Place:Worsley, Lancashire, England

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NameWorsley
Alt namesEllenbrooksource: hamlet in parish
Walkdensource: large settlement in parish
Walkden Moorsource: part of Walkden
TypeParish, Urban district
Coordinates53.5°N 2.383°W
Located inLancashire, England     ( - 1974)
Also located inGreater Manchester, England     (1974 - )
See alsoSalford Hundred, Lancashire, Englandhundred in which it was located
Salford (metropolitan borough), Greater Manchester, Englandmetropolitan borough in which it has been located since 1974
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
source: Family History Library Catalog
the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Worsley has been, since 1974, a town in the metropolitan borough of the City of Salford, in Greater Manchester, England. It lies along the course of Worsley Brook, 5.75 miles (9.25 km) west of Manchester. The M60 motorway bisects the area.

Prior to 1974 Worsley was part of Lancashire. It has provided evidence of Roman and Anglo-Saxon activity, including two Roman roads. The completion in 1761 of the Bridgewater Canal allowed Worsley to expand from a small village of cottage industries to an important town based upon cotton manufacture, iron-working, brick-making and extensive coal mining. Later expansion came after the First and Second World Wars, when large urban estates were built in the region.

From the 11th century, Worsley was a township in the Eccles ancient parish of the Salford Hundred, in the county of Lancashire. As well as being in Eccles ecclesiastical parish, Worsley was also in Barton upon Irwell Poor Law Union. However, the Swinton area of the township was in 1867 transferred to the Swinton Local Board of Health, which from 1869 became the Swinton and Pendlebury Local Board of Health and, subsequently, the Swinton and Pendlebury Municipal Borough. In 1892 a small part of the township of Worsley was absorbed into the Borough of Eccles.

In 1894, under the Local Government Act 1894, Worsley Urban District was created. A town hall was opened on 22 June 1911. Worsley Urban District gained 21 acres (85,000 m2) of land from Barton upon Irwell parish in 1921, and in 1933 gained the area of Little Hulton Urban District.

Under the Local Government Act 1972, in 1974 Worsley's Urban District status was abolished, and became part of Salford Metropolitan District.

Image:Salford.png

Ellenbrook

Ellenbrook (redirected here) was also a chapelry in Eccles parish, and is now located within Worsley parish on the border of Tyldesley. Wikipedia links it to Worsley.

The following description from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72 is provided by the website A Vision of Britain Through Time (University of Portsmouth Department of Geography).

"ELLENBROOK, a chapelry, with a [railway] station, in Eccles parish, Lancashire; on the Manchester and Wigan railway, 2½ miles E of Tyldesley. The living is a [perpetual] curacy. Value: £137. Patron: the Earl of Ellesmere. The church is in the Norman style."

Walkden

Walkden is 6 miles (9.7 km) west-northwest of central Salford, and 7 miles (11.3 km) west-northwest of Manchester. According to local population estimate of 2014 (reported in Wikipedia), Walkden had a total resident population of 35,616.

Prior to 1974 Walkden was in the township of Worsley and part of Worsley Urban District from 1894. Walkden's industrial history links are mainly to coal mining, but also to cotton mills. Before 1800 there were many shafts for small collieries sunk to the shallow coal seams of the Worsley Four Foot mine on land owned by the Egertons, the Lords of the Manor of Worsley, which included Walkden. After 1800 further shafts were sunk. The Worsley Navigable Levels linked many of the mines to the Bridgewater Canal at Worsley. The levels were used to transport coal from the mines of the Bridgewater Collieries in Walkden until railways were used as an improved form of transportation. Walkden Yard was the National Coal Board Central Workshops and was situated close to Ellesmere Colliery on the edge of Little Hulton. It was built 1878 by the Bridgewater Trustees as a central works depot providing engineering services for their collieries and colliery railways.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Walkden.

Research Tips

  • See the Wikipedia articles on parishes and civil parishes for descriptions of this lowest rung of local administration. The original parishes were ecclesiastical (described as ancient parishes), under the jurisdiction of the local priest. A parish covered a specific geographical area and was sometimes equivalent to that of a manor. Sometimes, in the case of very large rural parishes, there were chapelries where a "chapel of ease" allowed parishioners to worship closer to their homes. In the 19th century the term civil parish was adopted to define parishes with a secular form of local government. In WeRelate both civil and ecclesiastical parishes are included in the type of place called a "parish". Smaller places within parishes, such as chapelries and hamlets, have been redirected into the parish in which they are located. The names of these smaller places are italicized within the text.
  • An urban district was a type of municipality in existence between 1894 and 1974. They were formed as a middle layer of administration between the county and the civil parish and were used for urban areas usually with populations of under 30,000. Inspecting the archives of a urban district will not be of much help to the genealogist or family historian, unless there is need to study land records in depth.
  • Civil registration or vital statistics and census records will be found within registration districts. To ascertain the registration district to which a parish belongs, see Registration Districts in Lancashire, part of the UK_BMD website.
  • The terms municipal borough and county borough were adopted in 1835 replacing the historic "boroughs". Municipal boroughs generally had populations between 30,000 and 50,000; while county boroughs usually had populations of over 50,000. County boroughs had local governments independent of the county in which they were located, but municipal boroughs worked in tandem with the county administration. Wikipedia explains these terms in much greater detail.
  • Lancashire Online Parish Clerks provide free online information from the various parishes, along with other data of value to family and local historians conducting research in the County of Lancashire.
  • FamilySearch Lancashire Research Wiki provides a good overview of the county and also articles on most of the individual parishes (very small or short-lived ones may have been missed).
  • Ancestry (international subscription necessary) has a number of county-wide collections of Church of England baptisms, marriages and burials, some from the 1500s, and some providing microfilm copies of the manuscript entries. There are specific collections for Liverpool (including Catholic baptisms and marriages) and for Manchester. Their databases now include electoral registers 1832-1935. Another pay site is FindMyPast.
  • A map of Lancashire circa 1888 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time includes the boundaries between the parishes and shows the hamlets within them.
  • A map of Lancashire circa 1954 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time is a similar map for a later timeframe.
  • GENUKI provides a website covering many sources of genealogical information for Lancashire. The organization is gradually updating the website and the volunteer organizers may not have yet picked up all the changes that have come with improving technology.
  • The Victoria County History for Lancashire, provided by British History Online, covers the whole of the county in six volumes (the seventh available volume [numbered Vol 2] covers religious institutions). The county is separated into its original hundreds and the volumes were first published between 1907 and 1914. Most parishes within each hundred are covered in detail. Maps within the text can contain historical information not available elsewhere.

A description of the township of Worsley from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published 1911.

This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Worsley. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.