Sandbach Road North
This road has also been called ‘Back o’ the Mere Road’ and ‘Mere Lane’. It is also noticeable for several farmers – and others – called Edwards.
Opposite the site of Fairview is Lynton Place, developed by the Candlands, owner-occupiers on the east side of the Avenue, in what might otherwise have been their back garden. The houses nearest the road bear the date 1892, not long after the Avenue itself was established; William Candland sought and obtained permission for the drainage of cottages hereabouts the previous year. These were among many local houses built interlinked. The two nearest the main road were Wimborne House and Haulfre House. Early residents of Haulfre House, 2 Lynton Place, who presumably gave it its name, were Thomas and Mary Bibbey, who had connections with North Wales. Thomas Bibbey was a civil engineer and architect. The Candlands let 6 and 8 Lynton Place to the Bands, who operated a carriers’ business at Fairview, and sold no. 4 Lynton Place, possibly as a building plot, to David Colclough, who was given permission for drainage in 1894.
Nos 53 to 65 Sandbach Road North were built from about 1898 on a field which in the hands of Sarah Barnett in 1840 was known as ‘the Square Field’ – oddly, because it wasn’t at that time square. 53 Sandbach Road, once known as Roseneath, was before that known as Ashwood House. An early occupant was John Dean, a railway inspector, and his son George, a timber merchant. 57 Sandbach Road was once the home of Colin Candland, son of the original developer opposite, who called it Newlyn. The promoter of 63 and 65 was Samuel Birchall (he became owner of both, and was himself resident in ‘Fernleigh’, no. 65). The investor in 59 and 61 was Louisa Wyllie; both pairs of houses appear to have been designed or built by the same contractor. All were immediately occupied, residents around this time being clerks, middle managers and commercial travellers and their families.
Mere House stands on the site of part of a farm, probably Mere Farm (a name which fell out of use); the Mews, behind, part of the farm buildings, were not on the enclosure map of the first quarter of the 19th century. Joseph Edwards, the farmer, was killed on site in 1839, in an accident with a threshing machine – possibly of his own making. His descendants were certainly interested in engineering, and in mid-century founded Foundry Farm and its neighbouring foundry – later called the Union Foundry – to the north, before moving to Hardings Wood. In 1855 land here was put up for sale, and there came to be three large houses south of the foundry: Mere House, the Firs, and the house behind (which has had a number of different names). Farmland on this side of the road however remained in the Edwards family.
In 1865, Mere House (or Mear Cottage) was described as having 5 bedrooms and 3 receptions, together with a harness-room, cowhouse, cart-house, barn, granary, foddering bay and piggeries, as well as coach-house, stables and brewhouse. From about 1888 it was briefly the home (and school) of Alexander Grant, and what he called ‘Alsager High School’ for boys. He left in 1891, when the schoolroom was advertised as ‘an excellent billiard room’. He was succeeded by Michael Huntbach, a successful draper and department-store owner from Hanley, where he served as mayor and is remembered for his part in creating the municipal park.
Better-remembered than Grant’s was the girls’ school run by Agnes Broady at the Firs which had started by 1860. After Agnes’s father’s death in 1867 it supported both Agnes as principal of the school and her mother, who had charge of the domestic arrangements. The pupils used the ‘Mere field’, perhaps by the waterside, for games. Miss Broady subsequently took the business to Lawton Road. The contemporary house behind has had various names – Clover Bank and Hayesleigh among them – and has housed at various times Arthur Tomkinson; the Misses Poole, before their final move to Church Road; and a Huntbach heir.
Most of the semi-detached houses on the east side of the road were built between 1926 and the end of that decade by Alsager builders and undertakers Joseph Edwards and Son. It is believed that the land had stayed in the hands of the wider Edwards family.
