Port Street...

I’d heard of another archaeological site that was being investigated in the city. This time it’s where Port Street meets mega busy Great Ancoats Street in the Northern Quarter. It’s up where all the new bars and cafes have appeared so it looks as if the developers are following.

For as long as I can remember it has been a surface car park with a few cheap looking retail units on one side. Back in Victorian times it was an area of cheap housing for the workers who manned the cotton mills in Ancoats across the road. The magnificent Royal Mills are just five minutes walk from here. Along Great Anocats Street there were little businesses such as a bank and a pub called the Astley Arms. It was all there, decaying away, in the 1980s when the decision was made to tear it all down and the cheap retail units were put up. Manchester, in those days, was in a mess and looked to be in terminal decline and a surface car park and cheap shops was the best this rundown part of the city could hope for. Move on a couple of decades and the city is a different place with surface car parks being snapped up to construct skyscrapers as we go from strength to strength.

The archaelogists have a couple of weeks to see what they can find. They have already found the secure vault of the bank building which wasn’t that secure by our standards. And they have been in the cellar of the Astley Arms where they have found Victorian pottery and glass bottles. The local newspaper was quick to report that some of them actually had 150 year old brandy in them. Well, as usual, it was the press stretching the truth and they had found three bottles with about a centimetre of liquid in that might be brandy. No one fancied drinking something 150 + years old that might be brandy. I got that from the archaeologist I talked to so I know who I believe.

What you can see in the picture are some of the remains of the houses where the workers lived. They were ‘back to back’ houses with no open space or toilet facilities at all. They would have been amongst the worst slums in the city. They were three floors tall but one family didn’t have it all to themselves. As many people as possible were crowded into these places to get the best return in rents. Often a family would only have one room, even crowded into the damp cellars like you can see here. And the families weren’t small. With no family planning facilities there could be 10,11,12 children all existing (you can’t call it living) in these conditions. It makes Grandad’s childhood with one family having one small house to themselves on the other side of the city centre in Hulme seem positively privileged.