Available online here or call in the Modernist Shop on Port Street Manchester.
Tameside Moderne
By Steve Marland
A comprehensive guide to the Borough’s modern architecture.
Almost two years in the making.
Tameside east of Manchester – a volcanic explosion of concrete, glass, steel, brick and wood!
From sacred sites to suburban substations, a rollercoaster ride through provincial style.
Softcover, 84pages,
B&W
148 x 210xmm – landscape
£10 well spent – be quick these will fly!
On the day of HM Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee I cycled around Ashton under Lyne.
Recording and commenting upon the material changes which had occurred, during her reign of some sixty years. In turn many of these things have in themselves disappeared from view.
Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes.
Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow.
Let reality be reality.
Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.
Lao Tzu
Celebrating the gradual decline in spelling – Gill Scot Heron meets Tameside, everyone’s a winner.
Celebrating the proliferation of California Screen Blocks, hanging baskets and vertical blinds.
Celebrating the Pound Shop a profusion of road markings and pedestrian safety barriers.
Celebrating High Visibilty Workwear and the proliferation of the logotype
Celebrating advances in Information Technology and the decline of the retail sector.
Celebrating advances in fly-posting, street skating, youth culture and musical diversity.
Celebrating the re-use of redundant banks, sun beds, tattooing and t-shirts.
Celebrating advances in charity chop furniture pricing and the proliferation of leather sofas.
Celebrating the proliferation of the shuttered window, babies and home made retail signage.
Celebrating niche marketing in the child-based, haircare market and developments in digitally originated vinyl signage.
Celebrating street art and British popular music and modern cuisine.
Celebrating Punk Rock, wheel clamping and British can-do!
Celebrating the introduction of decimal coinage, raffle tickets, cheap biros, affordable imitation Tupperware, raffles and the Union Flag
Celebrating the huge importance of Association Football, hazard tape, shuttered doors and the ubiquity of the traffic cone.
Celebrating the ever growing popularity of Fancy Dress.
Celebrating pub tiles, the smoking ban, the use of plywood as an acceptable window replacement material and the current confusion regarding Britishness and Englishness.
Celebrating satellite telly, faux Victoriana and the development of the one way traffic system.
Celebrating plastics in the service of the modern citizen.
Celebrating laser-cut vinyl, adhesive lettering, regional cuisine and the imaginative minds of those who name our modern retail outlets.
Celebrating the welcome Americanisation of our youngster’s diet – Slush you couldn’t make it up!
Celebrating the welcome Americanisation of our youngster’s diet – Slush you couldn’t make it up!
Celebrating the return of the £1 pint, here at Oliver’s Bar, formerly The Cavern, a superbly appointed Bass Charrington owned, underground pub.
My thanks to Emma Noonan for kindly appearing in the doorway.
Celebrating our ever widening range of ethnic cuisine and the use of the ingenious A4 laser-written poster montage.
Celebrating the wide variety of vernacular tribute bands – Reet Hot Chilli Peppers?
Celebrating the ever popular art of colouring-in and the wide availability of the felt tip pen.
New Inn 121-137 Greenside Lane Droylsden Manchester M43 7UT
It’s the 1830’s and Droylsden consist of farms, a smattering of industry and little else.
Greenside Lane has a farm, appropriately named Greenside Farm.
Where at some point in the 1930’s a pub appears – the appropriately named New Inn.
This such an anomaly in this setting, an architectural style more commonly found on the coast, the Seaside Moderne of Morecambe’s Midland Hotel, or Bexhill’s De la Warr Pavilion.
A streamlined ocean liner of a boozer, truly Tameside Moderne.
For the new housing in the area.
Air like Blackpool – and pub architecture to match!
I discovered on Carl Flaherty’s Flickr post some of the pub’s deep history.
My parents were the first licensees of the New Inn, I was six months old when we moved in, that was in 1936. It was always very busy even more so during WW2, the Home Guard put an old Lewis Gun on the roof which bought down the ceiling when they fired, crazy.
