A Walk Along the Cornbrook Part 5: Chorlton Abbey
Original content by Dr John Piprani. Edited by Grant Collier.
In the late eighteenth century the Cornbrook flowed openly past The Villas along what is now Greenheys Lane and Charles Halle Road. Behind the Villas was a large house named Chorlton Abbey, occupied by the German Schunck family between 1846 and 1872. Chorlton Abbey was demolished in the early 1890s, and its footprint now sits under the Denmark Road car park.
Edward Schunk, formerly of Chorlton Abbey, was a manufacturer and chemist. A ‘devotee’ of science, he used the personal wealth he had accumulated through his business to study the chemical properties of various substances of great importance to the dyeing industry. On his death in 1903, he donated his laboratory and library to the Victoria University of Manchester. The facilities Schunck had created were so advanced that they were taken down, move from his home in Kersal Moor and reassembled on campus adjacent to the 1874 Chemistry Building.
Learn more about Schunck and his work here.
Discussion points:
- What methods can we use today to understand historic buildings and their inhabitants?
- How does the science practised by men like Edward Schunck differ to that done today, or that done in the early modern period?
