How Whalley Range changed the course of history

By David Rudlin

In the mid-1830s, Samuel Brooks did something remarkable: he left Mosley Street. It was a place he had lived for many years, nestled in Manchester’s urban core just four blocks from the newly-built Royal Exchange. Among his neighbours were the city’s great and good, merchants and bankers described by one author as “some of the most opulent characters [in] the United Kingdom”. This was simply how cities worked: the elite in the centre, the poor on the outskirts. That is, until 1834, when Brooks broke ranks.

It was many years ago, while researching a book on the future of housing, that I had my second encounter with the little-known banker-cum-visionary of suburbia Samuel Brooks. My research had led me to a book first published in 1987 by the American academic Robert Fishman. It was called Bourgeois Utopia: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. Most of it was about the US, but his story starts in the UK, first in London where merchants first set up weekend retreats in Clapham. But it was the third chapter where Brooks made his entrance, and where my interest was piqued. Fishman was making the case that the world’s first proper suburb was Whalley Range in Manchester.

He told a story that I already knew a bit about. Back in the 1980s, I had been a planning officer for Whalley Range and my team had started to worry because developers were coming in with proposals to demolish the Victorian villas in the area so that they could build apartments. We decided to designate it as a conservation area so that nothing could be knocked down without our permission.

A conservation area is partly based on the architectural quality of an area but it also depends on history. Which is to say: if we wanted to save the villas from the bulldozers we’d need to argue for the area’s historic importance. So, I was sent off to the local history section of Central Library to see if I could find anything interesting. I spent an afternoon going through the card index tracking down articles. The story I uncovered — about a merchant and banker called Samual Brooks who finally decided that he could no longer stand to live in the city centre and instead built his suburb — felt like it belonged to me, as things do when you discover them from the original sources. But years later, here was the same story in Robert Fishman’s book, and his claim was that Whalley Range wasn’t just Manchester’s first suburb, it was effectively a world first! […]

Samuel Brooks. Photo: Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery.

Continue readi8ng: The secret history of the world’s first suburb