Bury, Greater Manchester
Bury is a market town on the River Irwell in the Metropolitan Borough of Bury, Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 81,101 in 2021, while the wider borough had a population of 193,846.
The town is part of the historic county of Lancashire but has been a part of the metropolitan county of Greater Manchester since 1974. Bury emerged in the Industrial Revolution as a mill town manufacturing textiles. The town is known for the open-air Bury Market and black pudding, the traditional local dish.
Sir Robert Peel was born in the town. Peel was a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom who founded the Metropolitan Police and the Conservative Party. There is a memorial and a monument for Peel, the former stands outside Bury Parish church and the latter overlooks the borough on Holcombe Hill. The town is east of Bolton, south-west of Rochdale and north-west of Manchester.
History
Toponymy
The name Bury comes from an Old English word, meaning castle, stronghold or fort, an early form of modern English borough.Early history
Bury was formed around the ancient market place but there is evidence of activity dating back to the period of Roman occupation. Bury Museum has a Roman urn containing a number of small bronze coins dated for AD 253–282 which was found north of what is now the town centre. Under Agricola, the road-building programme included a route from the fort at Manchester to the fort at Ribchester which ran through Radcliffe and Affetside. The modern Watling Street, which serves the Seddons Farm estate on the west side of town, follows the approximate line of the Roman road.The most imposing building in the early town would have been Bury Castle, a medieval manor house built in 1469 for Sir Thomas Pilkington. It sat in a good defensive position on high ground overlooking the Irwell Valley. The Pilkington family suffered badly in the Wars of the Roses when, despite geography, they supported the House of York. When Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, Thomas Pilkington was captured and later executed. The outcome of the battle was the Lancastrian Duke of Richmond being crowned Henry VII by Sir William Stanley. As a reward for the support of his family, Thomas Stanley was created Earl of Derby and, amongst other lands, the confiscated Pilkington estate in Bury was presented to him.
The ancestral home of the Earls of Derby is Knowsley Hall on the outskirts of Liverpool. The family maintains a connection with Bury in various ways—the Derby High School is named after them. When the school opened in 1959 the 18th Earl of Derby was patron and the school's badge is based on the Earl's coat of arms. The 15th and 16th earls were both supporters of Bury Grammar School, both financially and in terms of land, and one of the school houses is named Derby in their honour. The town is home to the Derby Hall and formerly also the Derby Hotel, opened in February 1850.
The castle remains were buried beneath the streets outside the Castle Armoury until properly excavated for the first time in the 1970s.
Between 1801 and 1830, the population of the town more than doubled from 7,072 to 15,086. This was the time when the factories, mines and foundries, with their spinning machines and steam engines, began to dominate the landscape. In 1822 Bury Savings Bank opened on Silver Street established under government control and later became TSB.
Industrial Revolution
Probate evidence from the 17th century and the remains of 18th-century weavers' cottages in Elton, on the west side of Bury, indicate that domestic textile production was an important factor in the local economy at a time when Bury's textile industry was dominated by woollens, and based upon the domestic production of yarn and cloth, as well as water-powered fulling mills.Development was swift in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The establishment in 1773 by the family of Sir Robert Peel of Brooksbottom Mill in Summerseat, north of the town, as a calico printing works marked the beginning of the cotton industry in Bury. By the early 19th century, cotton was the predominant textile industry, with the Rivers Roch and Irwell providing power for spinning mills and processing water for the finishing trades. Development was further promoted when the town was linked to the national canal network by the Manchester, Bolton & Bury Canal, fully opened in 1808. The canal was provided with water from Elton Reservoir, fed by aqueducts from a weir on the Irwell, north of what is now the Burrs Country Park. The Burrs is also the site of another mill developed by the Peel family, first founded in 1790. The remains are displayed for the public. There were seven cotton mills in Bury by 1818 and the population grew from 9,152 in 1801, to 20,710 in 1841, and then to 58,029 in 1901.
Following this, railways were opened, linking the town from Bury Bolton Street railway station to Manchester, to Rawtenstall and to Accrington. From the Knowsley Street railway station there were connections to the neighbouring mill towns of Bolton, Heywood and Rochdale. As well as the many cotton mills, other industries which thrived included paper-making, calico printing and some light engineering. The town expanded to incorporate the former townships of Elton, Walmersley and Heap, and rows of terraced houses encircled the town centre by the turn of the 19th century. Districts such as Freetown, Fishpool and Pimhole were transformed from farmers' fields to rows of terraces beside the factories and mills.
