CONSTRUCTION OF ST MICHAEL'S WAY 1972

As we've deduced from our studies of these old Instamatic slides, the building of St Michael's Way (the 'Middlewich Inner Relief Road') and the demolition and redevelopment work in Kinderton Street were actually two separate and distinct projects, separated in time by a couple of years (and physically by the Town Bridge, of course). And, as Geraldine Williams has pointed out, Kinderton Street was not actually 'widened' to any great extent, and neither was the Town Bridge, so it was perfectly feasible by 1972 for St Michael's Way to be built and to be feeding traffic towards Holmes Chapel,the motorway and King Street via the original Kinderton Street formation, which must have dated back to 1931 when the current Town Bridge was built. In the case of traffic heading onto King Street, part of the redevelopment of Kinderton Street was aimed at improving its junction with Kinderton Street, meaning the loss of that wonderful old farmhouse.
And it also should be remembered that the traffic using the new relief road was not 'new' traffic, but traffic which would formerly have used Wheelock Street to get through the town, so there wouldn't have been significant 'extra' traffic. Not then, that is. The country's road traffic nightmare hadn't fully begun in 1972.
There were (and are) those who  resented the coming of the new road, and it was rather startling to see the way it carved its way through the old town, but it has meant that Wheelock Street has survived in very much its original form, and  we never suffered the same indignity as nearby Winsford where half the High Street was knocked down to accomodate that unfortunate town's 'relief road'.
Our present slide was taken in 1972 and shows St Michael's Way under construction. Out of shot to the left is Pepper Street (or what's left of it). The low brick building with the white weather boarding is Middlewich Telephone Exchange which, having started life mooning away unseen and unregarded in its own little compound off Pepper Street, suddenly found itself thrust into the limelight and standing alongside a major road. The intervening years have seen it blossom and more than double in size, sprouting all kinds of mobile phone aerials and the like on the way. Now we're promised fibre optic broadband, which can't come too soon. To the right of the telephone exchange is Powell's sewing factory (now the site of a block of flats and the ubiquitous town houses, connecting St Michael's Way with Wheelock Street.
As this new road emerges into the sunlight and with it the start of the new, post-industrial Middlewich we know today, we can see on the skyline a reminder of the older Middlewich in the form of  Seddon's salt works chimneys in Brooks Lane (to the left of the Church in this photo) still there, but soon to be no more.
Finally, a nice subtitle for this slide would be 'Me and My Shadow'. In the bottom left hand corner is the shadow of the then 20 year old Mr Roberts in the act of snapping the scene for posterity.

First published 5th July 2011
Re-formatted and re-published 21st January 2019

NOW & THEN - LOWER STREET and ST MICHAEL'S WAY

When we first published an old late-60s black & white view of the town centre, seen from the Town Bridge in this MD Entry, quite a few people were puzzled and 'unable to get their bearings' (largely, as pointed out by Paul Greenwood, because the church itself wasn't in the picture to act as a landmark).
So, as promised, here's that view again, together with a 2012 view taken from a similar vantage point.
We can see that, like so many areas of Middlewich, the churchyard has been taken over by trees, and there are many more of them now than there were in 1969. The Town Hall would have been behind that clump of trees.
The curve of Lower Street to the left is still evident, although the only part of that road remaining is a short stub now used as a bus layby.
St Michael's Way goes off to the right of this on a fairly straight alignment before curving off towards the last remaining segment of Pepper Street and then sweeping around to the left to join Nantwich Road close to the old Red Lion..
In between the two - i.e. the remains of Lower Street and  St Michael's Way, are traffic islands and a 'taxi rank' which, as we mentioned here, in another Now & Then feature,does not seem ever to have been used as such.
The black square in the top right hand corner of the modern view, by the way, is part of one of the traffic signals controlling traffic on the Town Bridge.
We had to wait a long time to get the modern view without it being full of cars and trucks and, ironically, in the end managed to take a picture with even fewer vehicles in it than the 1969 one.
 This, it hardly needs to be pointed out, is very far from typical.
You can click on the photos for a closer view.

LOWER STREET AND THE TOWN HALL, LATE 1960s

If you own the copyright on this image, please let us know

From the Paul Hough collection comes this view of Lower Street and Middlewich Town Hall in the late 1960s .
We featured a very similar colour view from 1969 in this Middlewich Diary entry

It's interesting to note that the road alignment at this end of what was to become St Michael's Way is not too different in the photo from the way things are in the present day, with the two traffic lanes nearest the camera guiding people to (from right to left) Holmes Chapel and Sandbach. The road markings are difficult to make out due to the pounding they've received from the heavy traffic which then, as now, afflicted Middlewich. We shouldn't be misled, either, by the fact that there are only three cars on view here. The photo was probably taken very early in the morning.
The original alignment of Lower Street, as it curves away to the left beyond the Town Hall can, as we've mentioned before, still be discerned in the bus lay-by next to the present day amphitheatre in the Bullring.

St Michael's Way was built on an alignment which runs off  through the site of the buildings to the right of Harold Woodbine's (the white building), including Foster's Bike Shop ( With the advertisement hoarding on its facing wall).

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One year ago, on the 9th June 2011, we were standing at the bottom of Dierden's Terrace and looking, as it happens, in the opposite direction, from The Bullring towards the Town Bridge.

This was the final entry in our original Middlewich Diary on the Salt Town Site. Can it really only have been one year ago?