Sharing our memories of Heald Green
Last Updated 27th Nov 2024
By Kathy Simpson
First Published 17/11/2024
Last Updated 17/11/2024
Heyhead
The village that disappeared
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Fig. 1 Heyhead Chapel
© K Simpson 1992
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​Heyhead was a little hamlet just over a mile south west of Heald Green station, and eight miles south of the centre of Manchester, as the crow flies. Many of its former residents moved to Heald Green after it was demolished.
Click here to read a piece that traces the history of Heyhead from its humble origins as a peat bog, through its heyday as a flourishing farming and market gardening community, to its ultimate demise when it was swallowed up by Manchester Airport and the Wythenshawe estate.
Addenda to the original piece
The Bottom Shop
It came to light that a Charles Hewitt was listed as a grocer in the 1909 Slater’s Directory for Heyhead.
This had been omitted from the original piece.
Fig. 2 Slaters Directory 1909
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​Charles's grandfather was William Hewitt of Ringway. William was the brother of the James Hewitt in Heyhead (my 2xG grandfather).
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William had a son, also James, he was the father of Charles. James married Mary Smith in Northwich in 1876 and Charles was born the following year. Mary died in 1880. By 1881 James, who had been working as a pork butcher in Northwich, had moved back to Ringway with his son Charles. They lived with James's widowed mother Elizabeth.
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In 1891 Charles was working as a milk youth in Ringway, aged 14.
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In 1900 Charles married Sarah Ann Bailey, daughter of Obadiah Bailey of Heyhead. They had one daughter, Phyllis, born towards the end of 1900.
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In the 1901 census, Charles was a butcher in Knutsford, where his uncle George Hewitt had been a butcher in 1891.
Charles was listed as a milkman at Ringway in the 1906 Slater's Directory for Altrincham.
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Given his wife's connections to Heyhead, and that he had distant family of his own there, this is probably the Charles Hewitt who had taken over The Bottom Shop, as listed in the Slater’s Directory for 1909.
By 1911, the census shows Charles was a butcher in Ashton upon Mersey.
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The 1929 Slater’s Directory shows Mrs Bloor (later Mrs Gibbons) as running The Bottom Shop.
Fig. 3 Extract of the 1929 Slaters Directory for Heyhead
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