![\"\"](\"https:\/\/hub.salford.ac.uk\/modern-salford\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/222\/2023\/02\/Screenshot-2023-02-24-at-17.32.47-1024x675.png\")
It\u2019s been hard to imagine but until the mid-1800s Higher Broughton itself was rural \u2013 a sparsely populated township to the north of Manchester, with most of the land owned by the Clowes family of Broughton Old Hall. They began to allow wealthy business and professional men, some of whom were immigrants from various parts of Europe, to build large mansions in The Cliff and Broughton Park and handsome terraces along Bury New Road, desirable districts well away from industrial dirt and overcrowding. It was prosperous merchants from the Ottoman Empire who built the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation on Bury New Road in 1861. Their work took them down to the centre of Manchester and from 1865 omnibuses then horse trams began to transport these commuters \u2013 some vehicles and horses were stored at Manchester Carriage Company\u2019s depot at Market Place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Towards the opposite end of the social scale were the tradesmen and workers, both skilled and unskilled, who moved with their families to occupy the two-up two-down cottages that sprang up in the 1870s. These were built in parallel streets of nearly identical terraces on Clowes land to the east side of Bury New Road, extending towards the meandering boundary with Manchester and northwards to Devonshire Street. A new parish of St James was carved out of St John\u2019s (until then the parish church for the whole of Broughton) to provide an anglican worship centre and school for the new population. It was more or less bisected by Great Cheetham St East, the route to Cheetham Hill, a grand name for what had started as Cow Lane. The 1889 Ordnance Survey map shows clearly the varied character of the district.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Higher Broughton developed in a similar manner over about twenty years and then remained essentially the same until the 1970s. Wilfred Street was extended as Leicester Road and more parallel streets of somewhat better-quality red-brick terraces were built on either side of it as far as Mandley Park and Wellington Street, with similar development on the east side of Great Cheetham Street. There were few open spaces but Mandley Park was a vital recreational lung for all ages, with bowling greens, tennis courts and swings, and it contained the branch library. For amenities the population had a great variety of shops all the way up Great Cheetham Street and many corner shops in the side streets. Social facilities included three churches, three primary and three secondary schools, four cinemas and four pubs, despite the Clowes family always restricting the building of pubs on their land. From the introduction of electric trams in 1901 there was easier mass transport to Manchester city centre, Prestwich and other parts of Salford.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As property aged and declined beyond acceptable quality, redevelopment began in the 1960s, when old houses and terraces on Bury New Road were demolished. Tower blocks were not a major feature in Higher Broughton but of those that were built five still exist; Oakhill Court commanded higher ground just beyond Mandley Park as selective clearance was done in Hightown; Cheshill Court and City View arose on Marlborough Road, Ascot Court (luxury flats) and Floral Court on Bury New Road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The major demolition and rebuilding of the oldest terraced streets took place between 1976 and 1982, removing over 1,500 dwellings and shops on twenty-six streets and replacing them with mainly two-storey, shorter terraces in a more spacious and less layout, reducing the density of both housing and population. Of course, this meant great disruption of communities, loss of shops and familiar places. Some of the red-brick terraces had renovation schemes and are still there. Others, in the area of Hampshire Street, often privately owned, were bought by Salford Council in the 2000s and demolished to make way for the Broughton Green scheme, a seven-year project aimed at bringing 700 new homes, a library, a youth club and sports fields. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Paul Dyson Photographs by Stanley Horrocks Higher Broughton has really been our family home. My sister and I lived there for most of our pre-adult lives and we both returned hundreds of times up to 2019 to visit our parents there. Our mother spent over seventy years there as a resident. However, the one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":308,"featured_media":741,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-modern-architecture-in-salford"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/hub.salford.ac.uk\/modern-salford\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/222\/2023\/02\/Screenshot-2023-02-24-at-17.34.11-1024x839.png\")
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/hub.salford.ac.uk\/modern-salford\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/222\/2023\/02\/Screenshot-2023-09-11-at-18.16.33.png\")