Just over one hundred years ago the Manchester College of Technology had a lovely new building on the corner of Whitworth Street and Sackville Street. It had been built in 1898 as this photo shows.
The College wanted to expand but there was a slight problem. Next door was St. Augustine’s Chapel. It had been there since 1820 and it had a churchyard at the rear.
As any native Mancunian will tell you, nothing — whether alive or dead — is ever allowed to stand in the way of the expansion of Manchester’s universities. So, the Chapel was demolished, all the poor souls who were buried at St.Augustine’s were dug up and the crypts were emptied.
How common a thing was this at the time? Even in later years, it seems that graveyards in other parts of the city were left and grassed over or turned into parks.
In those days there were no archaeologists from Time Team, sensitively brushing away the soil to investigate who lay there. Just some big lads with shovels, buckets and wheelbarrows: photos 1, 2 (dated 20 September 1909, just over one hundred years ago).
Would there have been objections or any mention of this clearance in the local press? I only have online access to old copies of The Times which, not surprisingly, doesn’t mention it.
Many people were church-goers. But a lot of Catholics would have been poor and there was much anti-Catholic discrimination at the time. Maybe the powerful interests involved managed to keep it quiet?
By 1910 the site had been cleared and looked like this (the camera is pointing south).
With the money it received from the sale, in 1908 the Catholic Church built a second St. Augustine’s on York Street. But just 32 years later it was bombed and destroyed in the Manchester Blitz of Christmas 1940 and Father George Street was killed.
Photos of the bomb damage: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
The ruin was painted by L.S. Lowry and the painting hangs in the City Art Gallery. The church stood just behind where the National Computing Centre is on Oxford Road today.
Due to the great depression in the 1930′s and then the Second World War, work on the University extension wasn’t completed until 1957.
So presumably none of the people who were buried at the original St.Augustine’s had been resting there for any longer than 89 years? I wonder where they ended up and, indeed, whether some of those spirits might still be around Granby Row? If I’d been disturbed like that I reckon I’d be haunting a few students and lecture rooms!
