Radicals in the Park

I've spent the last couple of evenings listening to local bands Blossoms and New Order playing a few miles away at Wythenshawe Park, the sound carrying clearly across south Manchester.

Wythenshawe Park is the last remnant of the country estate of the staunchly Royalist Tatton family and surrounds their former home Wythenshawe Hall, besieged by Parliamentary forces in the Civil War, which makes it a bit ironic that since the late sixties a statue of their republican nemesis Oliver Cromwell, first erected outside Exchange Station in Manchester city centre in 1875, has stood there, after the road layout around the original location was altered. Queen Victoria once expressed her distaste for the statue of a man who had killed her ancestor King Charles I before a visit to Manchester, and since its move to Wythenshawe Park it has been attacked numerous times because of Cromwell's genocidal policies in Ireland (when he was a bus conductor in the early sixties, my dad witnessed Irish drivers opening their cab windows to spit at it as they went past).

Near the north east corner of the park is a street of modern housing called Hallas Grove. I'm guessing that it's named after the revolutionary socialist activist Duncan Hallas who grew up just round the corner on Sale Road in Northern Moor, served an engineering apprenticeship at the massive MetroVicks factory in Trafford Park where my grandad worked as a toolmaker, and then became a leader of the International Socialists/Socialist Workers' Party, although I'm a bit puzzled as to why the middle of the road Labour types on Manchester City Council would bestow his name on it.