The roof used to have heaps of shrapnel after the bombing raids, the cellar was used as an air-raid shelter until the government built one for each home. We had a German fighter pilot housed in the cellar till the regular army came and took him away, he’d been shot down over Daisy Nook. We moved to Gatley in late 1949 and came to Australia in 1956. I remember the New Inn and Droylsden with fondness,the people were so friendly all the time.
I had a stack of those old photographs of the inside as it was then the Lewis gun and Karl -the pilot, plus ones of George Formby who was a mate of Dads he had a pinky red coloured Bentley which he used to park in the yard on the left of the pub. When I was in the army I was for a while in Germany I visited the pilot Karl Lehmann he lived in Hamburg, strange days mate.
John Leigh.
George had a passion for the Rolls and Jag – but it seems he also had a pinkish 1939 Mercury Eight Series 99A Estate during the war years.
Commissioned by Sir Malcolm Campbell and later owned by George Formby.
The pub now closed is currently mixed use – apartments and retail, some detail has survived though as with many other examples, the victim of replacement uPVC and re-rendering.
Take a look.
BT Roundabout OL6 6QQ
In 1913 Ashton is already a crowded town, a cotton town.
The first telephone exchange arrives and sweeps away property at the junction of Scotland and Bedford Streets.
The second arrives along with the bypass and establishes a roundabout, an island of telecommunication.
There they sit betwixt St Michael’s Parish Church and Albion Congregational.
A marriage of inter-war brick Revivalism and post-war concrete Brutalism.
Ninety nine point nine percent of the passing parade pass by onto the bypass by car, I took time to circumnavigate the site on foot.
This is what I saw.
Dale Street East OL6 7ST – behind the Safe Start.
Formerly the Friendship – which suddenly became surplus to requirements, when the Old Street area was redeveloped, and the adjacent Magistrates Courts built.
So far so good, these are the facts we are located.
In an unfamiliar street, in an unfamiliar town.
I myself had the good fortune to grow up here and drink in the Friendship.
Even so I have no recollection of this distinctive concrete column, neither does the whole of the internet.
Do you?
Though very much in the style of the day – exemplified by William Mitchell there is currently no attribution for this work.
Was it at some point relocated, if so from where?
There are more questions than answers.
Built in 1937 – very much in the civic style of the day, an inter-war classical moderne utilitarian low-rise in brick, steel, stone and concrete.
A three level, level headed essay in resolute local pride, when Droyslden was an independent UDC, prior to the creation of Tameside.
Furnished in the finest manner.
Computerised and digitised – the first library in Tameside to go live.
Droylsden Library Carnival entry – first prize winner in its category.
Closed on March 17th it now faces demolition.
Archive photos Tameside Image Archive
The rising cost of repairs, combined with ‘a desire to progress’ with the regeneration of Droylsden town centre and the inaccessibility of the library’s T shape, three-floor configuration means that a ‘solution for the future of the library’ is now needed, according to the town hall.
Of note are its curved cantilevered concrete balconies, complete with attractive steel balustrades.
Along with its carved relief above the door.
Decorative grille.
Commemorative Communist plaque
Drainpipes
Architectural Type.
And handrail.
I sure will miss the Library – I have walked cycled and bused by for over fifty years.
You are to be replaced by housing and relocated to the new development next door.
In my memory of days long gone by, I call to mind the stops strewn around St Michael’s Square – all points east I assume, Stalybridge, Mossley, Micklehurst, Dukinfield, Glossop and beyond.
Prior to 1963, Ashton-under-Lyne’s buses and trolleybuses stopped at a variety of termini throughout the town centre. Manchester Corporation services called at Bow Street and Old Square, by Yates’ Wine Lodge; Ashton-under-Lyne Corporation’s buses opted for Market Street and Wellington Road by the town hall.
SHMD’s stopped at St. Michael’s Square.
So says Mancunian 1001 so sagely.
In 1927 there’s no room for a bus station, the town’s full of old houses.
But following extensive demolition, the site was cleared for a brand new bus station, with toilets, shops, offices, staff canteen and depot.
To be followed by the completion of the Shopping Precinct, Beau Geste and Ashton Arms.
Ashton zooms forward into the future, its flat-roofed modern facilities complemented by ranks of low-level shelters and edged to the east by a walled lawn and flower bed – where we all loved to sit of a sunny day.
