38 Back Turner Street

Summary

House with integral workshop and cellar, probably early C19 with late C19 alteration.

Reasons for Designation

38 Back Turner Street, a house with an integral workshop and cellar, probably early C19 with late C19 alteration, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:

* as a rare survival in Manchester of a humble early-industrial dwelling retaining probable workshop spaces.

Historic interest:

* representing a significant transitional period in the development of Manchester as the world’s first industrial city.

Group value:

* with the adjacent small warehouses and other nearby examples of early-industrial dwellings, in close proximity to the industrial suburb which largely replaced them.

History

Green’s 1794 map of Manchester shows an empty space or yard on the future site of Number 38. Documentary research (referred to in Nevell, 2008) is understood to indicate that Number 38 may have been built between 1794 and 1800 on part of a plot of land bought by Peter Hall in 1755. Goodall and Taylor (2001) give a date of 1823, derived from earlier sources. The 1848 1:10,560 Ordnance Survey (OS) map, surveyed in 1845, shows Number 38 built, with a passage to the east to a rear yard. This suggests that the lack of illustration of this building on Slater’s map of 1848 might be an error, perhaps repeating one made on Swire’s map of 1824 and Pigot’s map of 1836. It would seem most likely that at the latest, Number 38 was built in the early 1840s, but perhaps earlier. The 1850 OS 1:1,056 town plan also shows a basement area to the front pavement. A Goad fire insurance plan of 1886 marks the current Number 38 as a dwelling of three storeys. The 1891 1:500 OS town plan marks steps (parallel to the street) to the basement area, as well as steps to the front door of Number 38, and down from a rear landing on the south-west, into the yard.

Numbers 36 and 38 were listed in 2004 under a single entry. However, Number 36 collapsed in 2005 and its replacement is not of special interest.

Number 38 is one of a small number of surviving late C18 and early C19 houses in the Northern Quarter of Manchester, many of which had upper floor workshops, and cellars which were also sometimes used as separate workshops or dwellings. It represents the latter part of this period of industrial activity which relied on domestic manufacturing before the complete dominance of the larger factories of nearby Ancoats, and of small-scale piecemeal domestic development rather than larger developments of workers’ housing.

Details

House with integral workshop and cellar, probably early C19 with late C19 alteration.

MATERIALS: red brick (painted), stone dressings, slate roof.

PLAN: a single bay wide and three rooms deep.

EXTERIOR: tightly-packed on the narrow Back Turner Street, with taller, listed buildings immediately adjacent to the south and east, and opposite three former attic-workshop dwellings also of three storeys plus a basement.

Number 38 is a single bay dwelling, its doorway to the left hand side, approached by a flight of five steps, altered to run across the building. To the right is an altered ground-floor window with stacked openings above, all with C20 joinery within openings with segmental-arch lintels and projecting stone sills. The roof is of three pitches with ridge set back and valley behind. At the right is a tall brick chimney stack. The left and right returns abut, and are obscured by, adjacent buildings, while the rear (not inspected) overlooks a small yard.

INTERIOR: not inspected.

Legacy

The contents of this record have been generated from a legacy data system.

Legacy System number:

490991

Legacy System:

LBS

Sources

Books and journals
Nevell, M, Manchester: The Hidden History, (2008), 63-74, 141-142
Holder, Julian, Taylor, Simon, Manchester's Northern Quarter, (2008), 14, 81

Other
Goodall, I, Taylor, S, 'The Shudehill And Northern Quarter Area Of Manchester', English Heritage Architectural Investigation Reports and Papers B/066/2001 (2001), 17-18, 79

End of official list entry

All text content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0 , except where otherwise stated. Any supplied maps are © Crown Copyright [and database rights] 2026 OS AC0000815036 and may not be reproduced without permission.

Print the official list entry