THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MOSTON’S vanishing ancient HALL

This is a very short excerpt from my new – but, as yet, unpublished – book Ravine. A lot of it is about Moston and Manchester …

When Ludwig Studios, Moston, shared these pix of Hough Hall with me, it reminded me I’d written a short piece on the history of this little Manchester suburb.

And Hough Hall stood proud and mute as all these centuries of change wafted by.

But now, as we know, this amazing piece of our history is about to vanish. Not even a ghost.

Ludwig Studios’ pictures reveal the cobbled street outside the hall which has already been tarmacked. The cobbles were there until a decade ago. I remember them as a child.

Hough Hall meant something for five centuries – they even named the road after it! Hough Hall Road.

What’s changed? When did it is cease to matter?

If anybody wants to be kept in touch with my book Ravine, go to the end of this piece and leave a message in the comment box – or PM me on fb.

Cheers

Leigh

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MOSTON’S CONDEMNED HALL

“Moston, Manchester, is a museum to bleachers, dyers, poets and brickmakers. My family has lived here, on the outskirts of the Tall Town of Chimneys, for almost two centuries … we blew in along with the Irish tinkers and the French gypsies.

Perhaps we were linen and lace.

Way back then it was a land fertile with dreams, hopes and opportunities. It was beautiful place … salmon in the Irk tributary and the brook, woodlands and wild hyacinth, meadows, daffodils and primrose.

In the first part of the 19th century only 50 people lived on Moston’s square mile-or-so of wetland. But they witnessed the birth of industry.

It began three miles away, you could see its tall chimney stacks belching shapeless tattoos on the horizon. Moston wouldn’t remain as pretty as a picture for much longer. Dye works, tanneries, print works, breweries, brickworks, began blotting out the landscape. By 1860 the population had grown to more than 1200.

King Cotton and coal had turned Moston into a dysfunctional family. Commerce put the town into such a spin it couldn’t remember where it came from or where it was going. The King built more and more terraced houses – hundreds and hundreds of two-ups-two-downs, replicating like warts.

Now the King needed pubs to keep all these people under control. Beer and gin, cheaper and more effective than food.

Pubs reeked on every corner.

The dye workers and the bleachers drank beer until their lights went out every night – and twice on Sundays. It was their only escape, you see. They toiled under a poisonous multi-coloured sky. The dye and the bleach works had turned the sky into a toxic rainbow – red from the ribbon factory, blue from cobalt, yellows and greens. Sometimes the wind blew it away and sometimes it didn’t. Those smoky pigments were lethal – they got in to your food, your beer. And your blood.

Drinking was a matter of survival, sixteen families to a windowless cellar, no heat, no light, no running water. But still drovers became tanners and farm labourers became brick setters and the gypsies plied their linen and lace door to door … the Irish, the refugees and the farm labourers and the plebs, they all saw this stinking, polluted grimy place as a swing into the jungles of the new world. The choice was simple, the poor house – or a job in a factory and a dirty dank corner of a cellar to call you own.

The bosses lived in imposing slate-and-tile mansions overlooking the deer leaps and the ancient ravine in Boggart Hole Clough. And they drank too, brandy and champagne washed down with liberal glugs of Laudanum.

Next the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway steamed through Newton Heath and put up giant viaducts across Blackley, another replicating township, this one owned by the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ drug-addicted Lord Byron. King Cotton, Lord Byron, the autocratic morons of Mammon were the people all the plebs looked up to from their dirty holes beneath the pavements.

And still shopkeepers rode in on the backs of the trains. Moston became a frontier town, and the poor the rich and the downright dishonest made their way here too. Tinkers and tailors and candlestick makers joined the gypsies, tramps and thieves. Drapers, butchers, gamblers, skallywags and drunks, they all came along. Somebody even opened a tea room. This strange little place kept on growing, distorting and mutating.

By the time the 20th century clocked in, it was bustling. They built new pubs, a fire station and three cinemas, the Moston Imperial Palace, The Adelphi and The Fourways.

In the 1940s, it joined in the war, became home to Big Bertha, an anti-aircraft cannon that thumped away on Broadhurst Fields.

Moston wasn’t any different really from any other working-class suburb with middle-class pretensions, it worked, it drank, it failed and it succeeded.

And Hough Hall was a mute witness to all this.”