No 129 was built in 1932 for George Bridges. No. 133 (then near the entrance to Foundry Farm) was begun in 1934, by which time new building had started along the west side of the road, starting with 84 and 86, built in part for owner-occupation. It continued to the north, with a handful of houses for intending owner-occupiers, and speculatively-built semi-detacheds by the local firm of Byron and Bradshaw, who also built in Lawton Road and Audley Road.
Opposite Edwards’s row of semi-detacheds is the first open space created by the local authority to allow the public closer to (but not on) the Mere. The purchase of land hereabouts was mooted in 1929, coinciding with Huntley Goss’s financial difficulties, but the Council was put off by the cost. There ensued persistent problems of uncontrolled public access, including for bathing, and purchase by the council of land forming part of the grounds of ‘the Wood’ was eventually agreed late in 1934, though public access was delayed until after WW2.
South of the corner of Caldy Road, Foundry House and farm passed in the early 1870s to George Yates, a builder/farmer, then to the Cooke family, also blacksmiths. Across the road lay the Wood, a house built about 1890 for Herbert Godwin, curate at Kidsgrove. It has been replaced twice.
To the north of Lodge Road, at the corner once known as ‘Wood corner’, was no. 136, Ivy Cottage, dating from the 1820s and demolished in 2020. In the early 20th century this became one of the most-photographed sites in Alsager; a drawing even appearing on the front page of the municipal guide. The cottage was inhabited in the 1840s onwards by William and Ann Bradshaw, boot- and shoe-makers, who returned eventually to their native Barthomley to run a grocer’s business.
At the corner with Pikemere Road, until the police house was built in Crewe Road in the early 1890s, was Alsager’s first police office. On the north side was Mount Pleasant, a farm of about 15 acres apparently originally part of the Cresswellshawe estate, owner-occupied by Charles Edwards and his widowed sister Ellen. They were succeeded by Ellen’s son Thomas Edwards. Mount Pleasant was about a tenth of the size of Cresswellshawe Farm, where Charles and Ellen had been brought up by their parents Thomas and Mary Edwards. The subsisting brick cottages here (nos. 152-154 Sandbach Road North) are in some respects like other mid-19th century buildings at Scholar Green and Audley, the latter associated with the Victorian architect William White. The name Mount Pleasant has first been found in 1859, when it was the farm’s turn to supply the parish overseer.
Cresswellshawe house, which stood from the early 1860s approximately where Ashdale Close now is, was one of a very few Alsager buildings designed by an identified architect, in this case Thomas Henry Wyatt. Described by an early directory as ‘a neat brick mansion’, it was built in the 1860s for Francis H. R. Wilbraham, of the family of large local landowners from Rode Hall. His family retained it until 1917. The house was in one of its final incarnations a residential home for elderly men, run by the county council.
To the north, the Wilbraham Arms occupies the former site of Cresswellshawe Farm. Thomas and Mary Edwards were succeeded here by William Barker and his wife Georgina, who earlier had farmed near Stone. Georgina, born Fanshaw, was the daughter of publicans at Dale Hall in Burslem, and had been brought up, latterly at the Lodge farm, as the stepdaughter of John Mayer. The Barkers’ daughter, also Georgina, and her husband James Colclough, son of Julia Lingard and stepson of Daniel Lingard, succeeded them. Like his father and grandfather, James was formerly landlord at the Horse Shoe Inn at Lawton Heath End; indeed Colcloughs had been licensees there in the 18th century.
When Francis Wilbraham’s widow left Cresswellshawe house in 1917 it became the home of Harry Boddington, who had taken over his father’s canal transport business. His mother Clara lived nearby, at no. 153 Sandbach Road North (Sandborough), from about 1922. This house replaced an earlier one: a farmstead was here in 1840, and was later enlarged; indeed a house with 5 acres called ‘Cresswell villa’, probably the same premises, was put up for sale in 1876.
Daniel Lingard built ‘near Cresswellshawe’ in 1910, and his widow went back to this neighbourhood after his death. Their connection with the area suggests the origin of no. 163 Sandbach Road North, the house now called Cresswell Villa.
