In which the buildings on the cover of the How I Wrote 'Elastic Man'/City Hobgoblins 7" are located and identified and their history outlined.
I will revise this article as and when new information is found.
The opening essay in the Tessa Norton/Bob Stanley-curated anthology, Excavate!: the wonderful and frightening world of The Fall is written by the eminent architectural historian and hardcore Fall fan Elain Harwood. Her piece, entitled Jerusalem to Prestwich, puts Mark E. Smith and The Fall into broad architectural context, while also taking time to point out Smith's apparent architectural conservatism and to puncture some myths about Prestwich perpetuated by music journalists.
In Jerusalem to Prestwich, Harwood reproduces the following passage (I'm citing the original source rather than Harwood's quotation of it):
"We’ve had a lot of Prestwich buildings on our covers over the years. Especially in the early days. They were put there for a reason, an obvious reason, really. It was because I really liked them. They were beautiful buildings and now old Fall album covers are a bit like an archive of old Prestwich because every building I ever have from Prestwich on the back of my covers gets fucking pulled down. The church on Grotesque is probably one of the few photographs left of the thing. Like the building on ‘Elastic Man’ was pulled down, the building on… which one was it… Hex Enduction Hour? Was it Hex? Yes, that was pulled down; the building on Dragnet was pulled down. Hah! I started to get a bit paranoid about it at one stage. I thought we might be the kiss of death. All those buildings that I cherished were just pulled down… just like that. We’d come back off tour and another one would be bloody gone."
Harwood seems to accept this at face value, moving on without further comment to mention some buildings with lyrical or biographical relevance to Mark E. Smith and The Fall. But Smith's comments are worth closer scrutiny: when Smith's apparently straightforward statement of intent is examined more closely, it turns out to be quite problematic.
M.E.S. had expressed similar sentiments over the years about these record cover building photographs. Harwood also notes that he told Michael Lang much the same thing years before (unless Middles adapted Lang's interview, which is possible given that some of the wording is identical):
"Every building I ever have from Prestwich on the back of my covers gets fucking pulled down. The church on Grotesque is probably one of the few photographs left of the thing. Like the building on Elastic Man was pulled down, the building on Hex Enduction Hour was pulled down, the building on Dragnet was pulled down, (laughs) it's unbelievable. All these places I cherish are pulled down. I chose them because they are good."
At a gig at the Acklam Hall on 12 December 1980 (the day after the concert at the same venue which was eventually released as The Legendary Chaos Tape, AKA Live in London 1980), M.E.S. is heard joking with the audience (Lennon had been murdered on 8 December):
"I'll tell you about coincidences. The insert of Dragnet, the building was knocked down right after. Elastic Man, the front cover, the photo was knocked down right after. There's one of The Beatles on the back of Grotesque. So don't cross here or we'll put you in our picture."
Hex Enduction Hour and Dragnet
Contrary to Smith's comments in the Lang/Middles interview(s), in fact there is no building on the cover of Hex Enduction Hour.
Dragnet, on the other hand, does include a photograph of a building, although it isn't a Prestwich building. The credits sheet features M.E.S. looking through the entrance gates of Belle Vue Speedway Stadium (home of the Belle Vue Aces speedway team from 1928 to 1987), Hyde Road, Gorton, Manchester.
Here's a photograph of the gates from a different angle, found in the Manchester Local Image Collection:
It seems there were two sets of gates side by side and slightly at angles to each other, as can be seen in the overhead photograph reproduced below (I have zoomed in to the detail). The photograph above is of the right hand set of gates, and it would appear that the Dragnet photograph is of the left hand gates.
The stadium was used for many other purposes too, including but not limited to boxing and stock car racing. Apparently it was also the site of the world's first cheetah race and the first kangaroo fight in Britain (Keating 1987).
The letters "MCFC", by the way, are the initials of the original Manchester Central Football Club, who played at the stadium from their foundation in 1928 until the early 1930s (there's a current team which has revived the name).
