St. Mary's
Hospital - Oxford Street & Whitworth Street
St. Mary's Hospital on
Hathersage Road is one of Manchester's newest hospitals
but its history goes back to the late 18th century and it
has occupied a number of sites in Salford and
Manchester. It began in 1790 as a charity
established by Dr Charles White, in a house in Old Bridge
Street, Salford. It later moved to the Bath Inn, in
Salford, and had the unwieldy name of, “Manchester
Lying-in Hospital and Charity for the delivery of poor
women at their own habitations.” It moved again to
Quay Street and then to this site on the corner of Oxford
Street and Whitworth Street, although when it was built in
1901 that portion of Whitworth Street was called
Gloucester Street.
As you can see from the
drawing above, this building was to be called the St.
Mary's Hospital for Women and Children. The
wonderlust of St. Mary's Hospital meant that this was only
a temporary "stop-over" because by 1907 work began on the
erection of the red brick & terracotta hospital
building on the corner of Oxford Road and Hathersage
Road. As you can see in the aerial photograph below,
shown with the permission of English Heritage, the
building on the corner of Oxford Street and Whitworth
Street was still there in the 1940s.
