As you can see, not a great deal has changed over the years !
Broomstair then.
Scanned postcard taken at Broomstair Bridge when it was the county boundary [pre-1974]. The larger of the two signs on the left at the bridge said "Municipal Borough of Hyde, Cheshire" and the smaller one just beyond said "Cheshire", and as far as I'm concerned that's where Hyde still is! I love the delivery boy and his bike and the EWS [emergency water supply] sign can still be clearly seen on the stone of the bridge. I would date this picture around 1959-60 I think.
Broomstair in 2007
Same spot but taken in 2007. Notice that the Tameside sign has been sited across the road.
Many Thanks, Susan.
Much appreciated.
5 comments:
Perhaps the most important change shown in these photos is the loss of the county boundary at Broomstair, shown clearly by the signs on the left of the bridge. It was at that point too where the accent changed from the Manx twang of Denton to the dialect and flat vowels of Hyde.
Spot on Susan. I noticed that the boundary signs had been repositioned but the River Tame is still the boundary / frontier between them foreigners west of Hyde. That said I married a Dentonian, they're not that bad. ;-)
The border between Hyde/Cheshire and Denton/Lancashire is marked on Broomstairs Bridge, so it doesn't matter where Tameside place the sign.
The old Oldham's Batteries social club was sometimes wrongly refered to as being in Denton, even though it's on the Hyde side of the river.
You're right, Anonymous, it doesn't matter. What does matter though is that Cheshire and Lancashire have removed their signs at this point because, regardless of what is written in the stone of the bridge, Hyde and Denton no longer have their place in those counties. For me, almost 40 years after its first sign was placed in position, Tameside will never exist for me - nor Greater Manchester either.
That's my grandmother's and her mother's house, the first one on the left, also where my mother and her sister were brought up, and Oldham's Club, as it was always known as, was directly behind it, which all generations of my family frequented on a regular basis when they lived there, I was often sent over for a bottle of Mackeson for my great grandmother when she became too infirmed to venture over there anymore, via a hole in the fence which ran along the whole length of our back alley. It was mainly accessed from the main (Hyde) road by a cinder type car park as I remember, back in the mid 1950s and early 60s. And yes, it was on the Hyde side of Broomstair Bridge, planting it firmly in Cheshire, as was. The older postcard photo taken from the road on Broomstair Bridge was sent to my mother in the early 60s when she and my father were relocated to Stevenage, Hertfordshire, to start a more financially secure life. Up until then, my father was an Electrician at Redfern's Rubber Works, Hyde, and my mother worked at Zorbit Towel Manufacturers, near Hyde Park. My father was from Hulme Road, Denton, near the Golf Course if I remember rightly. My parents were married at St Anne's Church, somewhere in Denton, which I think wasn't far from a place called Crown Point.
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