The School I Went To My first school was Elysian Street Primary. I went there from 1941 to 1947, and my memories of it are patchy. I remember my first day. Harry Gibbons lived next door to me and was Read more…

There were an amazing number of pubs in Openshaw. Looking at the pictures posted on the Openshaw Facebook page, it appears that there is a pub every fifty yards or so.     Thanks to Antony Broughton for the list. Read more…

Games We Used to Play Growing up in the 1940s and 50s we used to spend most of our time playing in the street. There was no TV, certainly not in the 1940s, and the growth of TV ownership was Read more…

War Time Food I don’t want to turn this into a blog about rationing and the war, but this post from a BBC website brought back memories. Spam got another fond mention, and whale meat got a thumbs down, feelings Read more…

Further Thoughts on Food   I got this response from an old friend, Barbara Collins, in response to my earlier post on childhood food. Barbara grew up in Swansea, and I know it’s not Openshaw, but the circumstances were similar, Read more…

Food in the 1950s Food in the 1950s was a lot plainer than we are now used to. For a start, wartime rationing didn’t finally end until 1954, so various kinds of food, meat, sugar, sweets and so on, were Read more…

Shops and Shopping Looking at photographs of Openshaw in the 1950s, you might think that every street corner had a shop, and often another half way down. While that’s not quite true, there were certainly a lot of shops in Read more…

A Quick History I grew up in an Openshaw that was dominated by industry, mainly light and heavy mechanical and electrical. The very first factories, though, in the Gorton and Openshaw area were mills, Gorton Mill in 1825, and the Read more…

Cinemas A comment by Tony Haigh about the Rex cinema took me back to my young childhood. I was a regular at the Rex on Saturday mornings for the latest cowboy picture, or Flash Gordon, with special effects that we Read more…

The development of Openshaw as we know it began in the 1850s, when the Manchester Sheffield and Lincolnshire railway built Gorton Tank for the manufacture and repair of locomotives. Until then, Openshaw was a small village with a population of Read more…