St Michael's Flags and Angel Meadow Park

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Coordinates: 53°29′21″N 2°14′8″W / 53.48917, -2.23556

Angel Meadow main entrance
Angel Meadow main entrance

St Michael's Flags and Angel Meadow Park is a small park close to the city centre of Manchester, England, on the slope between the River Irk and Rochdale Road. It occupies an area of only 7.4 acres (3 ha), but it has a rich and diverse history. It was once a wealthy suburb of Manchester, until the 19th-century industrial revolution transformed the area, bringing poverty and disease.

The 21st-century regeneration of the park breathed new life into the area, and created a gateway into the Irk Valley.[1]

Contents

[edit] History

St Michael's and All Angel's church was built in 1788 by Humphrey Owen, to seat just over a thousand people. Its foundation stone was laid on May 20, 1788 and it was consecrated on July 23, 1789. Almost twenty years later, a letter appeared in the Manchester Guardian declaring "Why one of the ugliest churches in Manchester situated in one of the most crowded and notorious parts of the City, should have so long enjoyed the pleasant sounding name 'St Michael's, Angel Meadow' is beyond understanding".[2]

The adjacent land became the largest cemetery in the town, used for the internment of poor people who had no family place of burial and were too poor to afford a proper funeral. Over 40,000 bodies are reported to be buried there in mass graves, resulting in the burial ground's closure in 1816. As social and living conditions worsened, some resorted to digging up Angel Meadow and selling its soil as fertilizer to nearby farmers. The situation became so bad that an Act of Parliament was passed in 1855 to cover up graveyards with flagstones, hence the name, St Michael's Flags.

In 1844, the Oldham Road terminus of the Manchester–Leeds Railway was abandoned and the line extended through Collyhurst to a new link station at Hunts Bank – the first Victoria Station. A railway viaduct traversed Angel Meadow, whilst the obnoxious smells from the Irk and Irwell and the Gould street gas works darkened the landscape.

The mixture was ladled further by aromas from the tannery, the dyeworks, the iron foundry, the brewery, the tripe works and rotting vegetation from the Smithfield market, all added together with the neighborhood’s fried fish and bad sanitation smells, one would agree that the cauldron of Angel Meadow was indeed a potent brew.[3]

—James Stanhope-Brown, Angels from the Meadow

Ragged schools, such as Charter Street and Sharp Street, and other institutes for abandoned, destitute and neglected children, flourished in the area:

Each winter, thousands of poor, helpless children are provided with food, clogs and clothing; and every Sunday morning during the season, hundreds of destitute men and women are served with breakfast; and we try, by God’s help and the bestowal of a word of comfort and cheer, to arouse in them a feeling of hope which may lead them to a higher and noble life.[4]

—Ellen Casey, Christmas Appeal 1901 by Thomas Johnson

[edit] Regeneration

Friends of Angel Meadow (FOAM) was formed in 2004 to campaign for the regeneration of the park and to research the history of the area. Over £200,000 was raised through grants and match funding, which was spent re-landscaping the park, installing street furniture including seating and bins, erecting four solar-powered street lights, an arched entrance way and planting wildflowers. The Local Heritage Grant of £24,000 paid for six history boards and the publication of an information booklet.

In the spring of 2006, the park hosted the BBC and Manchester Leisure's Springwatch Festival of Nature. In 2006 and 2007 it was awarded the Green Flag, the national award for green spaces in England and Wales.[5]

[edit] Local characters

  • Friedrich Engels wrote about Angel Meadow and poverty of Manchester in his book The conditions of the Working Class in England.
  • Charles Dickens worked briefly at Meadow's Booth's warehouse in the locality. The slum conditions of the area may have influenced his novel Hard Times.
  • LS Lowry's maternal grandparents lived on Oldham Road close to Angel Meadow, which he used as a basis for a number of his paintings depicting street life including "Britain at Play" and "The Steps, Irk Place".
  • Winston Churchill visited Charter Street Ragged School when he stood as a Conservative candidate in Oldham.
  • Jerome Caminada was Manchester’s very own Sherlock Holmes. A high-ranking detective in Manchester police force he wrote an account of his life in 25 Years of Detective Life – a fascinating account of crime in Victorian Manchester.

[edit] Notes and references

  1. ^ St Michael’s Flags and Angel Meadow. The Irk Valley Project. Retrieved on 2007-11-05.
  2. ^ Extract from North and East Manchester article, December 28, 1808
  3. ^ Angels from the Meadow, by James Stanhope-Brown.
  4. ^ Extract from article by Ellen Casey – Christmas Appeal 1901 by Thomas Johnson
  5. ^ St Michael's and Angel Meadow. Green Flag Award. Retrieved on 2007-11-04.

[edit] External links

[edit] Further reading