(The London Gazette of 9 May 1932 published the following notice:
"MANCHESTER CENTRAL FOOTBALL CLUB Limited.
AT an Extraordinary General Meeting of the Members of the above Company, duly convened and held at 5, John Dalton Street, Manchester, on Friday, 15th July, 1932, the following Extraordinary Resolution was passed: - "That as the Company by reason of its liabilities cannot continue its business, it is advisable to wind up the same and that the Company be and is hereby placed in Voluntary Liquidation, and that Mr. George Robert Woollard, of 5, John Dalton Street, Manchester, in the county of Lancaster, Certified Accountant, be and is hereby appointed Liquidator for the purposes of such winding-up." The appointment of the Liquidator was confirmed at a Meeting of creditors, held at 5, John Dalton Street, Manchester, on the same day. GEORGE HARDMAN, Chairman
The winding-up process was completed the following year.)
The gates in the Dragnet photograph are sometimes misidentified.
For example, in his essay Salford Drift: a psychogeography of The Fall, Mark Goodall (2010, p.42) incorrectly describes the photograph (labelled on p.43 as "Mark. E. Smith at Belle Vue Greyhound Stadium, Gorton, Southeast Manchester, 1978") as follows:
"Smith peers inside a derelict (now renovated) greyhound track in Manchester."
The mistake is a revealing one. Greyhound racing is, of course, stereotypically "northern" in a way that perhaps speedway racing is not. But the young M.E.S. had been a speedway fan.
'His school blazer had loads and loads of speedway badges on it!' recalled Ian Levine. 'We used to take the piss behind his back that the weight of his lapels with all those metal badges on it made him stoop like a hunchback! He was a serious speedway head.' [...] On the inner sleeve of Dragnet you can see Smith peering through the stadium gates at Belle Vue, doubtlessly thinking back to the days when he used to watch the Aces from its wooden stands.
Source: Ford (2003, p.6).
Perhaps Goodall's confusion is partly due to the fact that the newly-founded Belle Vue Aces speedway team raced at the Kirkmanshulme Lane greyhound stadium (opened 1926) in 1928 before moving to the Hyde Road stadium in 1929 (part of the Belle Vue Zoological Gardens complex - the stadium was converted for speedway purposes from an athletics track built in 1886). The Aces remained at Hyde Road until 1987 when the land was sold (it is now the site of British Car Auctions). Speedway thus returned to Kirkmanshulme Lane until the National Speedway Stadium was opened in 2016. The greyhound stadium closed in 2020.
All these sites are within a few minutes' walk from each other.
M.E.S.'s comments imply that the gates in the photograph were demolished c.1979, but I haven't yet been able to document that precisely. Further research is needed.
How I Wrote 'Elastic Man'/City Hobgoblins and Grotesque (After The Gramme)
And so we come, at long last, to the image I really want to focus on.
The cover of the 7" double-A side single How I Wrote 'Elastic Man'/City Hobgoblins consists of a photograph of a building, from which emanates some kind of demonic being. A hobgoblin?
The image is somewhat reminiscent of a William Blake watercolour, The Goblin (c.1820):
The visual echo is reinforced by the fact that M.E.S. was a William Blake aficionado, and that the B-side of the single is City Hobgoblins.
The image is one of Blake's illustrations to John Milton's L'Allegro (1816-1820). For more information see here and here and here.
If you examine the cover carefully, at least three figures can be seen.
The first figure is on the left of the doorway of the building.
On Twitter, Paul Hanley identified this figure as himself (Link to Tweet).
The second figure is to the left of the first, in front of the downstairs window.
Paul Hanley identified this as Mark E. Smith (Link to Tweet)
The final figure, placed further over on the left of the photograph, looks like it might be Craig Scanlon. But this remains very uncertain and the head remains unidentified at the moment.
M.E.S. also mentioned the cover of Grotesque, referring to the photograph on the back:
A reminder of what M.E.S. said about the photograph:
The church on Grotesque is probably one of the few photographs left of the thing. Like the building on ‘Elastic Man’ was pulled down...
