8 The Haulgh &Manchester Road
On the corner of Manchester Road and Bridgeman Place - many people will remember Leon’s coffee house, James Howard and Sons, Winterbottom’s and also Wood’s pianos. A really quite attractive building of the mid to late 1800s whose loss due to one of these mysterious fires is to be regretted..
To the left of Bridgeman Place, the Pelso factory.
The sad demise of this row of buildings, 1980. Picture posted on Facebook by Gene Watts.
Dave Watkinson picture. Wood's pianos shortly after the fire.
(C)WDC September 2009
What replaced the Leon's Coffee House corner. Functional and of its time and not entirely bland.
October 2013 Bolton News
This corner appeared in the Bolton News when the enterprising mill owner who wanted to sell the building put up a huge For Sale sign that you could hardly fail to notice. The news item dealt with the fact that the Council had asked him to remove it because he did not have planning permission.
2019-20 This Mill has now been converted into flats.
Down Bridgeman Place we pass a shop on the corner of Carlton Street very familiar to many people.
There has been a petrol station here for many years.
Bridgeman Place 1953,
Lancashire and Cheshire Miners Federation building built 1913, later Bolton and Bury Chamber of Commerce, 2011 Lord's College which c2018 took up residence in the disused Brooklyn Hotel on Green Lane.
April 2019 It has been renamed Commerce House Social Enterprise Centre also housing Commerce House Community Theatre and Christ Embassy Church. Google Streetview below.
Across the way from the Miners' Institute on the adjoining road was Bridgeman Street Baths. The building also housed a roller skating rink. For some years it was Bolton Business Centre. It is still there and has had recent renovations.
The building was constructed in 1845 and the baths opened in 1847 by a private company. They were believed to be the first public swimming baths since the Roman occupation. They were taken over by Bolton Corporation which was forced to close them in ?1975 due to soaring running costs.
The official name of this thoroughfare is Lower Bridgeman Street because Bridgeman Street which was once the longest street in Bolton (there may have been longer lanes and roads) was interrupted by the building of the Trinity Street Station.
Just below where Bridgeman Place and Lower Bridgeman Street join is Haulgh Bridge. Now it goes over the A666, St Peter's Way, previously it crossed the River Croal and the Bolton canal.
Looking from Haulgh Bridge to the hamlet of Springfields with the Springfields Paper Mill to the left.The Croal is immediately to the right of the cottages; the canal is off the picture to the left.
The houses on the top of the banking are on Westbrook Street and the bottom of Grosvenor Street which ran down the far side of the Technical College.
St Peter's Way and the Trinity retail park now cover this area.
Workers on Haulgh Bridge. Photo credited to Harold Crompton Robinson.
To see full size, click on any picture, navigate with <> - zoom in with + - exit with X
1 View from Haulgh Bridge (Bridgeman Place / Bradford Street) towards Church Wharf and the Parish Church in 1947. The canal is seen clearly on the right, the River Croal runs along the foot of the banking on the left. For its whole length on the picture the river is now culverted and buried by St Peter's way but it emerges from the side of the bridge behind us to run behind the Trinity retail area. There is now no trace whatsoever of the canal.
2 Haulgh Bridge going over the Croal. Note the advertisement hoardings. Between this bridge and the next is the road going down to Springfields.
3 The bridge over the canal. Note that the advertisement hoarding is the other end of the one on picture 2.
4 Looking away from town, downstream, we see the River Croal which has a weir to create the lodge of water for Springfields paper mills. On the left. the canal has already been filled in. In the distance are the floodlights of Burnden Park and the Burnden railway viaduct.
There are more pictures of this area on the Croal pages.
Haulgh Hall on the corner of Bradford Street and Bromwich Street, thought to be the oldest inhabited building in Bolton.
Samuel Chadwick's Orphanage on Bromwich Street.
That's far enough in this direction. We will return to the Trinity Street junction and have a wander along Manchester Road before continuing our circular tour by visiting Bradshawgate.
8 Manchester Road and Burnden
Manchester Road c1940 Picture posted on Facebook by David Whenlock
On the corner, hat became Leon's coffee house, the premises had provided billiards and snooker, at the top of the corner it says "Q club". The premises is now for sale.
Another of David Whenlock's pictures.
The corner is now Leon's as we remember it up to the fire. Date? Guess 1960s
Many people will remember this view of Manchester Road from the Trinity Street junction. The LMS warehouse and various other buildings associated with the railway yard dominated the right hand side of the road. How many people remember the horse trough which would have been just behind the lorry approaching us? Bolton Technical College and Grosvenor Street with Lord's Commercial College are on the left.
The Tech - postcard copyright Frith's.
Remembered by so many people for "night school" and somewhat later for the restaurant facing onto Grosvenor Street, run by catering students and open to the public.
A recent correspondence on Facebook bemoaned the loss of this "iconic" building with others indicating that it could not be retained
AH: Iconic building demolished like all the rest in Bolton very narrow minded ........ ...............
