The Forty Seventh Municipal School - All Saints
The park in the middle of
Grosvenor Square is the former churchyard of
All Saints Church. To the north of the park there used to be a
street called Devonshire Street and in the middle of the block between
Oxford Street and Lower Ormond Street a typical Municipal School used
to stand. (indicated by the red arrow on the image above taken in
1953). The memorial stone on the front of the school, laid on
June 17th, 1908, declared that it was the Forty Seventh Municipal
School. Strangely, it seems that it was called the Cavendish
Street School despite the fact that it wasn't on Cavendish
Street. If you follow the links below you can see two images of
it.
If you had visited the site
prior to 1908, the view would have been quite different, as you can see
in the old
postcard image below. The photograph was taken from Oxford Road,
looking north
across the corner of All Saints churchyard. I have been unable to
identify what these buildings were but Slater's Directory of Manchester
and Salford for that period lists a number of possibilities on
Devonshire Street. These include: Presbyterian Church
Sessional School; Manchester Carriage & Tramways Company Central
Office, 14 Devonshire Street; The Victoria Dental Hospital of
Manchester,
16 Devonshire Street; and Cohen Gustavus & Co. patentees and
manufacturers of medical electrical batteries, 18 Devonshire Street.
The Municipal School must have
been demolished at some point around the end of the 1960s and the
beginning of the
70s because the Manchester Polytechnic's (now the MMU) All Saints
Building was erected on this site in 1978. The image below shows
the All Saints Building in 2010 looking along the pedestrianised area
that occupies the former route of Devonshire Street.