And the under the cover of the canopy at night, ready for the time of your life, at the Birdcage, pub or pictures.
I remember the kiosk on the corner, a jewellers around the other corner.
I’ll meet you under the clock.
Photo: Ron Stubley
Here we see that the original shelters have been replaced and realigned.
Temporary Queensbury shelters were put in place prior to the addition of GMPTE’s standard shelters, seen in Stockport and Oldham bus stations. By the close of 1983, the recognisable GMPTE ones emerged. The cover at the precinct end was later glazed and became stands A to C.
The second version of Ashton-under-Lyne’s bus station opened on the 18 March 1985. After two and a half years refurbishment work, it was opened at 11.30 by Councillor Geoffrey Brierley.
Mancunian 101
And that’s the corner where we would deck off the open backed buses, hitting the pavement at speed.
That’s the deep blue and cream Ashton livery later superseded by SELNEC, GMPTE and TFGM – the wonderful full fare, unfair world of Margaret Hilda Thatcher’s privatisation, Arriva, First and Stagecoach first.
Then in the 1995 with the development of the Arcades Shopping centre, the whole site is reconfigured, now seen nestling in the shadow of the Dustbin.
Though as we know, nothing lasts forever and the shelters, passengers and buses get shunted and rebuilt yet again,
Even the Dustbin has gone west.
Opening in 2020 – the current version.
The majority of photographs are taken from online sources – please contact me if you are aware of the author’s name – I will post a credit.
I’ll be posting some pictures of my visit to this brand new Interchange, mixing it up with trams, trains and a tuppence one to the Cross.
Prompted by Gillian and Adam’s – A Different North project, my thoughts turned once again to notions of the North, similar notions have been considered in my previous posts:
A Taste of the North and A Taste of Honey.
I recalled the 2016 season Sky Football promotional film, it had featured a street in Ashton under Lyne, it had featured Hamilton Street.
A street spanning the West End and the Ryecroft areas of the town, the town where I had lived for most of my teenage years. The town where my Mam was born and raised in nearby Hill Street, nearby West End Park where my Grandad I had worked, nearby Ashton Moss and Guide Bridge.
This is an area familiar to me, which became the convergent point of a variety of ideas and images, mediated in part by the mighty Murdoch Empire.
Here was the coming together of coal and cotton, an influx of population leaving the fields for pastures new.
In the film, Leytonstone London born David Beckham is seen running down the snow covered northern street.
A credit to our emergent mechanical snow generation industry.
According to snowmakers.com, it takes 74,600 gallons of water to cover a 200 by 200-foot plot with 6 inches of snow. Climate change is cutting snow seasons short, we make snow to compensate, more energy is spent making snow, more coal is burned, more CO2 is released.
It is to be noted that locally there has been a marked decline in snowfall in recent years, the Frozen North possibly a thing of the past.
The temperatures around the UK and Europe have actually got warmer over the last few decades, although when you are out de-icing your car it may not actually feel as though it has. Whilst this can not be directly link to climate change, it is fair to assume that climate change is playing a part.
It is also to be noted that Sky Supremo Rupert Murdoch has described himself as a climate change “sceptic”.
Appearing arms raised outside of the home of a family clustered around the television, in their front room.
Filming the ad was great and the finished piece is a really clever way of showing that you never know what might happen in football, I always enjoy working with Sky Sports and I’m proud to be associated with their football coverage.
The area does have a football heritage, Ashton National Football Club played in the Cheshire County League in the 1920s and 1930s. They were sometimes also known as Ashton National Gas, due to their connections with the National Gas and Oil Engine Company based in the town.
Illustrative of a time when sport and local industry went hand in glove.
The National Ground was subsequently taken over by Curzon Ashton who have since moved to the Tameside Stadium.
Ashton & Hyde Village Hotels occupy the front of shirt sponsors spot on our new blue and white home shirt, while Seed of Speed, our official conditioning partners, feature on the arm, and Minuteman Press occupy the back of the shirt. Meanwhile, Regional Steels UK Ltd. are the front of shirt sponsors on our new pink and black away kit.
Illustrative of a time when sport and local industry continue to work hand in glove.
