Belmont and the coal chute

It’s that time of the year again when quiet descends upon the Together Trust’s head offices in Cheadle. As its two schools, Ashcroft and Inscape shut up shop for the summer, only the main central administration building now remains open.

Crossley Gaddum

The summer usually signals the exchange of children’s voices for the sounds of drills and hammering. The six weeks of the school holidays allows a chance for building work on the now empty buildings. As both Ashcroft and Inscape use buildings built by the charity in the 1920s, it is perhaps not surprising that work often needs doing. The buildings now contain classrooms for the education of those who attend the schools, but 100 years ago they were built as children’s homes. Then known as Hayes, Shaw, Crossley and Gaddum, they housed both boys and girls, catering for around 20 in each. To those who lived there the buildings today still look familiar from the outside. There are still however, some features that remain on the inside of the building, to remind us of what went on before.

Coal chute in Gaddum building

I can remember playing on the coke heap and getting dirty. 

– Gaddum resident 1946-1950

Take the basement in the buildings, for example. At Inscape (formally Gaddum) a coal chute remains, built to help with the heating of the building. A hot water boiler, fuelled by coke, was used to pipe hot water through the home. Coke would be delivered to the estate on lorries and tipped onto the back lawn. This was then shovelled by the residents into an external coal door, which ran to the basement next to the boiler. The boiler was kept stoked by the gardener. 

Those who lived in the Homes in the 1950s remember the arrival of the coal lorry:

I remember the lorries turning up at the back of the lawn there, tipping up. We used to shovel it down into the bottom there.

– Gaddum resident 1946-1950

Of course this method of heating changed not long after this. The Clean Air Act of 1956, reduced the use of coal burning as fuel and required the use of cleaner fuels. Consequently, the coal chutes were no longer used and were bricked up for security reasons; they are now an interesting reminder of how things used to be.