Queen Victoria’s Salford ‘rain’

Worsley New Hall

Complaining about the Salford weather doesn’t seem to be a recent phenomenon – even Queen Victoria noted that it was damp and muggy when she visited the area in the 1850s!

During Queen Victoria’s 1851 stay at Worsley New Hall with the Duke of Wellington, she remarked that the Hall was “very handsome, comfortable and cheerful”, but the weather was “very damp and muggy, and it rains almost more than anywhere else.”

The discovery is part of a joint venture between the Library at the University of Salford and Peel Holdings Ltd to research and preserve the history of Worsley New Hall. Built in the 1840s, the mansion served as a family home for four generations of the Earls of Ellesmere before it was demolished at the end of the 1940s.

The project has culminated with the publication of Worsley New Hall: A Guide to Sources. The guide provides a comprehensive history of the Hall which delves into archival evidence, oral histories from local people and the results of an archaeological dig carried out in the summer.

Dr Alexandra Mitchell, Project Officer, said: “The research uncovered some extremely interesting information which is brought together in the guide.

“I hope it will encourage others to take the research further, using the archives and resources we have identified to delve deeper into the history of the Hall.”

To read more about the history of the Hall, extracts from oral history recordings, census returns and digital copies of The Worsley Wail, a magazine published by patients of the Worsley Hall Red Cross Hospital during the First World War, go to: www.salford.ac.uk/library/about/worsley.

Photographs, letters, architectural drawings and other documents relating to the history of the Hall can also be viewed and downloaded from the Worsley New Hall Digital Archive: http://usir.salford.ac.uk/archives/.

For more information about Worsley New Hall: A Guide to Sources, please email a.mitchell@salford.ac.uk.