Talke Road
was probably little more than a track leading ultimately to Talke when the railway first came. It expanded to a roadway at the western end when Brook Villas were built. Around the time of its first development it was known as the ‘Talke and Alsager Road’, which was accordingly the name given in 1889 to the station opened on the Audley branch line at the east end of Talke Road. The line closed at the end of 1962. From an early date the station name was shortened to ‘Alsager Road’, though at the Alsager end this was never the name for the road itself, which was formalised as Talke Road in 1910.
Brook Villas are unusual, first in being semi-detached and second in being built with an ironwork veranda across both. The other villa in Alsager with anything like the latter feature is the Firs in Sandbach Road North. Though they may have been built earlier, the Villas’ first known occupant was Stephen Knapper, a successful grocer and all-round prominent citizen from Kidsgrove, who moved here from Shady Grove during 1871. He was here until, sometime after 1883, he moved back to Kidsgrove to assist his son, who had taken over the family shop. A successor was Dennis Richmond, pawnbroker and auctioneer, a citizen as prominent in Alsager as Knapper had been in Kidsgrove. The Villas constitute the earliest socially ambitious housing south of the railway, and may have stood alone for some time. By 1875, the only other new building in the immediate area was a pair of cottages on the east side of Audley Road.
The character of Talke Road was largely fixed in 1896, when David Chilton, the primary builder in Station Road, built the first of a range of semi-detached houses on the north side. Now nos. 19-69 eastward, he had completed 21 of them by 1897, when he advertised this number of ‘lobbied and tenanted cottages’ for sale. By his early death in 1907 he had not only built the rest of this range, but also some in the range 97-137. Chilton’s method was to sell more or less as he built, but the eastern range passed after his death into the hands of his mother, Rachel, who retained them for rent.
The first Alsager Golf Club was established here in 1909, with a 9-hole course on the south side of the road, near to the present station, using one of the westernmost houses on the other side as its clubhouse. It did not however last long, and the enterprise was defunct by 1914. In the early 1920s golf became established further south, on land belonging to the Linley estate sufficient for a 9-hole course.
There were small numbers of houses built in the centre by other builders. At the east end, linking with Linley, 28 houses – some on each side – were built, from around 1897, by James Barker, farmer of land round the Town House. He let them by the month, charging 12s in rent. He also agitated for a public house, and established the road linking Alsager with Linley.
Linley is a settlement which has grown up since the railway. It is difficult to identify it separately from the rest of the township before the 1871 census, and even then its extent is uncertain. As well as accommodation at the toll gate itself, further south nearer the county boundary, there was also a cottage for Ellen Booth, who had been collector of tolls on the turnpike road until tolls were abolished after an Act of Parliament in 1870 (the year the branch line to Audley opened).
In Linley the community had grown sufficiently to afford a beerhouse, serving about a dozen households by 1881. By the end of the century there were about 30 households and a grocer’s. Mostly householders were employed in mines or railways, especially after the opening of the nearby station, and the enlargement of the nearby railway depot and engine sheds, the largest on the North Staffordshire Railway outside Stoke; as well as works established by Settle Speakman in connection with the transport of coal.
The cluster at the junction with Linley Lane includes the earliest buildings. Here also two of an original four Linley Villas also survive. Nos. 49 to 55 Linley Road are probably the four cottages ‘recently erected and well built’ and advertised for sale as tenanted in 1880. Hawthorn Villas a little way to the north of the junction on the main road were there by the 1890s, as were larger premises at Longstile. Groups of houses at nos. 1-7 and 25-27 Wayside were built around 1900, with the mission room on the corner where the road joins Talke Road coming shortly afterwards.
Beyond these, things did not much change before the 1930s, when both the council and private builders (including Albert Perry, who favoured bungalows, and one Proctor, who proposed to build more than 80 houses) took an interest. The existing streets were developed and new ones built from the junction between Linley Road and Talke Road, just as work in mining and railways was shrinking. Of even later development, Foden Avenue commemorates the family most associated with the former Brunds Farm, which lay on the other side of the railway tracks, between Linley and the rest of the town.
Mere Lake – about which the usual remark is that it has neither a mere nor a lake, the ‘mere’ probably referring to the adjacent county boundary and the whole derived from ‘mere lacus’ or boundary stream – has changed little in the last century and a half; one way of reaching it on foot is by the line of the old branch railway, now the Merelake Way. At least since the mid-19th century it has been a settlement round cottages occupied by miners, railway workers, or factory workers. A pair of these were rebuilt by the then landowners, the Misses Marsh-Caldwell of Linley, in 1889, a fact unmissably recorded in the ladies’ family initials on the front.
