Bricks, Bars and Bobbies: The Story of Manchester’s Newton Street Police Station

U I Team
2 days ago
8 min read

Black and white collage: Left, a man grimaces as he's grabbed by the neck. Center, a woman with a feathered hat. Right, a man in a checkered cap. Background text. — A sample of three mugshots from the GMP Museum

Today I visited The Greater Manchester Police Museum, and I can't recommend it enough. It doesn’t look like much at first glance, just another red-bricked Victorian building nestled in the heart of Manchester’s Northern Quarter. But behind its arched windows and soot-blackened stone, 57 Newton Street has seen a hundred years of crime, community, and change. Before it became the Greater Manchester Police Museum, it was a fully functioning police station, a place where officers lived above their work, crooks were processed with methodical efficiency, and the heartbeat of industrial Manchester echoed through its tiled corridors.

Men in suits write at desks in a vintage classroom. Teachers stand nearby. Chalkboard filled with text in the background. Dim lighting. — Manchester City Police officers with their heads down in an education class at Newton Street Police Station in 1910, a building now housing the Greater Manchester Police Museum and Archives near Piccadilly Gardens.

The history of this building isn’t just about policing. It’s a social record. And the early 1900s mugshots taken inside its walls, now held in its archives, offer a rare and haunting glimpse into the lives of those who passed through its cells. I've added lots of the images here but they have a Flickr library that's well worth a look.

Sepia-toned portrait of a man with a serious expression, wearing a suit and tie. The worn background and edges suggest an aged photograph. — This is an image James McGrath. He was arrested in June 1881 for a failed attempt to blow up Liverpool Town Hall, linked to the Fenian movement. Tried that August, he was sentenced to life. His accomplice, James McKevitt, received 15 years and served time in Chatham Prison.

Built for the Beat: A Station for an Industrial City

When Newton Street Police Station opened in 1879, Manchester was one of the world’s fastest-growing industrial cities. Railways, canals, and factories had transformed it into a symbol of progress, but also brought with them overcrowding, poverty, and rising crime.

The amazing looking Clara Pendlebury was 32 years old when she made this appearance in Bolton Borough Police’s book of convicted criminals – known as the Thieves Book – in 1918. She is described as having dark brown hair, grey eyes and being of sallow complexion. The record also states she stood 4 feet 10 inches tall and was a native of Hindley. She was employed as a card room hand in the cotton spinning industry. On the 8th of April she was convicted of stealing two and a half pounds (lbs) of raw cotton. She was fined 40 shillings for the offence.

The city had already established a professional police force in 1839, modelled after Robert Peel’s London Metropolitan Police. But by the late 19th century, the need for more localised, residential police stations became clear. Newton Street was one of a new wave: multi-purpose buildings where officers could live, work, patrol and process suspects all under one roof.

Meet Albert Haycock of Heaton Mersey in Stockport. Albert, who was 21 years old when this picture was taken in 1907, wasconvicted of 2 counts of stealing iron on the 27th of November that year. He was sentenced to 12 days imprisonment with hard labour for each offence.

Its design followed Victorian principles of efficiency and discipline, a functional mix of charge office, holding cells, report rooms, stables, and upstairs accommodation. Constables lodged here with their families, climbing a narrow stairway each night to modest quarters above the cells they might have filled earlier that day.

A seated man in a top hat holds a cane, flanked by three standing policemen in uniform. Stone building background, serious expressions. Black and white. — Uniformed officers and a detective of Manchester City Police taken outside their police station in Newton Heath, circa 1880. Detectives of the day liked to dress well and this officer is no exception, looking rather splendid alongside his, somewhat crumpled, uniformed counterparts.

The Work of the Watchmen

Being a policeman in late Victorian Manchester was a tough job. Officers in stiff tunics and spiked helmets patrolled on foot, often covering up to 20 miles in a single shift. The streets could be lawless after dark, especially in areas like Ancoats and Angel Meadow, where gangs roamed, and drunken fights were commonplace.

