IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Salik Gardens, ROCHDALE, OL11 1QQ

An all-stations train from Manchester Victoria nears its terminus. It will use the remains of the former Oldham line to reverse direction, returning to Manchester (and on to Wigan Wallgate) at 12.04. For a contrasting, earlier view of this scene, see: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/820376.

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.

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Rochdale had become a rather cleaner place, probably because most of the steam locomotives on the nearby railway had been replaced by diesels.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

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 is the view to the south-west from Deeplish Corner. This view has not changed in any material aspect for the last 60 years, with the exception that the road was the sett-paved - and the introduction of speed bumps is quite recent.

These houses, which still exist, were, when photographed in 1949, almost in "as built" condition, with sash windows, and facing onto an unmade road with gas lamps.