IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Welburn Street, ROCHDALE, OL11 1PR

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 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of Rochdale had become a rather cleaner place, probably because most of the steam locomotives on the nearby railway had been replaced by diesels.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.

Unlike many smaller nonconformist churches, which have 'gone under', this one is still holding its own in an area mainly occupied by people of New Commonwealth origin.

Almost all the property on this patch of ground just west of Milkstone Road and south of the railway was demolished over 50 years ago, and there has been a large amount of new building. But the group of properties shown here survives from the late Victorian era. It includes, on the extreme left, a house whose address is 146, Vine Place. The number is still proudly displayed on the door, even though every other house in Vine Place had vanished before 1950.

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.

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.