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The Albert Street
Police Station
 (The image above is shown with the permission of the Greater Manchester Police Museum and Archive. If you click on this link you can see more historic images from their Flickr Photostream) The parade of
Peelers, shown above, is forming up in the parade
ground in the Albert Street Police Station.
The image dates from the 1850s. The police
station stood on the corner of Albert Street and
Gas Street not far from the River Irwell.
Today Albert Street is called St. Mary's
Parsonage. As the map segment below shows,
that corner was occupied in 1849 by the Manchester
Gas Works, Reserve Station No 1.
 By the time the map
below was drawn, circa 1888, the gas works was
gone and the police had converted the site into
a police station.
 The red arrow on the aerial photograph below points at the police station.  In November of 1867,
the execution took place of three men at the
nearby New Bailey Prison, across the River Irwell
in Salford. The men were William Philip
Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O'Brien,
members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, an
organisation that was dedicated to ending British
rule in Ireland. The men were convicted of
murder in the death of a policeman in an rescue
attempt on Hyde Road while they were enroute
between the courthouse and Hyde Road Prison.
Concern about the possibility of unrest at the
public execution resulted in the deployment of
large numbers of police and soldiers. The
Manchester Courier and Lancashire General
Advertiser reported that, "About
110 men of the 57th Regiment were stationed on
the railway bridges at the back of the New
Bailey Prison, and about the same number of the
72nd were stationed within the walls."
The Albert Street Police Station played its
part. "110 men of the 72th were
kept there as a guard, to be called out if
necessary. The men were quartered in the
large room, where a quantity of straw had been
thrown down, upon which many of the men lay down
to sleep; while others played at cards with a
number of police officers who were off duty."
If
you click on the link below, you can see two images
from the collection of the Manchester Central
Library, showing the police station in 1905.
The Albert Street
Police Station is long gone and the streets
around it have been reconfigured. Below
you can see some images taken in the vicinity in
2010. The buildings seen in the image
below were probably there when the library
photographs were taken.
  To see an in-depth history of the
development of a professional police force and its
police stations in Manchester, click on the button
below.
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