The first photo shows the left hand side of Hewitt Street in 1958, with the hat works to the right and the terraced houses on Manchester Road to the left, a nice old advert for Smith's Crisps on the end wall. The second photo shows the right hand side of Hewitt Street again around 1958. The corner shop had been a chippy but had recently closed down, next door was "Home Fittings" and then "Northern Plastics Limited", a company which is still in existence today.
Hewitt Street, after demolition of all the properties shown on these photo's became the entrance to the newly built Automasters Ltd.
A description of Automasters from a 1970's booklet is reproduced below:-
AUTO-MASTERS LIMITED
Auto-masters Ltd (engineers) were first established at Denton in 1947, and moved to Hyde in 1952, when they purchased premises off Manchester Road. By 1960 the old buildings had been replaced by a new bay on the same site, and this , together with adjacent works premises, since purchased , now total over 5000 square feet of floor area, standing on a five acre site.
Further development is planned for the future, and a start to the proposed frontage on to Manchester Road was made in 1964, when the original sites of demolished houses and shops were laid out with low walling, planted with semi-mature trees, and a large neon sign located over Hewitt Street to mark the main entrance.
The company is equipped with the latest machine tools and fabrication equipment, and a headroom of 25 feet, with travelling cranes up to 100 tons capacity, provide adequate facilities for most engineering requirements.
The area around Cooper Street (Hewitt St) in 1897
Last stages of construction of the new Auto-masters premises around 1970
7 comments:
Great post there!
Cleared up the mystery over what the Streets name was too. :)
I think the second photo's a bit later than 1958 - the little van looks like a Ford Thames 307E (the variant of the Ford Anglia) which (according to Wikipedia) was introduced in June 1961.
Great post Paul
I wonder if 'Hewitt' was someone's name.. maybe a builder or councillor, it may have been someone from the Hyde Lane Pit.. certainly strange to have a street name changed like that.
Good detective work on the van Dave...
Was the corner shop on the 2nd photo what was known as Kellett's cafe? That was a posh name for a chippie. I remember being taken to the Queen's cinema in Manchester Road and then across for a fabulous supper at Kellett's.
The only reference to a Fish & Chip shop at 88 Manchester Rd is in 1957 when the owner was M. Jones.
Paul
Thanks for adding these photos, have been looking to see where my late father grew up in the 1920s and 1930s.
My Dad and I made a trip to Hyde in the mid 80s when I was about 15 but it was quite sad for him because it had all changed so much and there was very little he could recognise, though he was able to point out the spot where a horse kicked him into the canal when he was a kid - he probably deserved it!
For your info, Hewitt Street seems to have been called that before the 1940s; I have a scanned postcard he sent his mum at number 6 Hewitt Street from Plymouth (he had just joined the Royal Navy aged 17) which is dated December 10 1938.
Ian
The photo of Auto-Masters is likely to be the late 1970s or early 1980s as i served my apprenticeship there from 1971 and worked on the building modernisation.
Dennis Goodwin
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