Local lad Gordon Alexander Taylor OBE is a former professional footballer. He has been chief executive of the English footballers’ trades union, the Professional Footballers’ Association, since 1981. He is reputed to be the highest paid union official in the world.
His mobile phone messages were allegedly hacked by a private investigator employed by the News of the World newspaper. The Guardian reported that News International paid Taylor £700,000 in legal costs and damages in exchange for a confidentiality agreement barring him from speaking about the case.
News International is owned by our old pal Rupert Murdoch, the News of the World no longer exists.
The view of Hamilton Street closely mirrors LS Lowry’s Street Scene Pendlebury – the mill looming large over the fierce perspective of the roadway. The importance of Lowry’s role in constructing a popular image of the North cannot be overestimated.
He finds a grim beauty in his views of red facades, black smoke and figures in white, snowy emptiness. He is a modern primitive, an industrial Rousseau, whose way of seeing is perhaps the only one that could do justice to the way places like Salford looked in the factory age.
For many years cosmopolitan London turned its back on Lowry, finally relenting with a one man show at the Tate in 2013 – I noted on the day of my visit, that the attendant shop stocked flat caps, mufflers and bottled beer, they seemed to have drawn the line at inflatable whippets.
Drawing upon other artists’s work, in a continuous search for ways to depict the unlovely facts of the city’s edges and the landscape made by industrialisation.
But Murdoch’s Hamilton Street is as much a construct as Lowry’s – the snow an expensive technical coating, Mr Beckham a CGI apparition. Our contemporary visual culture is littered with digital detritus, saving time and money, conjuring up cars, kids and footballers at will.
An illusion within an illusion of an illusory North.
Green screen chroma keyed onto the grey tableau.
Mr Beckham himself can also be seen as a media construct, for many years representing that most Northern of institutions Manchester United – itself yet another product of image manipulation, its tragic post-Munich aura encircling the planet, with an expensive Empire Made, red and white scarf of cultural imperialism.
David’s parents were fanatical Manchester United supporters who frequently travelled 200 miles to Old Trafford from London to attend the team’s home matches, he inherited his parents’ love of Manchester United, and his main sporting passion was football.
Mr B’s mentor was of course former Govan convener – Mr A Ferguson, who headed south to find his new Northern home, creating and then destroying the lad’s career, allegedly by means of boot and hairdryer.
Here we have the traditional Northern Alpha Male challenged by the emergent Metrosexual culture, celebrity fragrances, posh partner, tattooed torso, and skin conditioner endorsements.
It is to be noted that the wealth of the region, in part created by the shoemaking and electrical industries, have long since ceased to flourish, though still trading, PIFCO no longer has a local base.
The forces of free market monopoly capitalism have made football and its attendant personalities global commodities, and manufacturing by and large, merely a fanciful folk memory.
Hamilton Street would have provided substantial homes to workers at the Ryecroft Cotton Mills.
Ryecroft Mill, built in 1837,was the second of a series of four mills built on the site, the first was built in 1834. In 1843, over 10,000 people were employed in Ashton’s cotton mills – today there are none.
This industrial growth was far from painless and Ashton along with other Tameside towns, worked long and hard in order to build the Chartist Movement, fighting to establish better working conditions for all.
The tradition of political and religious non-conformity runs wide and deep here, the oft overlooked history of Northern character and culture.
Textile production ceased in the 1970s and the mill is now home to Ryecroft Foods, a subsidiary of Weetabix.
Ashton like many of Manchester’s satellite towns created enormous wealth during the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. The workers of Ashton saw little of that wealth, the social and economic void left by the rapid exodus of the cotton industry to the Far East, is still waiting to be filled, in these so called left behind towns.
Here is a landscape nestled in the foot of the Pennines, struggling to escape its past and define a future.
Fairfield is a suburb of Droylsden in Tameside, Greater Manchester, England. Historically in Lancashire, it is just south of the Ashton Canal on the A635 road. In the 19th century, it was described as “a seat of cotton manufacture”. W. M. Christy and Sons established a mill that produced the first woven towels in England at Fairfield Mill.
Fairfield is the location of Fairfield High School for Girls and Fairfield railway station.
