Chancery Lane
Chancery Lane has had various labels. It was ‘Lodge Lane’ in the 1881 census. In 1899, it was decreed that what we would now separately know as Chancery Lane and Lodge Road should together be called Mere Road. The name ‘Chancery Lane’ crept into use however, and by 1910 had become more or less official. The east end of the road was by then the site of three large houses built by prominent solicitors, so the name may have originated as a joke.
The area enclosed by Church Road, Hassall Road and Crewe Road formed part of the Alsager estate sale of 1876. These fields were often let with the Lodge farm, and were known by the estate as Ladies’ Field, Colonel’s Field, Major’s Field, and (between the Lane itself and Crewe Road) Charles’ Field and Endon Field. Some of these names have been appropriated by later developments.
There are two houses on the north side first shown on the map of 1840. One is 1 Hassall Road next to the Wesleyan Chapel. Around 1840 it belonged to John Plant, who with his wife Amy worked a smallholding. At one time they and their successors had a general shop. Their elder daughter, eight-year-old Hannah, was fatally injured in a horse and cart accident on the way back from Burslem market in 1824, allegedly through her father’s negligence. Mary Plant, possibly another daughter, was noted in 1840 as occupying a meadow beyond. John and Amy’s daughter Mary married John Espley, and their son George, a copperplate engraver (named after Mary’s brother) was a noted local organist and succeeded his grandfather as a trustee of the chapel. Their uncle George Plant, as well as becoming a purchaser of land on the Mere, was one of the trustees of the Mere and a substantial developer. Successive generations of the Plant/Espley family lived here into the 20th century, some buried in the churchyard at Christ Church.
The other very old house, no. 21 Chancery Lane, now called Rose Cottage, was occupied in 1840 or soon afterwards by its owner Charles Latham (1805-1884), who was also a leading Wesleyan. Latham was a shoemaker, and let the house and its garden when not living there himself. It is plausible to suppose he was a very early resident, as he was living in this area with his first wife and three young children in 1841; ten years later there is a second wife, Ann, and a more unusual household, with three lodgers, a widow on parish relief, a retired local farmer, Samuel Timmis, and his middle-aged son Edward, a ‘lunatic’.
The semi-detached houses nos. 3 and 5 are first shown on the OS map of 1876. They were built on the easternmost part of Plant’s holding, presumably by his successors the Espleys, and inhabited through the remaining years of the 19th century by farm workers and coachmen.
Some of the other pre-1939 houses in this street are the product of George Edwards’s building firm, continued by his son Arthur; some, especially towards the eastern end, by Joseph Edwards. George’s son-in-law Moses Corfield, a local headmaster, also built cottages in the road. Nos 11 to 15 appear to date from this phase of building, and George Edwards occupied the site of no 17 as a builder’s yard.
Of the three large solicitors’ houses, only the largest, Beechwood, on the north-west corner, is still there. Built of brick and stone with a striking cupola, it has probably survived by being sub-divided. All three houses resulted in essence from the estate sale of 1876, at which Thomas Sherratt (c.1832-1891), a Kidsgrove solicitor, bought the plots on both sides of the Lane. He left the area in 1878 and moved to Southport, building Beechwood in 1887/8 on his return, though he lived there for only a short time before his death. Joseph Edwards built (inter alia) Beechwood Drive in the 1930s, and himself retired to no. 33 Chancery Lane.
The two large late 19th century houses on the south side were built in a fashionable style, with a large number of entertaining rooms and bedrooms. They also belonged to solicitors who, like Sherratt, spent at least part of their working lives as clerk to a local authority, in their cases more locally. To the south of Beechwood, The Gables, now replaced by a post-war housing development, had already been built, in 1888 to the design of Ralph Dain of Burslem, by William Cooke for Francis Creed Mayer, who practised in Burslem and became the first clerk to the local urban district council. His father farmed at the Lodge, opposite. Francis was brought up there, alongside his step-sister Georgina Fanshaw, then subsequently lived in Church Road before building the Gables. The house was an ambitious pile, with half-timbered gable and night and day nurseries. It was rented, for a few years after 1909, by William Adams, heir to the pottery firm established by the Adams dynasty of Tunstall potters. Subsequently it was occupied by Sir Francis Joseph and his wife Violet Settle, before they moved to her father’s former house, the Hill. Originally next to the Gables, and like it now a thing of the past, the third house, Inglethorpe, was built by J.J. Nelson, a partner in Sherratt’s firm, about 1895.
Most of this side is modern infill, using the rear portions of gardens to Crewe Road houses. The only three earlier premises along the frontage are nos. 2 to 6, the pair of large red brick semi’s and a detached house. They were built from 1891 by the builder of the Gables, William Cooke (c.1840-1926), of Burslem, whose initials are on the terracotta plaque on the pair of semi’s. Cooke himself lived in no. 6 for some time before his retirement about 1914. He also developed the southern frontage of this land for 143-145 Crewe Road.
