Pay a flying visit to Manchester in 1850
MAPS USED TO CREATE VIDEO TOUR OF CITY 170 YEARS AGO
BIRD’S eye views of Victorian Manchester are revealed in a collection of stunning new video tours.
The unique ‘fly-over’ footage shows what still stands in the city today from the dawn of the age of industry. A number of streets and sights, factories and towering chimneys have long since been lost.
Gone from the skyline are many of the churches and mills shown.
But Manchester Cathedral and Manchester Victoria railway station are there, together with city centre streets including Oldham Road, Rochdale Road and Ducie Street.
Neil Millington, a 3D animator and amateur historian, created the visual interpretation from 12 Ordnance Survey map sheets covering Manchester city centre in 1850.
Neil said the project would provide a good basis for historical, educational, mapping or family history investigations, as well as a bit of fun and intrigue. The videos were made after extensive research using detailed computer animation and mapping technology.
Viewers can fly over the northern edge of the city centre, over Rochdale Road, Baptist Street and the old St Michael’s Church, near Angel Meadow. The sidings and entrance to Manchester Victoria follow, next to Walker’s Croft cemetery and chapel, much of which was swallowed up by the railway station’s expansion.
Walker’s Croft was a burial ground linked to a Victorian workhouse, with many of the people who were buried there believed to have fallen victim to cholera epidemics of the time. The Waterloo Bridge over the River Irk is shown before the video pans north along Broughton Road over mills and homes and back to Manchester over Strangeways Chapel and Great Ancoats Street.
Coal yards, timber yards, wharfs and dyeworks are all captured.
The New Bailey Prison, which closed its doors in 1868, is shown. Built in 1787 on the banks of the Irwell, it once held nearly 1,000 inmates. Also shown in the video is the Friends’ Meeting House and St Ann’s Church. Neil, who works within the oil and gas industry in Scotland, has produced many other Ordnance Survey-based videos of Manchester at the height of Cottonopolis. For his latest project he used the OS 60 inch to one mile maps of the era.
Neil, who is now working through map sheets from areas of Manchester surrounding the city centre, also used photographs of the time he could find to paint an accurate picture of his computerised 3D model.
He said: “It is a digital 3D model, basically following the original maps.
“I started to create the 3D map of Manchester around three years ago and it’s grown and grown and grown. There is far more that has gone from the city centre than what remains today, due to the war, redevelopment and the IRA bomb.
“People will get a better idea of where things are by overlaying or comparing it to a map today.”
Further footage shows the landscape as it would have been in 1850 surrounding Manchester Cathedral and Hunts Bank.
The masses of chimneys dominating the skyline symbolise Manchester as a booming heartland of industry and manufacturing.
Rows of dockside warehouses along the River Irwell are also revealed.