The houses were of the most limited kind, without basic facilities, sewers or proper streets. The result was the rapid spread of disease and high mortality rates in crowded areas. In 1838, out of 1,058 working class houses in Bury investigated by the Manchester Statistical Society, 733 had 3–4 people in each bed, 207 had 4–5, and 76 had 5–6. Social reformers locally and nationally were concerned about such issues, including Edwin Chadwick. One report that prepared the ground for the reform of public health matters, commissioned by the then Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, asked local doctors for information. King Street, Bury, was highlighted: it had 10 houses, each with one bedroom, and a population of 69. The average age of death in Bury was 13.8 years. Towns like Bury were likened to 'camps' where newcomers sought work in mill, mine or forge. Many, often from Ireland, found shelter in lodging houses. Thirty-eight in Bury were surveyed. Seventy-three per cent had men and women sharing beds indiscriminately, 81% were filthy and the average was 5.5 persons to a bed.
Although Bury had few of the classic late-19th-century spinning mills that were such a feature of other Lancashire towns, a group known as Peel Mills are still in use at Castlecroft Road. Immediately north of the town centre, their name is another reminder of the link with the Peel family.
Lancashire Fusiliers
According to writer Geoffrey Moorhouse, no history of Bury is complete without reference to its role as the regimental town of the Lancashire Fusiliers.In 1688, Prince William of Orange landed at Brixham, Devon. He asked Colonel Sir Robert Peyton to raise a regiment containing six independent companies in the Exeter area. This regiment absorbed the previously enscripted men housed at the Wellington Barracks, who would have been any men over the age of 21. These men became the Lancashire Fusiliers once they joined William's of Orange Men. Following successful recruitment, a regimental depot was established at Wellington Barracks in 1881. This barracks were originally built as a response to the Chartist movement, who were a mass movement of working-class men who protested via petition signatures.
The People's Charter called for six reforms to make the political system more democratic:
- A vote for every man aged twenty-one years and above, of sound mind, and not undergoing punishment for a crime.
- The secret ballot to protect the elector in the exercise of his vote.
- No property qualification for Members of Parliament to allow the constituencies to return the man of their choice.
- Payment of Members, enabling tradesmen, working men, or other persons of modest means to leave or interrupt their livelihood to attend to the interests of the nation.
- Equal constituencies, securing the same amount of representation for the same number of electors, instead of allowing less populous constituencies to have as much or more weight than larger ones.
- Annual Parliamentary elections, thus presenting the most effectual check to bribery and intimidation, since no purse could buy a constituency under a system of universal manhood suffrage in every twelve months.
Recent history
The post-war period saw a major decline in the cotton industry and, as with many neighbouring towns, Bury's skyline was soon very different, with countless factory chimneys being pulled down and the associated mills closing their doors permanently. The old shopping area around Princess Street and Union Square was demolished in the late 1960s, and a concrete precinct was built to replace it. This development was replaced by the Mill Gate Shopping Centre in 1995.On 23 November 1981, an F0/T1 tornado formed over Whitefield and subsequently moved through Bury town centre and surrounding areas.
In 2010, a £350million shopping development opened up around the Rock. The main street is populated mainly by independent shops and food outlets. At the top end of the street is a shopping area with a multi-screen cinema, bowling alley, and department stores including Marks & Spencer, Primark, H&M, Clarks, and The Range
Bury also benefited from other facilities in the early 2010s including a new medical centre and office accommodation close to Bury Town Hall. A decision by Marks & Spencer to vacate its store in the Mill Gate Shopping Centre and move into a new larger one on The Rock emphasised a change of clientele in the town.
The town centre is famous for its traditional market, with its "world famous" black pudding stalls. Bury Market was also once famous for its tripe, although this has declined in recent decades. The Bury Black Pudding Company, owned by the Chadwick family, provides black pudding to retailers such as Harrods, and to major supermarkets, and the market is a destination for people from all over Greater Manchester and beyond. The last 30 years have seen the town develop into an important commuter town for neighbouring Manchester. Large-scale housing development has taken place around Unsworth, Redvales, Sunny Bank, Brandlesholme, Limefield, Chesham and Elton. The old railway line to Manchester Victoria closed in 1990 and was replaced by the light rapid transit system Metrolink in 1992. The town was also linked to the motorway network with the opening of the M66, accessed from the east side of the town, in 1978.