Angel Meadow Residential (Plot 3), Aspin Lane, Manchester. Archaeological Desk-based Assessment

NOMA (GP) Ltd is devising proposals for the redevelopment of land encompassing Angel Meadow Park in the Shudehill area of central Manchester, as part of the wider NOMA Regeneration scheme. The proposals allow for the redevelopment of five
separate landholdings, in addition to a raft of public realm improvements. In order to facilitate the design and planning application process, NOMA (GP) Ltd commissioned Oxford Archaeology North to carry out an archaeological desk-based assessment of the study area. This was intended to establish, as far as possible, the nature and significance of the sub-surface archaeological resource within the area, and to establish the impact of any future development upon this resource.
Whilst the archaeological potential of all the proposed development plots has been subject to detailed assessment, the present assessment has considered the potential for
below-ground archaeological remains in one of these areas, referred to as Plot 3, situated between Dantzic Street and Aspin Lane (centred on NGR 384390 399210).
This site almost certainly formed undeveloped agricultural land beyond the urban fringe of Manchester, although it appears to have been used by textile workers for drying bleached and dyed cloth in late eighteenth century. The site developed subsequently as part of a residential district for Manchester’s expanding working class population, with the first terraced housing being erected in the early nineteenth
century. The study area had been developed entirely for workers’ housing by the mid- 1820s, and gained notoriety as part of Angel Meadow, one of Manchester’s most deprived Victorian slums. Whilst some of the worst dwellings were abandoned or remodelled, most of the properties survived until the 1920s, although progressive demolition occurred thereafter and the entire plot had been cleared by the late 1940s.