Upon the sale of Manley Hall in 1905, a contiguous strip of land was added to the south and west of the estate for house building, formerly being a part of the township of Chorlton-cum-Hardy.

Brooks drained it because all of this land was covered in peat from a thickness of eighteen inches to three feet; he built villas initially for wealthy businessmen such as himself.

The area was more or less equally divided between the Moss Side and Withington Urban Districts (some existing street furniture remains from that period).

The private police survived the elimination of toll-charging and incorporation into the City, only becoming defunct with the manpower shortages of the First World War.

[nb 3] Clarendon Road was built on the site of clay pits and needed remedial work on gable-ends due to subsidence in the 1980s.

West Point was lost to Chorlton and Darley Park to Old Trafford, as well as the eastern side at the north end of Withington Road.

Postcode changes, made necessary by the inter-war development of the Egerton Estate, meant that the southern end of the area was lost.

The travel agent, Robinson's on Withington Road, would reassure nervous passengers' relatives, by sending round a messenger boy once news of a safe landing had been received telegraphically.

The area also had its own ghost bus, which served the above station, timed to meet trains, for at least a decade after passenger services stopped.

Along with Brooks and Egerton, he opposed the building of a new church for the expanding population;[8] however, the opening of the Suez Canal caused such problems for the Mendel trading business that he became a bankrupt and the hall was put up for sale.

[9] Until it was demolished in about 1905, it was used as a pleasure garden, its most famous visitor being Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show [10][11] An infamous murder in the area occurred when it was at the height of its fashionable status in the 1870s.

PC Nicholas Cock was a Lancashire Constabulary beat officer for the then sparsely-populated Chorlton-cum-Hardy and Firs Farm areas.

The building, West Point, was later substantially extended on its eastern side to become the Seymour Hotel,[12] but the place in the wall where the bullet lodged was marked, and was visible on Woodside Road.

[13] PC Cock died on 2 August 1876 and was buried in Chorlton's Old Churchyard, although his elaborate gravestone, paid for by public subscription, was removed in 1956 to the Lancashire Constabulary HQ at Hutton near Preston.

Some years later, an infamous criminal, Charles Peace, confessed to the murder before he was due for execution; because of this, Habron was released and given £1,000, held in trust by his former employer at Firs Farm, and the Roman Catholic Bishop of Salford, Herbert Vaughan.

The intention was for Habron to buy a farm locally, which would have cost around £250, but he chose to return to County Mayo in Ireland, where he ran a beer shop for many years.

The Poor Law Unions linked representation with taxation; anyone with an interest in real property above a certain rateable value could vote on local matters, irrespective of gender.

The area is represented in Manchester City Council by three Labour councillors: Angeliki Stogia,[18] Muqaddasah Bano[19] and Aftab Razaq.

According to the 2011 census[25] Religion played a major role in Victorian life, and the size and number of religious buildings testifies to this.

Although Brooks was a High Church Anglican, he allowed non-Anglican Christian denominations (Roman Catholics, Methodists, and other non-conformists) to buy and build on substantial plots, as long as these were on the fringes of the development.

The original St Edmund's Grade II listed building has been converted into apartments, and the church congregation now meets in the modern worship-centre next door.

Manley Park Methodist Church is on Egerton Road North; the congregation began worshipping in a tin tabernacle in 1905 and the present building was opened in 1910.

In 1893 the Bishop of Salford, John Bilsborrow, appointed Father James Rowan, a former teacher at the college, as priest-in-charge of the district.

Ironically, in the German Invasion Handbook for Operation Sea Lion (Unternehmen Seelöwe), it was named as one of several large properties in the area suitable for use by the occupation authorities.

[34] St Bede's College (on Alexandra Road South), a Roman Catholic independent school founded in 1876, was originally built as an aquarium but this was not a commercial success.

The area west of Withington Road became playing fields, the rest continued as a farm until the late 1960s, when it became the site of St George's RC High School.

In 2007, the school rejoined the state education sector, scrapping its annual tuition fees and selective admissions test in exchange for funding as an academy.

Primary School on Whalley Road was partly housed, until the 1990s, in the former Imperial German consulate, seized during the First World War by the Custodian of Enemy Property.

After the phase of further developments on the Egerton Estate, the school expanded into the Crimsworth Annexe, a large house and garden at the west end of College Road.

The writer Dodie Smith spent part of her early life at Claremont, Wood Road, as she records in her autobiography Look Back With Love (1974).