M.E.S.'s comment implies otherwise, but the photographs on the album and the single are obviously of the same collection of buildings. On Grotesque, the roof of the focal building has collapsed or been removed, presumably during or just prior to its demolition. At any rate, it seems reasonable to assume that it was taken after the 'Elastic Man' photograph.
'Elastic Man' was released on 11 July 1980 and Grotesque was released on 17 November 1980. 'The artwork would have been finalised some weeks before the release dates, perhaps two or three months at most, but probably no longer and most likely less. I don't know when the photographs were taken, but it seems reasonable to suggest that the order in which they appeared is the order in which they were taken, and that both were taken in 1980. Mike Leigh's last gig as The Fall's drummer was on 18 March 1980, at Birmingham University and Paul Hanley's first gig was at the Electric Ballroom, London, on 21 March 1980. I'm assuming Hanley probably wouldn't have appeared in any group photographs prior to that date, or if he did then not very long before.
Crucially, though, while there is a church building in the photographs, it is still standing to this day. For more about this building, which is associated with the Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church, see below.
The building that was demolished, the one missing a roof on Grotesque, was not a church. What it was is simultaneously remarkable and ordinary. Which seems appropriate.
M.E.S. put the dilapidated not-a-church, which he claimed to have cherished, on the cover of one of The Fall's best-loved singles, and on the reverse of the cover of one of the group's best-known early albums. But he didn't identify it; worse, he misidentified it. Ironically, Mark E. Smith turned his "cherished" and "beautiful" building into a record cover-art icon, but one whose real presence in history he unwittingly erased in the process, demolishing it all over again.
Even the surviving building, which must be reasonably well known to Prestwich residents, has remained unseen since its appearance on the two record covers. Discussion and commentary has hitherto been based on inaccurate information. Perhaps because Fall fans have thought the buildings had been demolished, nobody had previously researched the location of the photographs and identified the buildings (at any rate, I was the first to publish).
13 Fairfax Road
On 11 April 2021, I posted (to the Fall Online Forum and Twitter) the location of the 'Elastic Man' and Grotesque photographs: Fairfax Road, Prestwich. Both photographs were evidently taken from the end of Rectory Lane.
The building in front of which Mark E. Smith stood, and in whose doorway Paul Hanley posed, was number 13 Fairfax Road. The site is now a car park, but originally it was part of the town council yard.
Google Maps Street View:
The site is in the centre of Prestwich. It is not hidden away or difficult to find.
Fairfax Road is a street off Bury New Road, and, if anyone wants to add it to their Prestwich post-punk pilgrimage itinerary, it is just three minutes' walk away from the Clifton Road chip shop (on the opposite side of Bury New Road) which hosts the gable end mural of Mark E. Smith.
(Since I first posted the location of the photograph, it has been added to a Fall-fans walking tour of Prestwich: https://www.railholidaymaker.com/post/we-are-the-fall-a-tour-of-the-fall-s-prestwich-in-the-footsteps-of-mark-e-smith.)
Following my Tweet, user Corson Hardware (@Zoomerlon) posted a photograph of the scene taken that afternoon:
Credit: @Zoomerlon
Elain Harwood's article in Excavate!, mentioned above, provides a concise history of Prestwich, including the key development of the opening of the Bury New Road in 1826 (some sources say 1827; the truth seems to be that construction began in 1826), along the route of a Roman road. One of the early settlement centres was around Longfield - what became the Fairfax Road/Bury New Road junction area - as can be seen on this 1840s map:
Surveyed 1844-1845 / Published 1848
Source: National Library of Scotland [Link]
Reproduced under Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-SA) licence
By the early 1890s, the area looked like this:
Although the buildings associated with the Catholic Church in Prestwich existed by the time the map was published, the area had been surveyed a couple of years earlier, and so they are not shown.
