Picture Book Moss Side

Moss Side is a suburb two miles south of Manchester city centre. In her novel Mary Barton, published in 1848, Elizabeth Gaskell describes a pleasant rural scene with small farms and green fields visited by the mill workers from Ancoats and Chorlton-on-Medlock as an escape from their hard working lives.

As people moved away from the congested central area, Moss Side and Greenheys became suburbs for the middle classes, with large houses springing up along Moss Lane and Denmark Road and the creation of Alexandra Park in 1876. Later, towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, a grid pattern of red brick terraces was laid out. These houses tended to be of better quality than many of the older houses that were condemned as slums in Hulme and Chorlton-on-Medlock. As well as most streets having a corner shop, Alexandra Road and Princess Road were important and bustling shopping centres in the early twentieth century. Moss Side became incorporated into the City of Manchester in 1904.

In the 1950s, many people from the West Indies, the "Windrush Generation" invited to Britain by the government to boost the workforce, settled in Moss Side. They brought with them a distinctive culture and sense of community. New churches, clubs, shebeens and music venues catered for spiritual and worldlier needs. Vegetables and other food, familiar to West Indians but not seen before in Britain, began to appear in the shops.

By the 1960s the housing stock was showing signs of deterioration, and as with many other inner city areas, Manchester City Council started a slum clearance programme. Although some high rise blocks were built, some areas of red brick terraces remain undemolished, whilst in the Alexandra Park area small family houses were built to replace the terraces.

There are 3,744 pictures of Moss Side through the ages in the Manchester Archives and Local Studies Image Collection.