2.05 LOW 1875 BRA

Wesley Place Building Club: Surveyor M Brayshaw, West Bowling, architect

Material: paper Scale: unk. Size: 64*48 cm Condition: good

The burial ground marked on this plan is that of the Methodist chapel at Low Moor. Quite a large property is owned by John W Tordoff, woollen draper, of Wesley Place. The bulk of the plan consists of survey land for properties which would form the Wesley Place Building Club.

A number of the LSL reserve plans originated from building club developments. As far as I understand the basic idea was that a group of people bought shares in a club and the capital thus obtained was used to buy and survey a plot of land, and then build houses on it. I assume that usually the shareholder lived in one of the houses. In reality the arrangements were slightly more complex since half and quarter shares were allowed, and most shareholders paid a small sum weekly until the price of their share was paid off. On a small scale this arrangement was not unlike a modern building society in its effects: shareholders ended up owning a house having made relatively small weekly payments for some years. The club would appoint an agent to collect rents and trustees to manage its activities. It looks as if such clubs had a definite life span before they ‘ran out’, at a time when every shareholder had paid their agreed sum and consequently owned a house. The well-known Hanover Square in Manningham was built in this way. I’m not sure when building clubs commenced their operations locally but references to them in the Bradford Observer pick up in the 1840s. Questions seem to have arisen as to whether club members were householders, and consequently had the right to vote in elections.

There is no date included on the map of the Wesley Place Building Club allotments. The development is certainly shown completed on later nineteenth century maps of Low Moor and Mary Twentyman, of the Low Moor History Group, suggested 1870 as a reasonable year for the plan’s composition. The biggest clue is the name of the architect, M. Brayshaw. References to him in the local paper are in the decade 1869-79. A whole morning devoted to searching the Bradford Observer finally revealed Brayshaw soliciting builders and contractors for 24 houses, and a house plus shop, for the building club in October – November 1875. Clearly this was for exactly one third of the properties to be found on the plan. Whether his intention was to recruit three separate builders to work simultaneously, or to undertake three developments on different occasions from First to Fourth Street, I am not able to tell.

The architect Mark Brayshaw (1828-1915) was the son of a plasterer who married a Mary Barraclough. In the 1868 Voters Register an M Brayshaw can be found at 299 Old Lane, Bowling and in the 1879-80 PO Bradford Directory he is living at 1 Little Cross Street. In fact he and his wife are still there in the 1901 census. Brayshaw was the designer of Thornton Methodist Sunday School, a Wesleyan Reform School in Beacon Lane, a spinning mill in Wibsey, and houses in Odsal, Bowling, Little Horton and Toller Lane.