Dive into the local history
Francis and Walter liked their bowls. So much so that when news came that the neighbourhood was threatened, they decided to complete their game before joining the fray.
Francis won, 21 ends to 19, and went on to beat the Spanish Armada in the final. Dapper Francis Drake and wandering Walter Raleigh are emblems of Olde England. So is bowls. The gentle game has ever declining numbers of followers and fewer greens left to play on. The finger post in Crowcroft Park Longsight, points the way to the Bowls Pavilion, but the elevated Bowling Green itself is recently laid out and planted in a decorative walkway. The pavilion is boarded up and abandoned. Too few bowlers to warrant the upkeep.
Games and competitive sports come and go and disappear into the pages of the social histories on the shelves of local libraries. Not many boating lakes, pitch and putt and bowling greens left to tell tales of the long Edwardian summer. Nor, centuries earlier, the legendary green on Plymouth Hoe where Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh might have competed ends whilst waiting for the tide to turn before sailing into the Channel to defeat the Spanish Armada.
Longsight confronted no such existential hostilities, though the streets have seen plenty of battles in the not-too-distant past.
In the early nineties gangs blighted the area, from Kirmanshulme Lane in the north to Matthews Lane in the south. Houses lost virtually all their value and some were abandoned. Manchester City Council recruited architects and planners, social agencies and community leaders to rethink the streets off North Moor Road. Traffic and parking were rethought, streets remodelled. Today the neighbourhood is more cohesive than it has been for half a century, thanks not least to Northmoor Community Association, operating from the hub in the splendid century old Co Op building on Northmoor Road.
If you travel south of city centre you know Longsight for one thing; most days, and especially Wednesday and Friday, you’ll crawl in traffic through Longsight, because Longsight Market is in full flow.
If the traffic jams drive you mad, pull over one day, and check it out. If you love colour, casual chaos, cheap avocados (4 for £1), kitchen ware, fabrics, braids, frippery of all sorts, mangos, watermelon, okra and Jerusalem artichokes, park up and get a touch of Mumbai without the long-haul flight. Make no mistake, Longsight Market is at the heart of this totally modern community.
Long straight terraced streets of houses whose front doors open directly onto narrow pavements are what the popular image of the industrial North are built on.
Built for factory workers, small, uniform, with notably few corner shops and local pubs. Stockport Road, the A6 a walk away, bristled with shops, pubs and places of worship. These were essentially hostel streets, built by landlords, without amenity of any kind. Nevertheless, these houses are almost all fully occupied more than a century after they were built.
There have been modifications and multiple generations of occupancy and ownership across time, economic upheavals, wars in Europe, and a global population on the move. Few city neighbourhoods tell the stories of a century of social change quite like Longsight.
And there are a variety of new houses and apartments clustering around East Road and the Hammons Road Area that reflect the ambition to renew the neighbourhood and keep it fresh. Where there used to be brickworks and clay quarries to produce stock bricks to build the infinite worker terraces, is now the Nutsford Vale Park with a flourishing wildlife habitat. There are entrances on Mathews Lane and Bikerdike Avenue.
Longsight Cricket Club has serious history. Founded in 1848, the club played two matches against an Australian touring team in 1878. Longsight’s guest player in one of the matches was W.G. Grace.
They lost that one, and over time, Longsight lost their ground and great numbers of players and members. The clubhouse and bar still flourish, and to continue with their social and community programme, the club needs income. Their bowling green, offers a generous site for housing. And the new ambition for the site is that it adds to the variety of homes that have refreshed this neighbourhood, on the border with Levenshulme.
Looking across the site today it is easy to see why the mood of the area has lifted from the dark days. Kids play cricket in the streets, and mums and dads walk them to and from school. And they’ll make good use of a great market and cross Stockport Road to one of the best used modern libraries in the city. This is family territory. It’s also where students will stay on to work in the city, find their own homes and do what generations have been doing here for more than a century. They’ve been making good their homes and making good lives.
This is Longsight Bowling Green
Asset type
Asset type
Residential
Quantum
Quantum
20 homes
Status
Status
Planning