The community has been home to members of the Moravian Church for many years after Fairfield Moravian Church and Moravian Settlement were established in 1783.
Notable people from Fairfield include the artist Arthur Hardwick Marsh (1842-1909)
Also the merchant banker and art collector Robin Benson (1850–1929).
Charles Hindley 1796 – 1857 was an English cotton mill-owner and radical politician the first Moravian to be elected as an MP.
Turning into Fairfield Avenue from Ashton Old Road you’ll find Broadway sitting prettily on your right hand side. It was intended to be an extensive Garden Village but was abandoned at the outbreak of the First World War. The estate consists of 39 houses, built between 1914 and 1920 in a neo-Georgian style. These are a mixture of detached, semi-detached and terraces in a range of sizes.
Edgar Wood and James Henry Sellers were the architects responsible for the scheme.
Broadway is a small scale example of a garden suburb development and is composed of a mixture of detached, semi detached and terraced houses ranging in size and built in a reddish-orange brick with dark brick dressing and patterning. The properties appear to be generously proportioned and they share similarities in design and construction and a unifying scheme of decoration.
It is suggested that the ‘imaginative exploitation of the levels and texture suggest that Woods was responsible for the layout, but the chaste Neo-Georgian character of the houses undoubtedly reflects the taste of Sellers’.
It forms a major part of the Fairfield Conservation Area.
Sneaking through the alley – lined with a Yorkshire Stone fence you enter the Moravian Settlement.
The Unitas Fratrum or Moravian Church is an international Protestant Christian group which originated from the followers of Jan Hus in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic) during the 15th century. As a result of persecution, the group eventually re-established itself in Saxony in the early 18th century, and it is from there that followers first came to this country in the 1730s, with the intention to go on to carry out missionary work in America and the Caribbean. A decision was taken to establish the first Moravian Settlement in England at Fulneck in Yorkshire in 1744. The first Moravian settlement to be located in Tameside was in Dukinfield during the 1740s. It was there that they laid the foundation stone for their chapel at the top of Old Road in May 1751. By 1783, 40 years after their first arrival in Tameside, the lease on their land at Dukinfield expired, and negotiations for a new one proved difficult. This resulted in the purchase and removal of the community to a 54 acres site at Broad Oak Farm in Droylsden where they established a new settlement known as Fairfield.
As well as providing domestic accommodation, the buildings at Fairfield had industrial functions. During the late 18th and 19th centuries the Settlement would have been a hive of religious and industrial activity, which included the church, schools, domestic dwellings, inn, shop, bakery, laundry, farm, fire engine, night-watchman, inspector of weights and measures, an overseer of roads, physician, as well as handloom weaving and embroidery.
I’ve cycled by here for some fifty years or more – always admiring its serrated roof.
Way back when we would roam around on our bikes, exploring the waste ground adjacent to Jackson’s Brickworks.
Where we would scavenge tape from the Rotunda tip.
I remember it as a Remploy Centre.
My last 13 years prior to retirement last May were spent at the centre, on Windmill Lane, Denton. Just before I left, a lot of demolition work was done, prior to redevelopment of much of the site.
I seem to remember the place always being referred to locally as Th’ Rehab – the Rehabilitation Centre, a Government training centre, where skills were taught, such as joinery, bricklaying etc, and there was also a Remploy Unit housed there.
Local men could go for a free haircut, administered by a well supervised trainee.
1949 Manchester Local Image Collection
It is listed in a 1968 directory of rehabilitations centres.
Currently forming part of Tameside Business Park with multiple occupancy.
Proximity to the M60, seen here under construction is paramount to its future success.
This former production plant for concrete components is now sadly partitioned and houses a number of businesses, only one of which still has a manufacturing base. The engineer for the project was also the client; reinforced concrete engineers, Matthews & Mumby. The intention was to create large floor areas, free from columns, to accommodate fourteen casting beds of about fifty metres in length. The structure of the two sheds was formed from arch units assembled on the ground, jacked into position and post-tensioned to form large tied span arches. Each arch spans approximately thirty metres and was designed to carry up to fourteen one tonne loads along the monorail hangers that ran the length of the factory, centred to each casting bed and suspended from the arches. Lantern section glazing hugs the curve of the arches that act as a reflective surface to provide an even light across the factory floor. The rails and hangers added a further louvered filter to the light, described at the time as ‘the ‘venetian blind’ effect. Originally the elevation between the V shaped columns was also glazed, this has now been filled and significantly reduces the aesthetic presence of the exposed structure and a distinctly ‘modern’ building of the time.
