{"id":372,"date":"2022-06-06T20:06:41","date_gmt":"2022-06-06T20:06:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/triskelepublishing.com\/weirdstonewalk\/?page_id=372"},"modified":"2024-11-04T11:29:25","modified_gmt":"2024-11-04T11:29:25","slug":"29-trafford-road","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/triskelepublishing.com\/weirdstonewalk\/29-trafford-road\/","title":{"rendered":"29 Trafford Road"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Approximate Location:<\/strong>
OS Grid Reference: SJ 8457 7836
Latitude: 53.18.7N Longitude: 2.13.59W<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alan Garner<\/a>\u2019s childhood home – 29, Trafford Road<\/a>. In the author’s memoirs he described the building in some detail: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Our house was on Trafford Road where Stevens Street meets Moss Lane. It wasn’t like any of the other houses. It was smaller and older, and had no garden at the front, only the footpath. That was because it had been a toll gate… There was a chimney at either end, a porch in the middle, and four windows, one in each corner. The window frames were made of stone set in the brick and had a stone pillar between the panes of glass. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

…There were three rooms downstairs. The one we lived in was called the House. That had the door to the porch and the road. The stone floor was covered with bits of linoleum… The next room was the Middle Room. It had no furniture and I kept my budgerigar in a cage there. We used the Middle Room to get to the Scullery. The Scullery was the room where the slopstone and water tap were and it had been added along the back wall. Outside were the coal shed and the lavatory<\/em>“.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Garner, A., 2018, Where Shall We Run To? – A Memoir<\/em>. 4th Estate. London. p50-52<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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29 Trafford Road immortalised in the pages of Elidor (Credit: Charles Keeping \/ HarperCollins)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The author used the house as the setting for the building which the children moved to from Manchester in his 1965 novel Elidor<\/a><\/em>. The front elevation featured as a stylised illustration, by Charles Keeping, in Chapter 12 – The Letterbox<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The house appears in the 1978 television documentary\u00a0The Writer\u2019s Workshop: Places and Things<\/em>\u00a0which was presented by Garner himself. It is also referred to in a curious essay – The Edge of the Ceiling<\/em> (The Voice That Thunders<\/em> 1997, 3-18) – concerning Garner’s lengthy history of childhood illnesses which often left him bed-bound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Locations<\/a><\/blockquote>