Let’s stop them stealing any more of North Manchester’s history

There will soon be a hole in the ground where a ratty old piece of black and white history once stood. And very soon the glimmer of its memory will be gone too.

Its history, beauty, the ghosts that hid their stories in its ancient corridors from urban explorers, heroin addicts and rough sleepers will all be buried under replicant boxes, The headstones of dead history.

Greater Manchester believes it needs 50,000 affordable homes by 2037.

But will the impending destruction of ancient Hough Hall, Moston, Manchester, make any difference to this ambition?

Not really.

But it will l make a difference to the face of our dower and dreary suburb of the City of Tall Chimneys.

As Moston blusters into the future another feature will have been incised from its battered old countenance. And builders will ‘bottox’ the wound with little bijou boxes.

Yep, I’ll say it again … boxes. Boxes for people. Coffins of the imagination. Boxes more brutal than the New Brutalism of the 1960s. Architecture that left our inner-cities prickled by preposterous proboscises that would have had Le Corbusier turning smugly in his concrete grave.

Actually, the first British tower block was built in 1951, The Lawn in Harlow, Essex.

It is a Grade II listed building and still standing.

Moston’s Hough Hall was a Grade 11 listed building too. But rumour reached us today that demolition had already started. One of its chimneys was being dismantled, an old pal told us. It might just be that it’s dangerous.

But soon its timber frame on a stone plinth and large winged gables, rafters, galleried entrance hall, its new dog-legged staircase, muntin-and-rail panelling and stone chamber fireplace will all disappear piece by piece. And forever.

It is estimated that the hall would have cost about £100 to build as a farmhouse about five hundred years ago.

Last year it was sold into its final resting place for around £165,000 – about £60,000 less than a detached house on that other almost-entirely lost site of history, Yeb Fold, costs today.

So little now is the price of memory and heritage.

And yet Hough Hall, with its narrow windows and heavy oak doors, had stood its ground through civil and world wars, blitz and bombs, depression and boom, neglect and abuse.

And a thousand winters and summers.

All gone now.

You can’t blame the builders for its vanishing, it’s their job to build. And the fathers of this sprawling city believe they still need tens of thousands of new homes despite the fact that almost 20,000 houses are empty all around them.

Neither can the blame be laid squarely at the feet of the Barnard family who had so many hopes when video artist Roger bought it decades ago. They, sadly, were dogged by bad-luck health.

But we can point the finger at the local council and other authorities and organisations put into place to protect our heritage and history.

Look at the city centre itself with its great eccentric shards of glass and cantilevered skinny skyscrapers, its Berlin Wall monstrosity built to commemorate the 1996 IRA bombing, and the ‘Gingham’ Motel One on the site of the old Twisted Wheel nightclub where Northern Soul was reputedly born.

They could have protected the terraces of Moston, you know. And the cinemas and the pubs. They didn’t have to knock them down.

Look at Didsbury with its very expensive and charming two-up-and-two-downs and its old-fashioned, modern hostelries.

So why did they? Well, the answer is simple, they didn’t like Moston or Newton Heath or Midleton, or Ashton etc etc. We were the North.

And there has always been a great divide in Manchester between the North and South.

Us Mostonians are good people and we deserve better.

And don’t forget they are about to take the glorious Art Deco Adelphi from us now.

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