The buildings around the council yard are visible, though, to the right of Barrow Street. By the time the How I Wrote 'Elastic Man'/City Hobgoblins and Grotesque photos were taken, Barrow Street had long been closed and developed out of existence.
The following map was published in 1922, and this time the Catholic church buildings (the presbytery and the building marked as "R.C. Church") are present:
By 1934, when the following map was published, the R.C. Chapel had been turned into a school, and a new church (the present day Our Lady of Grace) had been built on the land between the school and the presbytery. No. 13 Fairfax Road is just above the letters "W.M."
Building numbering on Fairfax Road may have changed down the years, so reliably identifying the occupants of number 13 through history is not necessarily straightforward. What follows should be read with that caution in mind, and is subject to revision.
13 Fairfax Road seems to have been built as accommodation associated with the council/town yard on the site. The earliest reference to the town yard I have found so far dates to 1890, in newspaper reports of a fire at, ironically, a neighbouring firewood company's works.
The following story comes from the Manchester Evening News of 31 January 1890 (p.2):
FIRE AT PRESTWICH. - A few minutes after five o'clock this morning a fire was discovered on the premises of Messrs. Hall and Co., firewood manufacturers, Fairfax Road, Prestwich, adjoining the stables and yard of the Prestwich local board. Four horses which were in the stable were got out safely. The station master and his staff were present with the station hose and succeeded in keeping the fire in check until the arrival of Assistant Superintendent Savage, from Jackson's Row, Manchester, with a steamer and Mr. Engineer Boardman with a tender from Goulden-street. The buildings which were of wood burned furiously and the efforts of the firemen were directed to saving the local board buildings. In about an hour the fire was under control and at eight o'clock it was extinguished. The buildings were entirely destroyed and the roof and stables of the local board were considerably damaged. The loss is estimated at £550 and is partly covered by insurance.
(For more on the Jackson Row fire station, Manchester, see this link. For Goulden Street, see here.)
The firewood company had been there a few years. The following advert appeared in the Manchester Evening News of 31 October 1884, p.1:
Wanted at once, experienced GIRLS for bundling up Wood at the Prestwich Fire-light Manufactory: good wages can be earned. - Apply at the Works, Fairfax Road, Prestwich.
At the time of the 1901 census, 13 Fairfax Road was the home of Joseph Entwistle, a carter for the district council. His wife was Susannah, and at that point he had a 2-year old daughter called Elsie and a two-month old son called Thomas.
According to Slater's Manchester, Salford & Suburban Directory (Part 4, Suburban Directory) for 1903, Entwistle, described as "foreman carter", was still at number 13, and the site was also identified as the location of the Urban District Council Yard.
Between 1903 and the end of the decade, Entwistle moved on. The 1909 and 1911 editions of Slater's instead list William Edwardson, a "horsekeeper" for the council, as the occupant of number 13. The 1911 census shows that he lived there with his wife Lucy, their daughter Mabel, and sons William, Austin and Norman.
By 1909, the site was also home to the local fire station. The following entry is from the 1911 edition of Slater's:
Bury Archives Online has a couple of photographs of the old fire station (unfortunately undated). In the first, 13 Fairfax Road can be seen on the left:
We know the Edwardsons were still at the address in 1915, because Mabel married a labourer called Thomas Delaney on 20 November 1915, and Fairfax Road was given as her home address [Link to Lancashire OnLine Parish Clerk Project record].
However, the 1921 census shows that the Edwardson family had by that time moved to Clough Walk (between Butterstile Lane and Shrewsbury Road). William was then working for the Cooperative Wholesale Printing Works as a carter.
William Edwardson died aged 60 on 18 October 1926. Lucy lived to the age of 79, her death on 13 April 1949 recorded in the Manchester Evening News of 14 April (p.11).
Lucy and William's graveyard memorial can be seen here.
Edwardson's successor, at least at the time of the 1921 census, was John Briercliffe (age 61), listed in the census as the Town's Yard Depot Foreman. He lived at 13 Fairfax Road with his wife Amelia and his son John Arthur (a clerk for the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company).
