Digging deep into the history of 35 Demesne Road ..... a house empty and abandoned

Now there is something I don’t like about empty and abandoned buildings.

On a practical level it is of course the waste of a place which could provide a home or set of homes.

But it is more I guess about the end of something.

And so it is with number 35 Demesne Road which today is pretty much a derelict building.

Part of the roof is open to the skies, many of its windows are boarded up and those that aren’t have long ago been broken.

The fireplaces will be cold, the wall paper peeling and the grand staircase dismal dirty and possibly dangerous.

It is in every sense a building which seems to have no future, made all the worst by seeing it on a bleak December day when the interior will be no warmer than the outside.

Not that this is a descent into some romantic tosh.

I have no idea to what extent this was a happy home or how far the people who lived there were contented and at peace.

In fact at present I have only been able to uncover a few names and those are confined to around  1911 but they do offer up a story.

At the end of 1910 when Slater’s street directory was being compiled it listed a Mr Thomas Porter, director and Herbert Stewart Lysons accountant at the property.

Mr Porter had been there by 1897 and with a bit of digging we should be able to push that back to sometime earlier in the 1890s, which in turn may help date Inglewood which was the name of the house.

It doesn’t appear on the 1894 OS so will have been still relatively new when the two were recorded on the 1901 census along with Mrs Porter and two servants.

A decade earlier and Mr Lysons was living at home in Pendlebury with his father who was a “Colliery Stores manager” and he at 19 described a “Colliery Surface labourer”.

But young Herbert was on a path of self improvement.  By 1901 when he was living with his uncle Mr Porter at Desmene Road he had become a chartered accountant.

At the census of 1911 he was living alone in the house with just two servants and given that this was an eleven roomed property I guess they must have rattled around a bit.

The intriguing question is whether he brought his new bride Minnie to live at the house when they married in 1918.

She had been living nearby in Albert Road and later in their married life they were at 62 Demesne Road where he died in 1939.

Her father was a ship owner and he may have known Herbert professionally or perhaps socially.

Minnie survived both him and his sister and died in 1974.

And this is almost all we have although I do know that from Andy’s research there was a son born in 1920, and that Herbert founded an accountancy practice in 1899.

According to one source* he had offices around the city starting in St Mary’s Gate, and moving to Deansgate, St Ann’s Place, Albert Square St Peter’s Square and King Street.

Now that seems a long way from our empty house on Demesne Road, but not so.

Mr and Mrs Lysons will have continued to pass the house and may have wondered what went on behind it door after they had left.  And so might Herbert’s sister who would have known the house.

She had spent most of her adult life in Stockport but lived out her final years on Chandos Road and so she might too have wandered past the property perhaps on a visit to Alexandra Park.

And here I shall stop before I do indeed slide in to romantic speculation leaving only to reflect finally on the fate of the house.  It is in a sorry state, but there are no planning applications to demolish or later the property and maybe just maybe some one will be along to save it and make it a family home again.

Pictures, 35 Demesne Road, 2014, courtesy of Andy Robertson

* Chartered Accountants in England and Wales: A Guide to Historical Records
 edited by Wendy Habgood, 1999, http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AR-9AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA156&lpg=PA156&dq=herbert+lysons&source=bl&ots=4y0sJEFjiK&sig=LzrIXAuqcfum2u6cbJ2LhSOw-po&hl=en&sa=X&ei=PxF_VOOxM4rd7QaRuIG4Ag&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=herbert%20lysons&f=false