Alsager 1848-1939: buildings, places and some history
‘A small town with a small Mere in the middle’
Until the railway arrived in 1848, Alsager was no more than a hamlet near the Cheshire boundary, between Sandbach in Cheshire and Audley in Staffordshire. Crewe had not yet achieved its later significance. Alsager consisted of a few houses and a handful of scattered farms. To save residents trekking to the parish church at Barthomley, the ladies who owned the manor (but were not resident themselves), the Misses Alsager, opened the fashionably Georgian Christ Church in 1797, and local Wesleyans added their own small chapel on the road to Hassall some forty years later. After the railway came, the township developed on the northern side of the tracks, in fits and starts. If it hadn’t been for the railway, it would all look quite different today.
I wanted to find out how and why this had all happened, who built existing buildings – most of them since the railway – and for whom. There was an excellent local history, published when the town still housed a University campus, but it covered a much longer period than the 90 or so years dealt with here and did not answer all my questions. Some of these may now be unanswerable.
This website represents what I have been able to find out from archive evidence, or am prepared to hazard as an answer. Those who have lived here longer surely know more. I have drawn a line at the start of World War Two (WW2), which brought about changes as radical as the railway did. Later, the M6 brought more. There are gaps, as there are gaps in the records, so if premises aren’t mentioned, it’s probably because their origin hasn’t been securely identified. If you know anything relating to this period about buildings or places mentioned – or which should be mentioned – please get in touch.
Isobel Watson