Kelly's Directory for 1929 shows that the house was then occupied by one Walter Harrop, who was, presumably, the foreman of the Urban District Council Yard.
I think this Walter Harrop was born on 17 January 1876.
By the time of the 1939 register, Harrop had moved on and was living with his wife Sarah at 1 Green Walks, Prestwich. His occupation was described as carter/heavy worker.
In 1939, the Municipal Journal recorded the following information:
The outdoor services of Prestwich are controlled from a central depot in Fairfax Road where all vehicles, motor and horse-drawn, belonging to the township are kept, and where the horses are stabled. This town's yard also provides storage for all tools and materials, workshops and housing for officials in charge of general and emergency services.
Source: "Lancashire's Two New Boroughs: 1 - Prestwich - From the Roman Occupation to 1939." Municipal Journal & Local Government Administrator, vol. 48 (4), 27 October 1939, pp.2250-2251, quote above on p.2251.
Post-war, Fairfax Road seems to have retained its function as an emergency services depot.
The Municipal Journal article notes that Prestwich paid a fee to the City of Salford for the services of Salford Fire Brigade. According to the Greater Manchester Fire Service Museum, Lancashire Fire Brigade opened a station in Prestwich in 1948, located on Hilton Crescent (now Crescent Avenue) off Bury New Road. It was nicknamed 'The Shrubberies', after a house/hall on the site called 'The Shrubbery'. This station closed in 1957, and the site is now the home of Prestwich Hebrew Congregation.
Here's the telephone book entry for 1950, showing that the Towns Yard then came under the Highways Department:
In 1954, the following announcement from Lancashire County Council appeared in the Manchester Evening News:
As from and including 08-00 hours on Monday, May 31, 1954, the new Ambulance Station situated at Besses-o'-'th'-Barn, Whitefield, will be brought into operation and the Station in Fairfax Road, Prestwich, will close.The present arrangements for calling the ambulance will continue, i.e., all requests for an ambulance in the Prestwich and Whitefield area should be made by telephoning the Radcliffe Station, telephone numbers - RADcliffe 2614 and 2970.
C.H.T. WADE,Divisional Medical Officer.
Divisional Health Office,
Parsons Lane, Bury.
Source: Manchester Evening News, Friday 28 May 1954, p.12.
"Council Depots To Close", reported the Prestwich and Whitefield Guide on 26 August 1977 (p.6). The Council's Policy and Resources Committee had approved plans to close the Fairfax Road and Elms Farm, Whitefield, depots by 1978. 13 Fairfax Road itself seems to have been demolished c.1980 (more research is needed to establish the date more precisely) and the land on which it stood was turned into a council car park.
M.E.S. described 13 Fairfax Road as "beautiful" and as a "church". Whether it was beautiful may be in the eye of the beholder, but it definitely never was a church. The building to its left, which was a church (now a parish hall, see below), has survived.
The story of that building follows.
The Pentacle Church?
The surviving 'church' building has sometimes been mistaken for a synagogue by fans studying the photographs, because of what has been assumed to be a Star of David in the upper window. But the hexagram (and the pentagram come to that) is also a Christian/Catholic symbol. I guess its presence in the photograph adds a layer of occult associations that work in the context of the record cover, albeit by substituting for the original Catholic symbolism.
The building was the original Church and School of Our Lady of Grace (I'll call it Our Lady of Grace I), completed in 1890. It has been through various changes of use, and is now a parish hall. The present Our Lady of Grace church, next door (which I'll call Our Lady of Grace II), was built in 1931.
Our Lady of Grace's website (Our Lady of Grace Prestwich Parish website) doesn't have a history section, but in a talk given to Prestwich & Whitefield Heritage Society, Monsignor John Allen explained the history of the church and its buildings (Allen 2016).
