Looking up St Edwards street from Compton

Here is St Edward Street, photo uploaded on 31st March (to flickr). Spout Hall is here in the foreground on the left, just where the guy in yellow is on the pavement.

St Edward Street (p59)

"St Edward Street is lined with buildings of differing style, age and character. There is no uniformity and no straight lines, but nevertheless there is great harmony. St Edward Street has a number of fine houses which were once the homes of many of Leek's prominent citizens".

"One such house was Spout Hall, part of which can be seen on the extreme left of the picture. This impressive Victorian building was designed by the architect Norman Shaw for Hugh Sleigh.

This was the square way before the monument there was erected. (P.57)

"This scene is now dominated by the Nicholson War Memorial, or 'Monument', and the traffic island. The old cattle market extended into this area, which is bounded by Cawdry Buildings, Fountain Street, the Cattle Market Inn adn the Talbot Hotel. Iin the background are St Luke's Church, the Fountain Street Primitive Methodist Chapel and Brough, Nicholson and Hall's factory, with its tall chimney".

Leek in 1900

The top photo reads... "Leek's old baths can be seen on the left of this picture, c. 1900. The small building with the pyramid-shaped roof housed a public weighing machine. It stood on the area known as 'Sparrow park', part of the old cattle market site before the Monument was built".

The bottom photo reads... "Sanders' Buildings, at the corner of Derby Street and Haywood Street, was designed by Sugden and Son, the Leek architects, in 1894 as shops with living accomodation. It is still known locally as 'Mears's Corner', from the name of a former shopkeeper".

Derby street in late Victorian years ...dog and partridge

The text reads... "There were apparently no parking restrictions in Derby Street when this picture was taken in the late Victorian Years. The inno n th eleft, with its hanging sign and shops on either side, was the Dog and Partridge".

"Town Scenes our Grandparents Knew"

The first picture is of Derby street, not as many will recognise it now to what it used to be then, "A fine view of Derby street in about 1910. Skinner and Son, the ironmongers and hardware store on the left, was founded in 1894 and is still trading today". The Church in the background, the steeple standing high, is still there now in 2008, so is the roebuck pub which stands more in the foreground yet not very clear to the eye.

The other buildings down on the left is the Manchester banking corporation building If I remember rightly, which stands after the Roebuck pub (this pub was built in 1626).

Shops and Retail in Leek

Shops and Markets of Yesteryear...



When you look at the new retail stores of today, their windows have little character like the shop frontage and presentations of yesteryear. Leek like many towns of victorian era had many characteristics amongst the retail trade that are worlds apart from today. You will not walk down a town centre today and observe men selling cattle to make a living, do not get me wrong, cattle and livestock is still sold yet not in the original market places where they used to. Leek cattle market used to stand where the Smithfield centre stands today, and there was no monument on the square like regular visitors to Leek will see, oh no, by the Cattle market inn and The Talbot public houses and even the small roundabout by the square and its monument, stood what was the cattle market of Leek, a huge area for selling livestock in its day.

Here are the draymen and their horses outside the pub in the market square! You wont see these today, more like a wagon or two bringing in barrels of beer and bottles of all sorts.

The following photos show what selling from shops and the market was like a few decades ago.

This guy is W. Fallon and seemed to have a few different shops in Leek at the time!
Here are traders at the cattle market, as mentioned before, situated where the bus station and Smithfield centre, mini roundabout and square with monument stand today.

There were many modes of transport in the victorian era, canal barge usage was one of them, here is Leek canal basin that was, sadly it is not there anymore, instead an industrial estate stands where the canal basin and wharf used to be.

Leeks Industrial Times

What was Leek known for?

Well some know that Longton, Stoke and Hanley were renown for bottle kilns, the pottery industry, such as Spode, Wedgewood, Royal Doulton, Aynsley to name a few, yet Leek and Macclesfield have been known for materials such as the silk and textile industry which moves up towards lancashire where you have such places as Styal in Cheshire, Blackburn and other Cheshire and Lancashire towns that were known for the cotton industries.

Such places as Brough, Nicholson and Hall Ltd, and S Mayers and Company, Wardle and Davenport, Clemesha Brothers and Birch were known for manufacturing textile products, garments and household goods in the 1930s. One hazard with the textile firms though was the risk of a factory fire, Brough, Nicholson and Halls major fire happened in 1915, on the 31st August, the photos are the evidence.

Where there are and were mills, there would be mill workers houses, alot of them were 3 or 4 storeys high (if you count the cellars) here, you can see the demolition of houses that once stood in Stockwell street, beside the Nicholson institute. Some houses of this style can be seen in Albion Street and King street as I have seen them myself. If you have read before this in my blog you would have seen the two pictures I took of King street.

