Hassall Road
Alsager’s educational provision has blossomed forth from the early church school on Church Road associated with the founding of Christ Church, its function now discharged by several primary schools scattered throughout the town. The site now has Alsager School, the town’s secondary school, on the east side of the road. On the west, the former Alsager campus of Manchester Metropolitan University (earlier a teacher-training establishment) ate up farmland and the local marl pit, but began its slow closure and subsequent erasure about 2006, eventually to be replaced by housing developments.
At Pikemere Road’s western end is Alsager’s first Grove House, of the 1850s, which has access from Hassall Road. It is one of Alsager’s earliest villas but went unremarked by the directories. Francis Stonehewer, formerly master at the Church school, added rooms, and by 1855 his ‘Alsager Grammar School’ here was advertising up to 12 boarding places each year at 20 guineas per annum, ‘no extras’. He appears to have had a strong association with the established church, as he offered various Anglican clergymen – and no others – as references. He continued to run a school here until his death in 1885.
At the foot of the road stands the first Wesleyan chapel – original location of Alsager’s Methodists – founded in 1834 and later extended. John Plant, who owned the triangle of land between Hassall Road and Chancery Lane, sold to his co-trustees of local Methodism £5 worth of this land for building the chapel. Its larger extension in 1852 was itself inadequate, and it was altered again before WW1. Probably the chapel was, in any of its phases, in the wrong place in relation to the centre of the village. The much larger premises in Wesley Place dates to the 1860s, and later the Primitive Methodists had their own chapel in Crewe Road. A second-hand book enterprise here now supports the museum of Primitive Methodism at Englesea Brook.
The Espley family next door were associated with the chapel for over 100 years, and the cottage where they lived, though numbered as part of Hassall Road, is dealt with here as part of Chancery Lane.
The rest of the road was developed as the 20th century progressed, beginning with detached houses at 3 to 11 begun for their first, owner-occupying families between 1924 and 1929. Further north was one of the sites of a controversy sparked in the early days of local authority planning supervision, when the UDC devised a policy against the proliferation of bungalows, those at the time being promoted by the building firm of Joseph Edwards as far north as Bennion’s farm (a new road is named after the farmer). This had crystallised by 1935 into refusal – at the time – to allow any more bungalows, unless they were in the area of those by then already existing.
