3.024      MAN c1852 SPR    BHM 811 B11 

A planned development in Manningham

Paper   Scale: 10 yards per inch   Size:  120 *45 cm   Condition: good

This plan looks very simple, although the length of the original means it has been photographed in two sections. There are the usual problems of where is it, when is it, and who owns it? These have proved to be quite difficult to answer. The map is annotated on the back – plan of Spring Bank Place: where was this? Essentially if you are travelling out of Bradford along Manningham Lane it is the last right turn before Manningham Lane is crossed by Marlborough Road – Queens Road, where the complex traffic light system is today. Marlborough Road almost certainly didn’t exist at the time of the plan and is not included either on the first Ordnance Survey map of the area published in 1852. Bolton Lane is now Queens Road at this point, although the name Bolton Lane is preserved for a branch down-hill immediately before the viaduct. Manningham Lane retains its name of course but the surprising thing is that the same side of the thoroughfare was extensively quarried for stone by the mid-nineteenth century.

The name Spring Bank Place is pencilled in on the roadway: it has this name by the time of the 1889 OS map of the area and retains it today. It seems that a parcel of land parallel to Bolton Lane and between it and ‘Mrs Duffield’s Estate’ was being offered for villa development. I can identify such a sale of land from a small advertisement in the Bradford Observer, April 8 1852. I have used this date for the map since there is no other indication. The advertisement does not give the name of the vendor. The puzzle is that the final house or houses, placed at 90 degrees to the others, and probably called Spring Bank, is already present by the time of the first OS map. Possibly our plan is offering constructed villas for sale. The 1871 borough plan reveals that in fact a more intensive development eventually took place. This intensification, for example, resulted in three pairs of semis being built south of Spring Bank Place. But even today the bones of the arrangement indicated on this map are still present. What, at first sight, appears to be generous gardens stretching down to the railway track, called Valley(?) Field were soon built on. Rose Mount Villa was certainly there by the time of the 1889 OS map and I understand it was actually built 40 years earlier by textile merchant John Douglas. In this map the whole area is described as Clifton Villas.

Who then is Mrs Duffield? Identifying her is made much more difficult by the disinclination of Victorian map makers to use the forenames of female land-owners. I am making the assumption that she is connected to the eminent family who, with little thought for future local historians, produced three generations of men all called Francis Duffield. The first Francis Duffield was a merchant. He married Caroline – widow of John Buck who had built Town Hill House, Wakefield Road in 1770. After his marriage he is always referred to as Francis Duffield of Town Hill House, and he died in 1813. His son, another Francis Duffield of Town Hill House, married Mary Ann Sturges, daughter of the well-known Bowling Iron Company director. He just makes it into the 1841 census, living at Town Hill with his wife Mary (50) and his daughter Mary. I believe he moved into land ownership and rented property. He died in July 1841 aged 60, and there is a memorial to him in Bradford Cathedral.

The third Francis Duffield was his son who was born in 1817. He had entered Cambridge University by 1833 and his address is also given as ‘of Town Hall (sic), Bradford’. In the Bradford Observer during 1845 he is described as Francis Duffield of Bolton House, which was in Lister Lane, overlooking Peel Park. In that year his gardener won best celery in a Bradford horticultural show. He was a Poor Law Guardian for Bolton, and in 1846 the equipment from ‘a quarry lately occupied by Mr Francis Duffield, Manningham Lane’ was being offered for sale. Francis’s life was about to experience dramatic changes. He married and in 1848 had a daughter, Anna Maria. In the 1851 census he is living with his wife Caroline Charlotte (Dawson) in faraway Windsor, Berkshire: later that year he died. I assume his widow Caroline Duffield is the Mrs Duffield of the map.