The Little Book of Manchester (eBook)

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FUN, FUN, FUN!

How have Mancunians enjoyed themselves over the years? Let’s look at a few of the ways.

PLEASURE GARDENS

For almost 200 years, ornamental gardens open to the public have entertained the people of Manchester.

Spring Gardens

There was once a Spring Gardens in Manchester at some time before 1729. It was somewhere near what is known today as Fountain Street and is remembered by a street name.

Vauxhall Gardens

Robert Tinker (1766–1836) was, by 1797, the proprietor of the Grape & Compass Coffee House and Tea Gardens, in what today seems an unlikely beauty spot – the banks of the River Irk at Collyhurst. He changed its name to the Elysian Gardens and dressed it with 3,000 coloured lights, promising an evening ‘at once intellectual, rural and delightful’, complete with singers and a band, and all for the admission price of 1s 6d. In 1814 he changed its name to the Vauxhall Gardens, after its more formal London counterpart, but locals by now knew it as Tinker’s Gardens. It offered floral gardens, concerts and sporting events, a zoological gardens and horticultural wonders including, in 1814, a cucumber 7ft 8in long, not surprisingly promoted as ‘the greatest curiosity of its kind nature ever produced in this kingdom’. Other regular attractions were the early balloon ascents. The promotional material for the August 1827 Royal Coronation balloon ascent says the gardens ‘are so happily disposed by nature as to form a complete amphitheatre’ to afford ‘uninterrupted observance of every preliminary preparation.’

The year after Tinker’s death, his gardens faced new competition in the form of those at Belle Vue, but they continued in business until 1852. As an aside, the name Vauxhall has medieval origins. The original gardens in London were built on land which once housed Fulk’s Hall, the home of Falkes de Breauté, a medieval mercenary who was given the land for services to King John in the thirteenth century. Fulk’s Hall changed over the years to ‘Vauxhall’, and an ironworks of that name later located there. It was there, too, that the first Vauxhall cars were made – the griffin emblem on the Vauxhall badge is part of Falkes’ medieval coat of arms.

Pomona Gardens

The Pomona Gardens were another of Tinker’s rivals, just across the boundary in Salford, near Ordsall Hall. They were named after the Roman goddess of fruit trees, gardens and orchards, but were originally called the Cornbrook Strawberry Gardens. The gardens (formerly to a private house) were opened to the public in the 1830s and other attractions, such as a zoological garden, were added later. At one time they had the largest ballroom in Britain and political rallies and leisure events could attract crowds of up to 100,000. Disraeli addressed an audience of 28,000 in one of the halls there.

The Pomona Gardens were a popular venue for Victorian Mancunians, many of them travelling there by boat. They would board it from the Cathedral Steps (as their name suggests, wooden steps leading down from Victoria Street near the cathedral). In the early days, the trip would have been something of a rural idyll, looking out over the Trafford Park woodlands, farms, orchards and a beauty spot called Throstlenest. But creeping industrialisation and the growing pollution of the river itself gradually made the journey less charming and more of an endurance test. The coming of the Manchester Ship Canal gave the public a new reason for taking the boat trip (giving views of the ocean-going ships in port) but also spelt the end for the Pomona Gardens. They were swallowed up in 1888 into what became the Pomona Docks, serving the Ship Canal. The loss of the gardens did not end the popularity of the river trips and, in the first half of 1897 alone, over 200,000 went to see the wonders of the Ship Canal. But the Cathedral Steps were closed in 1906. They stood just below where the rivers Irk and Irwell met, at one of the narrowest points in the River, and the introduction of a jetty at this point made the likelihood of flooding worse.

White City, Hulme

The Manchester Botanical and Horticultural Society was set up in 1827, one of its aims being to create a pleasure garden for the benefit of the general public. One of the purposes of this was to cool any revolutionary ardour among the working classes, just eight years after the Peterloo Massacre. As the society put it: ‘What can be a more delightful relaxation to a Lancashire mechanic than an hour or two in a garden? What an escape from the pestiferous politics of the times.’ The society was directed by the eminent scientist John Dalton to a site in Stretford, near modern day Old Trafford, where the prevailing wind would blow enough of the town’s pollution away to give the plants a sporting chance. The gardens would be the site for the Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 and an even more popular exhibition of Art, Science and Industry to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887.

By 1907 the popularity of the gardens was waning and part of the site was let to Messrs Heathcote and Brown, who undertook to provide ‘a pleasure garden of the highest class’. They promised to scour the parks and fairgrounds of Europe and America to find the latest novelties (which they did in just ten weeks). A water chute and big dipper were among the attractions they brought back with them. The amusement park lasted until 1928, at which time it was decided to sell off the remainder of the site to enable the construction of a stadium and racing track. This played host to a variety of events, from athletics and greyhound racing to speedway and stock cars, until its closure and replacement by a retail park in 1982.

The only parts that survive to this day are the original entrance to the gardens and the name White City. This appears to have been quite a common name for pleasure gardens – others were to be found at Hull and Onchan on the Isle of Man, for example. Does the original come from the name given to the stadium built for the 1908 London Olympics (which opened at about the same time as Manchester’s amusement park)? This was located in an area of Hammersmith that was open fields until just before then, but was used to house various trade exhibitions. The white stone-clad exhibition buildings were christened the White City by visitors, and the nickname transferred to the Olympic stadium and to the area as a whole.

Belle Vue

For many years Manchester’s best-known leisure destination, Belle Vue was the brainchild of a Nottingham-born man, John Jennison. In 1826 he was working as a jobbing gardener when he decided to open the garden to his house as an attraction. They were known as Jennison’s Gardens, or the Strawberry Gardens. This soon became a full-time activity for him, as he added a menagerie and a public house to the facilities. The business came to the attention of an entrepreneur named George Gill, who persuaded Jennison to expand by leasing a 35-acre site between Hyde Road and the Stockport Road. The site, previously used for occasional leisure events, was known as the Belle Vue Tea Gardens. The business flourished until new competition emerged from the Manchester Zoological Gardens at Higher Broughton in 1838. Then the Manchester to Birmingham Railway sliced through his site, cutting off access from the Stockport Road, after which recession drove Jennison into bankruptcy.

Unable to find another taker for the site, his creditors allowed Jennison to continue trading, at which point he had a dramatic reversal in fortunes. The recession also killed off some of his competition and the railway company built Longsight station right next to Belle Vue. Far from cutting him off, the railway now allowed him to tap a huge hinterland of new customers. By 1843, Jennison was free of debt. From there, his zoological collection steadily grew and a range of new attractions was added, from a fireworks lake and island to a natural history museum. His family gradually took over the running of the business as Jennison’s health failed (he died in 1869). By the turn of the twentieth century the gardens occupied 68 acres, with another 97 bought or leased next to the site, housing a circus ring, fairground, kinematograph and a roller-skating rink. One of their less conspicuous successes were their range of water ices, which were made from the polluted waters of their Great Lake (itself fed from the Stockport Canal) and which were the source of much food poisoning.

During the First World War, Belle Vue was turned over to military use. Soldiers drilled there and aircraft parts were assembled in the King’s Hall and the roller skating rink. A munitions factory was built next to the athletics track. The fireworks displays continued, but now they depicted scenes from the western front. By the end of hostilities the place was in a run-down state and there was even talk of Manchester City FC acquiring it to build their new ground. But instead a promoter of fairgrounds and amusements, John Henry Iles, took it over in 1925. He built an entirely new amusement park and added additional attractions like wrestling, speedway and a Christmas circus. One of its star attractions was a roller coaster named The Bobs. Constructed by an American engineer, Harry Traver, and completed in 1929, The Bobs...