Oldham’s lost landscape
Alan is intrigued by a panorama showing Oldham’s industrial past
In its heyday, Oldham had more cotton mills than anywhere else in the world
Arriving in Oldham to talk to the local branch of the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society, I was very early (no traffic congestion on the motorway) and there was plenty of time for a coffee. The meeting was in Gallery Oldham, an impressive early 21st-century museum, library, art gallery and cultural centre. It has a great cafe, so I bought my espresso macchiato and sat down. For me the highpoint of the cafe (apart from the excellent coffee) was that along the wall behind the counter is a splendid panoramic photograph of the town centre, taken from the south in about 1900 and blown-up to such a scale that every little detail is prominent.
Oldham stands on a high ridge, crowned by the tall tower of the church of St Mary, built in the mid-1820s on the site of a medieval predecessor. When new, the church was a gleaming golden-white colour (a fine landscape painting by a local artist, done in the late 1820s, shows it in pristine glory). But in the photo on the wall it is jet black, the result of 70 years of smoke pouring into the Oldham atmosphere from innumerable chimneys. And my goodness, the photograph really highlights those chimneys – forests of tall, slender brick spires dominating the skyline. In its heyday, Oldham had more cotton mills than anywhere else in the world – over 300 of them – and it’s extraordinary to see them in the photograph, especially as only a handful now remain.
The picture must have been taken in Wakes Week, the town’s annual holiday when the mills shut down for maintenance and the smoke from their steam engines was not belching forth. The sky is clear and the industrial landscape is revealed in all its drama. In the foreground are skeins of railway tracks, on which stand long lines of coal wagons, the lifeblood of any place which relied on steam power for its industrial might. Now the busy railway, which ran from Manchester up hill to Oldham and down dale to Rochdale, is part of Greater Manchester’s Metrolink system. Bright yellow trams glide through the town centre, nothing like the lumbering double-decker tramcars of a century ago.
The town is in the coalfield, but even when the photograph was taken most local pits had long since closed. The company names painted on many of the wagons show that they belonged to the Kiveton Park Colliery Company, which operated deep mines on the border of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire near Sheffield. Just one surviving coal pit is visible in the photo, a small rickety-looking structure with primitive winding gear next to the railway, embedded almost in the centre of the town. It’s incredible to think that under the streets and superstores and public buildings of central Oldham are the claustrophobic black wet tunnels of ancient coal workings.
Back-to-back and terraced houses are visible, tucked into odd spaces and squeezed in between mills and factories and railway lines. For 51 weeks of the year, soot and dust would rain down on them from the tall chimneys (I remember how down the road in Manchester, even in my childhood, the smuts and specks of soot would powder the washing which my grandmother put out to dry in the backyard). For most Oldham people, this week of holiday was a liberation from grime and smoke, as they flocked in special trains to the seaside at Blackpool.
The photograph records a world that’s completely vanished. Hardly any of the buildings survive today, the industries are gone, a busy dual carriageway road crosses the area in the foreground of the photo, and (quite unlike 1900) there are trees and grass. But the tower of St Mary’s church still rises above the town centre as it has done for almost two centuries.