SC: or if you are in the know like I am you will know the building was becoming structurally unsound. To rectify the problem you would have to disassemble the entire building back to the steel frame, replace most of the steelwork, treat the rest and reassemble the whole thing brick by brick. That of course would be economical suicide. The only option is demolition and rebuild a modern structure which is exactly what happened but on Moor Lane. So as much as everyone bashes the council (which Is justified in many cases) this time they are not to blame.
PG: - agreed I worked there and more than once pipes burst through the walls. KE who was responsible for the building told me once that they had no plans of where any of the services were and as such couldn't do any checks or preventative maintenance. The cause of the poor state of the steel framework is Adolf Hitler's fault in a roundabout way. The RAF took over the college during WW2 and used it to train radio technicians. They drilled holes in the roof for aerials and cables. THAT right there caused water seepage into the internal steelwork.
TH to SC: how do so many other historical structures survive around the country?
SC to TH: this was a steel framed building with a lot of reinforced concrete, for whatever reason moisture had got into the concrete causing the steel to rust on the inside, as you're probably aware changes in climate inside and out cause that moisture to freeze and condense. When water freezes it expands and causes cracks, cracks expand, more moisture gets in, freezes, cracks spread and eventually the structure is weakened, in the trade we call it concrete cancer. Its the same process that causes potholes to develop in the roads, rain, freeze, thaw, repeat, tarmac cracks and potholes appear. If you travel the M6 you will see constant Bridge work where all the old concrete and steel bridges are being replaced with steel only. I know this because I am a structural engineer and have been in the trade since 1990.
Corner of Grosvenor Street (on the left) and Manchester Road. Bolton Commercial Institute otherwise Lord's Commercial.
The college still exists but is located at the disused Brooklyn Hotel on Green Lane (2021)
Manchester Road, see caption
Picture from Karl Gregory - with permission
Picture from Karl Gregory - Bolton by the elephants - with permission
MH: really disappointed to see such a beautiful building disappear it would have been better to turn it in to student accommodation because of its size and history used to live next to it in Grosvenor St in late 70s
TW: It was hardly a nice building, just a concrete mess, inside was a mess even when it was open, full of asbestos too
.Perhaps TW is far too harsh. It was of itself a not unattractive building, it was a good example of what it was, it was "iconic" and well loved by generations of Boltonians. It was a shame that it had to go.
Across from the Tech and stretching back to Trinity Street was the Railway goods yard.
The warehouse was built in 1885 and in the early days was packed with cotton bales from America and Egypt. LMS was the biggest of the four main railway companies in the UK, the largest commercial enterprise in the Commonwealth, the largest transport organisation in the world and the second largest employer in the UK, after the Post Office.
Picture 2 - posted on Facebook by Owen Lythgoe.
Picture 3 - March 1977 then in use by National Carriers.
Picture 4 - not Bolton, sorry, but these Scammel Scarab drays were a common sight in Bolton. They became this colour when the railways were nationalised.
2 May 1973
The warehouse had been empty from 1952 until its demolition
(Bolton News)
DURING Queen Victoria's Jubilee year in 1888, the Mayor of Bolton was Thomas Moscrop, founder of one of the town's oldest family firms. Originally selling lubricant animal fats, they moved into the motor oil business and flourished up to the early 1970s. Drivers approaching Bolton along Manchester Road were greeted by this advert for the firm's business as they passed close to the Wanderers football ground at Burnden Park. It promoted their Lion brand of oil long before Esso ever launched its tiger.
The bridge, pictured here in the 1930s, with tramlines along the road, has now been demolished.
The Burnden Viaduct. Burnden Park floodlights can be seen to the left.
A very well known picture of a train apparently stopped on the embankment so that the driver can see the match.
August 1984
TWO familiar landmarks for generations of Bolton football fans bit the dust as a new era dawned at BurndenPark.
For the axe was poised to fall on two railway bridges in Manchester Road, Bolton, under which football fans have tramped for generations. Both the bridges were being demolished in the first phase of an ambitious plan to create an imaginative sports complex at the Burnden Park home of Bolton Wanderers in August, 1984. Work on demolishing the first of the bridges — just a stone's throw from the ground — began in the first week of August. Workmen hoped to remove it completely over the weekend. The second bridge, which stands only yards away, was to be removed the following weekend. Then the Wanderers intended to level and reclaim the embankment. Part of the site was to be concreted and drained for car parking before new turnstiles and access gates were created.
Today's picture shows work in progress on dismantling the first bridge. (Text from Bolton News)
"Imaginative sports complex" never materialised. There seem to have been disputes with Big W (Woolworths) who had built at flagship store here and the upshot was BWFC decamping to Middlebrook.
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"This row of cottages outside the Bolton Wanderers ground at Burnden was a familiar sight to thousands of supporters. It had been condemned for years and will disappear any day now." Bolton Evening News report February 1956.
The club had long wanted the cottages demolished to widen the frontage of the ground and ease the Manchester Road bottleneck. "Embankment spectators will be able to walk straight to the turnstiles when the site is cleared," continued the article.
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Looking back along Manchester Road towards Bolton from Burnden Park. (During the tram era)
1 August 1998 (C)WDC The Big W store (now ASDA)
and the demolition of Burnden Park
On the next page we return to Trinity Street and begin our walk along Bradshawgate.