Lawton Road
The ‘Bank Corner’ – the junction of Sandbach Road, Crewe Road and Lawton Road – is now regarded as the centre of the village, but it was not always so. In the mid-19th century this crossroads was the site of Fairview and also a large house built to its east in the 1860s; there were two or three buildings opposite. Some of the present shops started out as houses, indeed there are few pre-war shop buildings in Alsager which were purpose-built. The local council, by moving its main operations here after WW1, set the seal on the eastward trajectory of the whole settlement.
On the north side, Fairview (where the library now stands) was a farmhouse of no great pretension, described as a ’new house’ in the early 19th century enclosure settlement. It was the centre of Sarah Barnett’s property holdings – around 20 acres, sometimes more, sometimes less. She described herself variously as ‘farmer’ and ‘landed proprietor’. Added to as necessary, it was by the early 20th century occupied by the family of William Band, local cab proprietor, whose descendants later ran the town’s former well-loved hardware shop. Mrs Band was an early caretaker of the premises when the site was bought by the Council as its permanent home in 1922.
The council precinct now incorporates Prospect House to the east, which was there by 1864 and still had an acre of its own grounds in 1932. Early occupiers of Prospect House were William Beech, of a line of china manufacturers of the Bell Works, Burslem; then Thomas Forster (1820-1872), a partner in the pottery firm at Clayhills in Tunstall known until his death as Elsmore and Forster. He and his family, who moved from here eastwards to Longview, were succeeded by Josiah Wood, formerly of Radway House. In the early 20th century the resident here was Thomas Hancock, a retired Kidsgrove grocer. His middle name was, appropriately, Prosperous.
Hancock is a name frequently found in the locality. Opposite Fairview, on the corner of Sandbach Road South, was another Hancock’s which was by virtue of its location a local landmark. John Hancock (who had run his own baker’s establishment in Crewe Road) took over, at the outset of the 20th century, on the death of his father Daniel, who had first brought a business here from Tunstall about 1870. He built anew in 1890, and in his lifetime saw the number of food retailers burgeon, alongside other shops on the main street. George Hancock in his turn succeeded John, and the business is remembered as a confectioner’s. Nos. 7-13 on the north side were all built as houses, rather than shops, about 1891. James R. Dudson, of the family of potters, lived at one of these from about 1902 and Alfred Eardley, partner in the Brownhills pottery company, in another. Wulfrun House, detached and to their east, is part of the same development and existed by the end of the 1890s. These houses had various names – they included, at various times, Halcyon, Hazeldene, Englesea, Northern Hey (which was Dudson’s), Ashville, and Ivydale. Agnes Broady, formerly of the Firs on Sandbach Road North, had apparently transferred her boarding school for young women by 1888 to Ash Villa (which may have gone: even which side of the road it was on remains unidentified). She was also at Ashville, possibly the same house, finally retiring around the end of the 1890s to a smaller house at the east end of Crewe Road.
The precinct now occupied by an Asda supermarket, redeveloped around 2010, was previously centred round a Co-op, its third Alsager site. The Butt Lane Industrial Co-operative Society established a presence about 1902 on the corner of Wesley Avenue, and when its lease ran out advertised for a grocer’s shop or building land. They moved across to the corner of Ashmore’s Lane on the south side of Lawton Road, where they built their second shop, a vernacular-style tile-hung two-storey building with a laundry behind. It is still there, though sub-divided. In 1913, the Co-op fell foul of the local authority’s shops inspector, by opening the new shop on the afternoon of early-closing day, which was Wednesday in Alsager but Thursday in the Potteries, where their other branches were.
No. 31 has been much altered but is older than its western neighbours. Though most of this site was probably still a field in 1869 the building may be broadly contemporary with the Chapel opposite, opened that year. Alsager’s first fish and chip shop opened at no. 29 in 1929. This part of the road was known as Wesley Place, after the chapel; by 1876 there were also a grocer’s and a plumber’s premises, as well as the home of the resident Wesleyan clergyman. The adjacent Wesley Avenue was originally known as Wesley Street. It dates from around 1877, and two houses with gardens were sold there in 1880, though its subsequent growth was gradual. The early houses may have been built by the local builder Samuel Davies, who supplied the materials to build an additional greenhouse and workshop shortly after the first houses were built. The Co-op started on the site of the garage at the Lawton Road end until its move across the main road; the garage was established on the same site about 1921.
Shady Grove takes the line of one of the oldest tracks in Alsager, shown on the early 19th century map as leading to the farm known by mid-century as Moorhouse, which lay at the top of the lane about where Moorhouse Avenue now crosses. The name Moorhouse is not an ancient one: the farmer around 1870, George Moore, who had formerly been at Brookhouse Farm, probably occasioned it. The first cottages were two terraces on the west side, one of four near the main road and the rest contiguous on the far side of a substantial gap; the road was occupied by 1871, but still substantially consisted of building land years later.
The 19th century houses on the north side of Lawton Road just east of Shady Grove date mainly from the late 1870s; some were in existence in 1876, but enough were unoccupied in 1881 to suggest new building still on the market. Nos. 43 and 45 Lawton Road started as a speculation about 1877 by John Ashmore, on whose bankruptcy they were sold. Ashmore was a gardener by profession, and most of the work of building the houses is likely to have been undertaken by Samuel Davies, his neighbour and creditor. The westernmost house of the two had outbuildings which were originally a stable and coach-house, but the specification of both was unpretentious, as there was piped water but no bathroom in either.
