PLAYER WALL OF FAME VOTE 1- THE FIRST 20 YEARS

[pjdaly]

Here's a map that was marked 1895, which is just a few short years before we played on Ainslie Street. The map seems to reveal two broad areas of what appears to be expansive open land at that time. The first is the area more or less between Settle Street and the edge of the Griffin estate. The other is beyond Matties Chip Shop all the way to Cemetery Hill (not that Matties Chip Shop was there then).

Food for thought (the precise location of the ground that is, not Matties chips).

As for Holker Street, there appears to be what I can only describe as a splodge where the pitch is now, mostly towards the corner where the traffic lights are.

[Holkerbird]

My source was the deeds for a terraced house I bought on Romney Road in 2003.
The Devonshire Road estate was started in 1919 after the end of WW1 and finished I think in 1923.

[Hadrian]

Thanks again (and to pjdaly for the plan).

It is probable that the initial transfer on your deed was for the land. The Duke of Devonshire was a major landowner in Furness as a Thomas(?) Preston had bought Furness Abbey and its estates in 1607 and when his male line became extinct they passed to a branch of the Lowther family and then in the late eighteenth century to the Devonshires. (The other big landowner was the Duke of Buccleugh who also held the title of Lord of the Liberty of Furness.)

Barrow grew rapidly from a hamlet to 30 houses in 1845, a population of 488 in 1851 and 16000 in 1866, necessitating the opening of a hospital that year. The following year Barrow was incorporated and the heart of the town was moving from The Strand/St George's Quarter area and house construction had moved inland as far as Rawlinson Street and along to the coast to Blake Street. The 1870s were a time of depression and construction of the railway loop line from Salthouse to Park Junction had progressed slowly, only opening alongside Barrow Central station in 1882. Most residential development of the area inland of this railway only occurred afterwards.

As pjdaly's plan shows, the south side of Ainslie Street in the area opposite the block in front of Titchfield Street was part of an ironworks pre-dating British Griffin's use of the site and appears to have been its slag bank. No room for a football pitch there, so the site of our Ainslie Street pitch remains a matter for conjecture.

This is a more detailed plan of the site from the 1891 1 to 550 OS town plan: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AgNl9S9KBXiijZAOB4I ... g?e=ZQaWd7