Deep Haye Country Park

Like many a country park in Britain, some were once an industry and once the industry had gone, buildings demolished, the area was kept as a park area. Brough Hall once stood on the grounds we now know in Leek as Brough Park, Deep Haye country park was it seems a brickworks industry.

"A group of workmen at "all Grange Brickworks at about the turn of the century. The works closed in 1960, after a long and chequered history, when the kilns and workshops were demolished. The area has now been landscaped, and forms part of the Deep Haye Country Park.

Around Leek In old photographs

by Ray Poole ISBN 0-7509-0623-5

When living in a generation where there are tv screens, digital tv and a luxury such as running water from a tap, motorised delivery vans and trains, being brought up in the age of computers also, it seems hard to imagine life without any of these things, although I was reminded as a child in the late 1970s and 1980s that we were lucky to have a television and a telephone.

I remmber a time where you could walk down the high street and nobody owned a mobile phone yet the older generation whom were born in the late 1920s onwards will remember that the only form of communication was a letter and in some homes, the rich owned a telephone in their own homes.

Leek, Staffordshire, known to many as the "Queen of the Moorlands", is no different to other towns back in the victorian times (when Queen Victoria was on the throne) many goods were transported by horse and cart, in some cases steam trains or even by canal, deliveries from local shops to the surrounding area were regularly done by bicycle.

A prime example on how Leek, like many other towns in its era, that has changed dramatically in this photo of Derby street in late victorian times. If you compare that photo to one of now (2008), then you can see the vast difference. There's no cobbled road and the only existing cobbled areas I have so far observed, are the market square, Albion street and the little side road adjacent to St. Edwards church in Stockwell street, which leads to 'Mount Pleasant' and Brough Park.

The Book I resourced some of this information and photographs actually remind me of older photographs from my family, my mum for example, in her Sunday best back in the late 1940s to 1950s, posing for a Sunday school photograph, together with my two aunts and my eldest uncle, a similar style dress to many of that the children are seen to be wearing in old school photographs in this book.

Schools of Leek...

There seemed to be quite a lot of schools back then, as there is now, I know of 4 first schools in Leek, there is St Edwards in Cheddleton, Westbrook junior/1st school over the West end of Leek, 1st school on the Haregate estate off the Buxton Road and All Saints primary by the junction of Compton and junction road, in fact there may be more.

Leeks schooling system has nursery to primary at first schools which are aged 3years/4years to 8 years adn then there is Churnet View Middle school and St Edwards Junior High (nee middle) whom cater for 9 years to 13 year old pupils, then it is on to a choice of either Leek high school or Westwood High. It surely takes some getting used to.

Now to schools in Leek around a hundred years ago...

St Lukes build in 1871 to cater for 164 pupils, a church school, the picture in the book was taken in 1912.

Ramshaw Primary, Buxton Road, photo taken around 1904









All Saints school, photo taken in 1920, not sure where this stood yet I have a feeling it was either opposite all saints church on Compton or on the same side of Compton, where some small modern flats now stand?



These two pictures on the left are of Regent Street School. Sadly the school has since been demolished. I doubt any of the children in these photographs are still iving today, my great aunt is 102 years of age, and although born in 1906, there are not, to my knowledge, any other elder generations of her age still living in staffordshire.

Cheddleton School is still standing if it is the one I am thinking of that is now named St Edwards (first) primary and is situated near Ostlers Lane, 50 Yards from St Edward the confessor church. There was also Leek Girls High School (shown here in 1921) and I am unsure if that it is the same High School which is now known as Leek High School?

If you wander out of Leeks main retail area and market square, towards what is known as Clerk Bank, there is a pink building and a blue building, to look at them and realise that htere contemporary make up hid what was in 1723, The Old Leek Grammar school would be hard to imagine.

It seems that Leeks original high school was not up off the Ashbourne Road, yet it was originally situated in the inner quadrangle behind the Nicholson Institute in and around 1901.

1 week later...

On Monday I needed to visit the library to pick up a fiction book and wished to visit the 'local studies' section at the Nicholas institute (our local library) In Leek, so I got the following three books to research for this blog!

1. Staffordshire Moorlands THEN & NOW by Lindsey Porter [isbn 1-84306-317-4]
2. Cheddleton North Staffordshire - A village history Edited by Robert Milner [isbn not shown]
3. Around Leek IN OLD PHOTOGRAPHS by Ray Poole [isbn 0-7509-0623-5]

I am hoping to retrieve some much required information from these books before returning them to the library and gaining more books about Leek!