Angel Meadow Residential (Plot 5), Naples Street, Manchester. Archaeological Desk-based Assessment

NOMA (GP) Ltd is devising proposals for the regeneration of land encompassing Angel Meadow Park in the Shudehill area of central Manchester as part of the wider NOMA Regeneration scheme. The proposals allow for the redevelopment of five separate landholdings. In order to facilitate the design and planning application process, NOMA (GP) Ltd commissioned Oxford Archaeology North to carry out an archaeological desk-based assessment of the study area. This was intended to establish, as far as possible, the nature and significance of the sub-surface archaeological resource within the area, and to establish the impact of any future development upon this resource. Whilst the archaeological potential of all the proposed development plots has been subject to detailed assessment, the present report has focused on one of the development sites, referred to as Plot 5 (centred on NGR 384519 399151), situated immediately to the east of Angel meadow Park. This site almost certainly formed undeveloped agricultural land beyond the urban fringe of Manchester until the late eighteenth century, when a row of houses was erected. These overlooked the parish burial ground that had opened in 1786, and was a factor in the area evolving rapidly as a working class residential district. The site had been developed almost entirely for workers’ housing by the mid-nineteenth century, and many of these properties contained cellars that are likely to have been used as low-cost dwellings. Forming part of the area known as Angel Meadow, it became widely acknowledged as one of the worst slums in Manchester by the late nineteenth century. Despite the widespread renewal of sub-standard housing in Manchester that was carried out during the final years of the nineteenth century, most of the houses in the study area remained extant until the mid-twentieth century, with some examples surviving into the 1980s.