No. 47 – Windsor Cottage – has been given a date of 1876 and was occupied in 1881 by Harvey Ford and his daughter Elizabeth. Harvey had started life as a ‘potter’s boy’ in Tunstall. The family prospered; his mother Rebecca was able to give up painting pottery, and in his teens and subsequently his twenties – after being widowed young, with a young daughter – Harvey lived with his parents at Peel Cottage in Fields Road. He subsequently became a manufacturer of crates. For many years the owner-occupiers here were the family of Amos Jackson (1846-1925), who described himself as a ‘monumental agent’. The rooms were ‘not big, but lofty’, and included a scullery with bath, and a small workshop.
Nos. 51 to 65 include a pair of semis plus, to their east, a terrace called Grove Villas with a passage between the buildings and their gardens. The latter bear a date of 1874, and were in being by the following year, so may well have been in the course of building when the Ordnance Survey of the mid-1870s took place, though they are not shown on it. They were advertised as having 8 rooms, and replaced a double-fronted villa set back from the road, which had had grounds behind and trees in front.
No. 67, the Hollies, also a detached villa, was from the mid-1880s the residence and headquarters of Thomas Gratton, who built several houses lining the Mere along Church Road. It is likely to have been previously occupied by Samuel Davies.
Nos. 69, 71 and 73, and 77-79 form a group some at least of which appear to have been built by (or, soon after building, bought by) Allen Kaye, a tailor and draper who was, on a local scale, something of a property tycoon. No. 69 Lawton Road was his own house, where he lived with his wife Mary; they called it Clayton Cottage. Next to it, he also owned nos. 71 and 73, Laburnum Villas. Kaye probably built, between 1906 and 1909, nos. 40 to 46 on the other side, had interests in the row of cottages on the west side round the corner at the top of Fields Road, and owned land in the Avenue.
No. 81 bears a large entablature with the date, in this case 1914. This suggests that its origins lie in the only drainage application made that year for this road, by James Stevenson, a woollen draper formerly resident in one of Kaye’s nearby houses. It was, as now, called the Croft or the Crofts in the 1920s and 1930s.
Lawton Road also has some of the oldest surviving houses in Alsager. Towards its eastern end, nos. 91, 97 and 99 are on sites which were developed by 1820, and may be considerably older, though there has been alteration and rebuilding, some quite recent. No. 91, now called Lombardy Villa, is described in 1840 together with its considerable outbuildings as a ‘homestead’. It had at that time substantial land attached and was occupied as a farm by Thomas Holland, possibly son-in-law to Rawlinson. By the turn of the century it had become home to the families of men in managerial occupations (in 1911, the secretary to a flint milling company). The lane to its west was once known as Chapman’s Lane and led to a field behind called Chapman’s Flags. The two cottages at 97 and 99 (one originally with a stable) were occupied around 1841 by James Taylor, a farm labourer, and as late as 1912 separately by his sons Thomas and James, who began as agricultural labourers and later set up a carting business.
The core of a complex of buildings on the south side at no. 80 Lawton Road, is now a nursery. Land here belonged in the early to mid-19th century to Thomas Bourne, who had been born in Wolstanton parish about 1794. No. 48 Lawton Road – Pear Tree Cottage – described about 1912 as ‘an old-fashioned cottage in fair repair’, was during the first part of the century still occupied by a member of the Bourne family, then farming at Sunnyside.
Nos. 86 to 100 were all on the first comprehensive local map, in 1876. In the early 20th century. No. 92 was called Carnbury Cottage. No. 90 was called Bijou Cottage by Charles Cratchley, a joiner, who lived here from before 1881 till his death in 1911, and Brundsmead by a later occupier, Frederick Lloyd.
Eastwards from here, a number of large houses on the south side – as well as a handful of semis on the north – date from the period from just before one world war until just before another. At 104, a strange house with Art Deco features, built about 1931 out of reinforced concrete for a Mrs Voigt, has been demolished and replaced by a line of bungalows: it was one of a tiny number of Alsager houses noticed by The Buildings of England.
Next to it, no. 106 was built about 1928 for Ethel Bishop, the daughter of a leading solicitor in Hanley, who had earlier lived with her parents successively in Fields Road, Station Road and the Avenue. No 110, bearing a date of 1913, was built for Robert Dickinson, who took over his father’s draper’s shop in the town and throughout most of his life worked as a shopkeeper either in Alsager or Kidsgrove. (These two houses are close to the well-head still visible on the south side, and dated 1877.) Vale View, a late 19th century detached house with outbuildings, is now replaced by Vale Gardens. ‘Bursley’, no. 144, was built in 1920 for Frank Curwen Powell, a previous resident of Fields Road who was registrar of births, deaths and marriages in Burslem.
On the north side, the bungalow at 109 was advertised for sale by the builder William Millward in 1936. Further along is the site of Longview, a house of some age (in 1912 it was described as ‘old-fashioned’). Here the Burslem potter John Maddock and his wife Martha Knowles first brought the younger members of their family from Stockton Brook to Alsager. After his move to Brundrett House in the 1860s, and the subsequent tenure of Thomas Forster’s widow and children, Edward S. Woolf, a brewer and spirit merchant in Crewe, lived and farmed here for at least a decade from the 1870s. Through his South Cheshire brewery, he once owned the Mere Inn; around 1897 the Lodge Inn too. The grounds of Longview were developed by the local builders Byron & Bradshaw, who had built semi-detacheds on the main road in 1932 and went on to build more, in accordance with larger-scale development plans put forward the following year. The houses were on sale for £520, including space for a garage, and Alsager was advertised as having ‘pure and healthy’ air.
