Angel Meadow
| St Michael's Flags & Angel Meadow Park | |
|---|---|
Entrance
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| Type | Municipal park |
| Location | Manchester, England |
| Coordinates | 53°29′21″N 2°14′8″W / 53.48917°N 2.23556°WCoordinates: 53°29′21″N 2°14′8″W / 53.48917°N 2.23556°W |
| Area | 7.4 acres (3.0 ha) |
| Created | 2004 |
| Operated by | Manchester City Council |
| Website | Friends of Angel Meadow |
St Michael's Flags and Angel Meadow Park is a public park to the immediate northeast of Manchester city centre, in North West England. Located on a slope between the River Irk and Rochdale Road occupies an area of 7.4 acres (3 ha), but features in the formative history of Manchester. It was once an affluent suburb of Manchester, until the 19th-century Industrial Revolution altered the social standing of the area and introduced poverty and disease. Regeneration of the park in the 2000s has however modified the area and created a gateway into the Irk Valley.
St Michael and All Angels' church was built in 1788 by Humphrey Owen, to seat just over a thousand people. Its foundation stone was laid on 20 May 1788 and it was consecrated on 23 July 1789. Almost twenty years later, a letter appeared in the Manchester Guardian declaring "Why one of the ugliest churches in Manchester situated in one of the most crowded and notorious parts of the City, should have so long enjoyed the pleasant sounding name 'St Michael's, Angel Meadow' is beyond understanding".
The land adjacent to the church became the largest cemetery in Manchester, used for the interment of those who had no family place of burial or were too poor to afford a proper funeral. The population density of Angel Meadow in the mid-19th century was in excess of 350 per acre, and as social and living conditions worsened some resorted to digging up the cemetery and selling its soil as fertilizer to nearby farmers. The situation became so bad that an Act of Parliament was passed in 1855 to cover up graveyards with flagstones, hence the name, St Michael's Flags.
In 1844, the Oldham Road terminus of the Manchester–Leeds Railway was abandoned and the line extended through Collyhurst to a new link station at Hunts Bank – the first Victoria Station. A railway viaduct traversed Angel Meadow, whilst the obnoxious smells from the Irk and Irwell and the Gould street gas works darkened the landscape.
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Wikipedia