Skyliner

Dodge Hill

These days a modern urban environment often makes it difficult to realise the origins of a town, of how it was formed, why its location was vital to its survival or even to properly step back and see the lie of the land. Stockport thrived because of the standstone cliffs it was formed around and there’s plenty of evidence of this all around you to this day.

Dodge Hill_Manchester_Skyliner_Andrew Brooks

At one particular location on the edge of town there’s a sandstone cliff face and if you’d peered through the trees here until very recently you’d have also noticed there was once a door.

That was until now - the doorway has been sealed up and what lies behind it is documented here for the very last time. This is Dodge Hill.

Beneath Trafford Town Hall

with photos by Andrew Brooks

If you’d ever looked closely enough at the shrubbery around Talbot Road you may just have uncovered an emergency entrance to Trafford Town Hall’s cold war bunker.

The entrance, pictured above, led to a series of rooms and passageways with concrete walls and steel doors but is now just an open space devoid of any fixtures or fittings and, at the time of our visit, flooded.

Beneath Trafford Town Hall_Manchester_Skyliner_Andrew Brooks

In November 1980, Manchester City council declared the city a nuclear free zone, and when this bunker was proposed a few years later, despite Trafford itself not being part of the zone, the anti-war feeling amongst the community led to opposition from the residents of Trafford borough.

Hulme Hippodrome

With photos by Andrew Brooks

Although you’d never know it from the rather dowdy, reclad exterior, inside this Hulme building you can time travel.

On October 10th 1901, exactly 110 years prior to our visit, the Hulme Hippodrome as it is now known opened its doors as a spectacular melodrama venue.

Hulme Hippodrome_Manchester_Skyliner_Andrew Brooks

Originally named the Grand Junction Theatre and Floral Hall (which explains the neighbouring pub; the Junction Hotel, which has an unexplained missing third floor as illustrated in the video below),

Posts tagged Andrew Brooks Photography

Dodge Hill

Beneath Trafford Town Hall

Hulme Hippodrome