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St. Luke Street, ROCHDALE, OL11 1PP

A row of red-brick terraced houses on Aubrey Street in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, England. Such housing stock is typical of much of Rochdale and of Greater Manchester.

This building was formerly the Sunday School of St. Luke's: the actual Church building stood a short distance further away from the photographer, on Deeplish Road. But in the 1980s the large Church itself was sold for demolition and replaced by the modern flats visible in the left background of the photograph. Services were then transferred to the Sunday School building shown above, which thus became the Church.

This small shop, now an electrical suppliers', was formerly a butcher's shop where the butcher's boy was provided with a bicycle with solid tyres. Overt Street Baptist Church Image is seen in the background.

It's 1955, and a plume of smoke rises from a locomotive on Rochdale station as an office worker makes his way home across waste ground on the corner of Ashfield Road and Milkstone Road. Also visible on the extreme left is the Brown Cow public house.

By the time of this photograph in 1964, this part of Rochdale had become a rather cleaner place, probably because most of the steam locomotives on the nearby railway had been replaced by diesels. The Brown Cow public house is seen here on the extreme left.

No 86 on the right with the door open, and No 88, where I lived as a boy from 1948 to 1954.

I celebrated my 21st birthday by taking this photograph of waste ground outside the spring works. In those days. nobody bothered about air pollution. Engines would stand on the sidings for hours emitting smoke and steam, while additional smoke was caused by Riley's workmen setting fire to waste rubber outside the works.

Looking eastwards from the junction of Deeplish Road with Ashfield Road, known locally as Deeplish Corner. These are large terrace houses which each have, or had, a small front garden: however, some of these front gardens have been removed to create space to keep a m***r c*r, (that affliction of our villages, towns and cities!)

This is looking northwards from Deeplish Corner, and shows the junctions of Ashfield Road with Ventnor Street and Aubrey Street. The decorative brickwork on the terrace ends is of recent origin. The tilting bus stop sign is of significance - it states 'out of use'. There is no bus service whatever now into the Deeplish district. Interestingly enough, this is the route of Rochdale Corporation's very first bus service. Back in the 1920s, the corporation was a tramway operator, but trams would not have been suitable in Deeplish with its narrow roads and awkward street layout. So a motorbus service was started, and appropriately enough, was given service No 1. It ran for very many years, usually at a 10 minute frequency, surviving into the SELNEC and GMPTE eras (although renumbered). But now it has gone with only a few disused bus stops to recall its existence.