of Sale Water Park. Samuel Brooks (known, affectionately or otherwise, to his tenants as "owd stink-o'-brass" was a corn merchant from Whalley who established himself around 1845-50 in Manchester, diversified into banking, land and property and made a bomb. One of his early lucrative ventures was to buy the moss adjacent to Moss Side, drain it, and then flog plots of land off to businessmen keen to build themselves pleasant villas on the fringe of Manchester. He called the area "Whalley Range", after his native village. He ended up owning very large tracts of land south of Manchester, including much of Sale, Baguley and Carrington, where he drained the moss and then rented the land out to farmers and market gardeners. "Brooklands" takes its name from his, as a consequence of another speculation involving the acquisition of land and the building of a long, straight road from Marsland Road to the Altrincham-Wilmslow Road, the idea again being that business men would fancy living out in the country once the Machester-Altrincham railway was opened in 1851 and commuting became feasible. Brooks persuaded the railway company to open an additional station to serve his new suburb, which they named "Brooklands". His son, Sir William Cunliffe Brooks, became later in the 19th century MP for East Cheshire and was a landowner along the Mersey from Stockport to Partington. Although we lived a couple of miles from the centre of Sale, south of the brook in what was technically (though not postally) Baguley, Wythenshawe and Manchester, in my youngest days my parents viewed Sale as their town, and I too got taken to Worthington Park and recall leaping on the stone lions. I remember there was an iron cannon too - and a really high brass slide which seemed enormously high to a four year old, but in reality probably wasn't! My mother used to push me down Hope Road in a pram as a tiny, and I recall looking through the hawthorn hedge across the railway and the canal to Springfield Road houses and school. Not because I was a precociously geographical tot, but because I was always fascinated by that six-coach train that was shunted into the central siding south of Sale station until it was needed at rush hour; and because St Paul's clock - "the clock that tells Sale the time" - used to intrigue me when it struck the hour. Like you, I moved away and for years I was t'other end of Wales. Even when I came back, it was to Stockport - just far enough from Sale not to go in that direction very often. So it's a bit of a strange land now, especially because my occasional visits have demonstrated that quite a lot has changed in the intervening years. But some of the memories remain vivid ...

I too was fascinated to find this site, quite by accident - I had googled "Rosherville Gardens" after reading an interesting article about it on the BBC website and when I followed a link to a photograph it brought me here. I grew up in Sale in the late 1950s/60s/70s and also remember before they built the M63, as it was then. My father used to take me to the tip, which as I recall was somewhere alongside the River Mersey on the way to Stretford. I guess it would be somewhere near the slip road from Cross Street up onto the M60, as it is now. I remember rooting through piles of furniture, all kinds of belongings...everything just seemed to be piled up in heaps, and everybody just seemed to help themselves to whatever they wanted! The house I grew up in, and which my grandparents got for a song because it was haunted (it was! I was scared to death!), was called "Brookfield" because it was built on land owned by Samuel Brooks, who donated a lot of land in the Sale area. In fact, if you go to google street view and zoom in on the original gateposts, you can still see the name - "Brook" and "Field"! I don't live here now and haven't done since 1982. I went to Springfield School on Springfield Road, which is directly across the railway and the canal from my house in Hope Road. When I was able to walk to school on my own I used to go into the playground and wave to my mother, who used to stand at the bathroom window and wave back! She liked to make sure I had got there safely! From looking at google street view, the infants' playground appears to be a teachers' car park these days :( The Brooks Institute in Ashton on Mersey was built by Brooks. He also built Brooklands Road, and I was amazed to see just how rural it was in another photograph on this site. JP Joule grew up on Wardle Road, and there is a statue of him in Worthington Park. I used to play on the stone lions in the park (there used to be three but now only one remains and that has been relocated a couple of times). I used to go to Manchester Airport when it was still called Ringway and go through the turnstiles at the back and watch the planes from the piers. I vaguely remember lots of little lanes around the back of the airport, somewhere near the Airport Hotel, although these have long gone. My father was a paratrooper in the war and used to train at Ringway, doing his training jumps over Tatton Park. I used to go to the Galleon Baths in Didsbury in the 1960s and, from what I recall, you went down a little country lane to get to it. I've managed to find the entrance of the lane on google street view, but it's far from a country lane these days! I live in Penwortham, Preston now. I haven't been back to Sale for about 30 years and find it fascinating to see the Sale (and other places) of yesteryear!

Interesting to hear from someone who knew it - or, at any rate, knew about it! I've responded more fully on the thread associated with the photo. No more market gardening in East Didsbury any more - most of the land, being near the river and too low-lying and subject to flooding, is now used as private sports grounds. The only relic of farming which remains is the use (at least until very recently) of a few of the fields to graze cattle from the community farm based at Wythenshawe Park.

John Great to see your pin over Willow Bank Farm - I would not have thought anyone could have remembered it being there. It was my G Grandfather who lived there around the turn of the 19/20th century as a base for the family nursery business where my grandfather was the greenhouse manager. Rgds Doug Rogerson