Mainstream Modern – my thanks to Richard Brook for the text and archive images.
So one sunny day last week, on a lockdown walk I went to take a look around.
The addition of cladding is never an uplifting sight on any site – the integrity of the building is seriously challenged.
Sometimes a former Rehabilitation Centre can do without rehabilitation it seems.
We have of course been here before, to see a concrete bus shelter and a derelict control room.
All that is solid melts into air as Marx and Marshall Berman told us.
Though remnants remain – this is a short journey through a hole in fence, down into the warren of power station offices past.
They have been stripped of their former use and meaning, transformed into a transitory art performance space, paint and plaster now peeling, appealing to the passing painter, partially reclaimed by nature.
Let’s tag along:
I’ve been here before in search of a bus shelter.
I’m back here to day in search of an abandoned control centre at the long gone Hartshead Power Station.
The station was opened in 1926 by the Stalybridge, Hyde, Mossley and Dukinfield Transport and Electricity Board.
The station was closed on 29 October 1979 with a generating capacity of 64 megawatts. It was demolished during the late 1980s, although part of the site is still used as an electrical substation.
First glimpsed on an urban exploration site, I had awaited an opportunity to slip through the fence and take a look around – here’s what I found.
Most of the valuable equipment stripped out leaving and empty shell, covered in layers of the taggers’ interventions.
From fashion to homeware, find everything you need at Crown Point Shopping Park.
The court heard the accused had agreed to detonate a bomb at Crown Point North as a diversion before driving to their school, murdering teachers and pupils and then killing themselves.
We live in strange and troubled times, the urban landscapes we have created are often far from convivial.
Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It’s no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.
JG Ballard – The Atrocity Exhibition
This condition is further exacerbated during the current State controls, constraints and closures.
The myriad opportunities for social alienation are replaced by compulsory isolation.
The vacuous amoral urban retail experience becomes desert again, the domain of singular dog walkers and itinerant snappers.
The car, cash and credit are no longer king – space is the place.
285 Stockport Road Guide Bridge Ashton-under-Lyne
This was planned to be the Verona Cinema, a project of local builders – P Hamer Verona Cinema Ltd. The construction of the cinema was almost completed when Hamer sold the building to Oscar Deutsch and it opened as one of his Odeon theatres.
Hamer then used the proceeds of the sale to build the Roxy Cinema Holinwood, which was designed by Drury & Gomersall.
Opening date of the Odeon Theatre was 29th June 1936, when the first programme was Bing Crosby in “Anything Goes” and Harold Lloyd in “The Milky Way”. Designed by the noted cinema architectural firm of Drury & Gomersall, the frontage had a neat entrance in brick, with white stone facings on the window surrounds. There was a parade of shop units on each side of the entrance which had matching brickwork and a white stone trim.
Inside the auditorium the seating was arranged for 834 in the stalls and 330 in the circle. The side splay walls on each side of the proscenium was decorated in wide horizontal bands, and topped with a backlit illuminated grille.
The Odeon was closed by the Rank Organisation on 11th March 1961 with Kenneth More in “Man in the Moon”.
It was converted into St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church. Former cinemas have made good conversions to churches and the fabric of the buildings are generally respected. In this case though, the sad story is that the front entrance has been rendered over and inside all details of it cinematic past have been erased. You would never know you were inside what had been been an Art Deco styled building.
Contributed by Ken Roe Cinema Treasures
I passed by nearly every day for years travelling to and from school, I played there at a wedding reception in the church social club. I sadly have no recollection of the building in use as a cinema.
It has been closed since 2010 – currently it has no purpose or seemingly any future use, there are no For Sale signs in evidence.
Fallen so quickly and absolutely from grace.
Modern Mooch 