Allen notes the rapid growth in the number of Catholics in the Salford Diocese during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1889, Rev. David Walshe, a 31-year-old Irish priest from St. Albans, Blackburn, was appointed to create a new parish in Prestwich. At first he lodged with the parish priest at St. Thomas', Higher Broughton, and held masses at the Co-operative Store Hall on Warwick Street while raising money for a church.
In May 1890, Walshe acquired land on Fairfax Road for a school/chapel and construction eventually began in September the same year. The two-storey building opened on 15 August 1891, with the first official service the next day. The presbytery was completed in 1894.
George Middleton, in his Annals of Prestwich (1902, pp.101-102), wrote:
The Church and School of Our Lady of Grace, the memorial stone of which was laid by William Mather, Esq., M.P., on the 8th November, 1890, is situated in Fairfax Road, Prestwich. The upper portion, which is used as a church, was opened on Sunday, August 16th, 1891, by Dr. Vaughan, Bishop of Salford, and is calculated to accommodate 280 people. The ground floor is used as an elementary school, and will accommodate 208 children, viz.: Mixed 132, infants 76. The church and school both have all the advantages of a modern building, and are eminently suited for the purposes for which they were erected.The number of scholars on the registers in January, 1902, was seventy-three, average attendance fifty-one. The first rector was the Rev. Father Walshe. The present rector is the Rev. Father Hayes. A Presbytery as a residence for the clergy is also attached, bearing this inscription: - "This stone was laid by Mrs. Whittam, a most generous benefactor of the Prestwich Catholic Mission, October 29th, 1892. Leo XIII., Pope. John Bilsborrow, Bishop. David Walshe, Rector."
Rev. W. Nicholls describes Our Lady of Grace I as a "neat and unpretentious brick building, conspicuous for its numerous windows" (1905, p.127) . He reproduces the following official information:
In the early part of Lent, 1889, Dr. Herbert Vaughan, Bishop of Salford, appointed the Rev. David Walshe, of St. Alban's, Blackburn, to the charge of the district of Prestwich. He formally took office on May 7th, 1889. On June 9th of the same year Mass was said for the first time in the Co-operative Hall, Warwick Street, Prestwich. On May 15th, 1890, 3,532 square yards of land were taken in Fairfax Road for the erection of a church. The foundation stone was laid by William Mather, Esq., M.P., on November 8th, 1890, and the church was opened by the Bishop (Dr. Vaughan) on August 16th, 1891. The school was opened on August 17th and there were 68 children present. It was approved by the Board of Education for 132 mixed and 76 infants. On May 20th, 1898, Rev. D. Walshe was appointed to St. Marie's, Bury, and his successor is the present rector, Rev. Joseph Hayes, who took charge on June 4th, 1898.
Hayes stayed for twelve years and was succeeded by Father James Corkery, who moved on after sixteen years. It was Corkery's successor, Father William Browne (who served from 1926 until his retirement in 1948) who presided over the building of Our Lady of Grace II, completed in 1931.
Once Our Lady of Grace II was up and running, Our Lady of Grace I became solely a school. That remained the case until a new school was opened on Highfield Road in 1975. The old school/chapel outlived its Corporation neighbour at no. 13, and is now used as the Parish Hall.
A Note on Barrow Street
Unfortunately the Bury Archives Online site provides no further information about the photograph, so the date it was taken is unknown.
However, Barrow Street was swept away by the Longfield Centre development (which opened in 1971), so it must have been taken before then. And the first car (colleagues on the Fall Online Forum inform me that it is Hillman Minx) on the left hand side of the street has the registration number PTF 402C. The "C" represents 1965. Therefore this photograph must have been taken between 1965 and c.1971.
At the end of Barrow Street can be seen, across Fairfax Road on the left, Our Lady of Grace. The one-storey building directly across Fairfax Road had clearly already been demolished when the photographs for How I Wrote 'Elastic Man' and Grotesque were taken (from Rectory Lane further to the right). Barrow Street originally continued on the other side of Fairfax Road, and so it seems that this building might have been some kind of gatehouse to the town's yard.
Bibliography
http://thefall.org/news/000326.html#bravear
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