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.
