epw017445 ENGLAND (1927). Rack House and The Mount and surrounding countryside, Northenden, 1927

Hi John, do you have any more information about Bay Villa on Yew Tree Lane, Northenden? I am a member of a Wythenshawe History website on Facebook and another member has posted a picture of a house that I believe is probably Bay Villa. They have asked if anybody knows it's history? Hope you can help! Many thanks, Marie

I'm afraid I don't, Marie. When my dad first got a car in the late 1950s and started giving me a lift to school, we used to travel along Yew Tree Lane every morning; but while I remember nearby "Cringlewood" because of its M.C.T.D. social club sign, and also Piper Hill because it was then (I think?!) a riding school and close to the traffic lights at the junction with Princess Parkway, I can't call "Bay Villa" to mind at all.



I grew up at the Baguley end, and do know something about the beginnings of some of the houses there; but Northenden was just a bit outside the area of my youthful wanderings! A number of such larger houses in my childhood stamping grounds of Baguley, Brooklands and Timperley were late Victorian "gentlemen's villas" built from around 1850 onwards by Manchester or Stockport business men who fancied living out in the country, and were able to do so because of the expansion of railways, the growth of horse-drawn and then steam and subsequently electric trams, and the steady improvement of the roads.



But the Chester Record Office website - always worth a look! - suggests that Bay Villa was a dwelling-house at the time that the tithe maps were drawn up between 1836 and around 1850, rather before railways and trams in these parts, so that explanation doesn't seem to serve. The house evidently had an earlier origin, but I don't know what it is.

(The North Lodge of the Hall)

Correction: this is Rack House.

This Grade II listed half-timbered historic house was built around 1540 by Robert Tatton of Chester, and remained the home of the Tatton family for almost four centuries. A year before this picture was taken, his successor, another Robert Tatton, sold the extensive estate to Manchester Corporation for overspill housing, so this series of photographs show the area on the eve of an era of unprecedented change, which at this point had not quite begun.