A new book is being published in time for Christmas recounting the day over 150 properties in Lymm were up for sale more than 100 years ago!
The latest Lymm Heritage Centre book will be out later this month, recalling how in September 1911, hundreds of people could be seen queuing at the door of Lymm’s Drill Hall. Almost all of them were clutching a weighty book.
It was the auction catalogue for the sale of large portions of the village, over 150 lots in total, and the auction was about to start. Just six months earlier Sir William Lever’s purchase of the entire Beechwood and Oughtrington Estates had made the national news with headlines like “Mr Lever Buys a Town”. But now he was selling on the majority of his acquisitions.
The catalogue reads like a modern Domesday book with all the properties, some familiar, some long gone described in detail. Pubs, banks, shops, post offices and a wide range of houses all feature in this unique snapshot of one moment in village history.
Now for the first time, an original copy of the whole 150-page catalogue has been painstakingly scanned and copied by volunteers at the Heritage Centre, including over 20 full-page illustrations.
The book also includes additional chapters that describe other aspects of village life in 1911 as well as a fictionalised account of one man’s experience of the auction, based closely on newspaper reports of the time.
Discover too “what happened” next with a detailed table of who bought what for how much and how Lever made further attempts to sell the residue of the estate in a further auction in 1919.
The original catalogue contained two large pull-out maps. These have been cleverly condensed into a separate 16-page full-colour map booklet that sits in a sleeve inside the back cover of the book.
All in all it’s a publication that no Lymm enthusiast will want to be without. It goes on sale in mid-November at the Heritage Centre, Lymm Post Office, Ruby & Harry’s and online at lymmheritageshop.co.uk.
Visit the Heritage Centre, 1 Legh St WA13 0DA Thurs-Sun 12-4 for other Lymm-based gifts: books, three top quality new jigsaw designs and Christmas cards. www.lymmhic.co.uk
