Conservation Area Proposal (Cheadle Hulme)

The proposed conservation area extension was one of the first places to which such people came. Ordnance Survey maps of the area did not appear until 1872 but already on 14 May 1861 Beechfield Road (before it was thus named) appears in a map attached to the first conveyance of the Ellerslie estate, seven years before Cheadle Hulme was to become an ecclesiastical parish (see Appendix A). In his Stockport: A History (Deanprint Ltd., 1997, p.24), Peter Arrowsmith tells us that “from the mid-nineteenth century, the demand for dwellings outside the town was growing. Where mill-owners and wealthy professionals led the way, other members of the middle class, including tradesmen and shopkeepers followed. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sizeable detached and semi-detached houses, complete with garden land known as ‘villas’, were built in increasing numbers for such individuals and their families. […] It was the railways that enabled the growth of ‘villadom’, by providing the middle class with a convenient means of commuting between their homes and their place of work. […] Cheadle Hulme, which had been served by a railway station as early as 1845, was also one of the first places in the Borough to see an influx of new middle-class residents. In 1864 it was described as “rapidly improving, containing some handsome suburban residences””. The proposed conservation area contains examples of such “handsome suburban residences”.

Indeed, the first Ordnance Survey map of the area in 1872 shows it to contain some of the first detached villas in the area (‘Ravenoak’, ‘Homefield’ and ‘Ellerslie’, as yet unnamed), and due to the particularly early railway connection in Cheadle Hulme which Arrowsmith mentions, these are also some of the earliest such Victorian residences in the entire Stockport area.

Carole Squire (quoted above) also writes of the birth of villadom that: “businessmen and their families were finding Cheadle Hulme a picturesque, quiet and pleasant place to settle and several houses were built about the middle of the nineteenth century. These Victorian houses stand proudly still today (in Swann Lane, Cheadle Road, Station Road, Albert Road and others.” Her history was penned almost 30 years ago, rendering the “still’ of her observation even more fragile; far fewer of these residences stand so proudly at the time of writing and one of the benefits of the proposed conservation area would be to protect a cluster of such properties from demolition or unsympathetic future development.

In addition to some of the earliest examples of Victorian villas in Stockport, the proposed conservation area extension also contains nine examples of local architecture from the inter-war period, each individually designed yet which together form a recognisably harmonious whole. As such, the properties within the proposed area chart the architectural development of Cheadle Hulme, its evolution from rural farmland and Victorian villadom into a popular twentieth-century suburb.