Back at Newton Street, the charge office was the nerve centre of it all, a no-nonsense room where arrests were processed and suspects logged in longhand. The iron-barred cells, located directly behind, were dimly lit, with little more than a bench, a bucket and heavy wooden doors that shut with a final-sounding thud.

Manchester City Police officers learning shorthand at Newton Street Police Station in 1910. The building, which lies close to Piccadilly Gardens in the city's Northern Quarter, is now home to the Greater Manchester Police Museum and Archives.

Officers worked long hours and often saw the same names again and again, petty thieves, sex workers, fraudsters, drunkards and brawlers. It wasn’t glamorous. But it was consistent. The station provided a steady presence in a rapidly changing city.

Capturing Crime: Mugshots and Manchester’s Underclass

Some of the most remarkable remnants from Newton Street’s working years are its early 20th-century mugshots, many taken between 1900 and 1915. These photographs, now held by the Greater Manchester Police Museum, weren’t just for record-keeping, they became a form of social documentation.

Sepia-toned portrait of a serious man in a plaid scarf and dark coat against a plain background. Early 20th century style. — The scuttlers were gangs of young people, both male and female, that menaced the streets of Manchester and Salford towards the end of the nineteenth century. The had a specific way of dressing, often including brass tipped clogs, distinctive scarves and bell bottomed trousers, they carried weapons, which included belts, knives and guns and sported colourful names. Large-scale street battles or “scuttles” took place amongst the groups, and sometimes the numbers involved swelled to hundreds. This young man, 20-year-old William Brookes, obviously fell foul of Manchester City Police as this image appears in the forces criminal record book of 1890. Scuttlers were similar in nature to the London gangs known as hooligans, a name still in use today.

Captured using glass-plate or early film photography, the mugshots are startling in their honesty. There’s no attempt to flatter or dramatise, just plain faces, lit by harsh light. Some are defiant. Others have clearly accepted their fate. The clothing, waistcoats, work shirts, crumpled caps, tells of hard labour and harder lives.

The unimpressed face of Edith Towell, a domestic servant and petty thief, who repeatedly came to the attention of the police during the last years of the 19th century. Born in Leamington but a resident of Rochdale, she first appears in police records when convicted of stealing wearing apparel on the 28th September 1889. She was fined 40 shillings by the local magistrate but it doesn’t seem to have been a deterrent for she was back in court in Liverpool only days later when sentenced to 3 months for stealing a gold watch and £4 3s 4d. There then seems to have been a lull in her criminal activity, or at least her appearances before the court, as she does not appear in records again until 1895. This time she is convicted of stealing £7 in cash and £40 in Co-operative store cheques in – where else but the town synonymous with the Co-operative movement – Rochdale. Her story becomes confused at this point but in 1895 she appears to have served prison sentences in both Coventry and Worcester before making her final appearance on police files after being sentenced at Salford Sessions to 3 months for stealing wearing apparel and a watch in 1897. After this time she is not heard of again. Her date of birth isn't known but she is said to have been 36 years old in 1895.

Some of the images you'll see of the people who had been arrested show them displaying their hands to the camera. According to one of the volunteers I spoke to, this was a way of identifying the women arrested, as many of them were missing fingers due to the dangerous mill work that employed so many at the time.

Black and white vintage photo of a woman with a decorative hat. Accompanying text details name, age, trade, and physical features. Mood is solemn. — In this image from 1893 the imressive hat of Mary Elizabeth Smith makes her looks more like she is going to a wedding than to prison. However her long list of offences, including larceny, obtaining money under false pretences, and more strangely “wearing apparel” saw her in and out of custody several times in the early 1890s. Perhaps the hat formed part of the evidence for her latest arrest?

One photo shows a 14-year-old boy with “larceny” scribbled beneath his name. Another captures a woman in her fifties, arrested for “drunkenness and riot.” Many were repeat offenders, not hardened criminals, but products of the poverty and pressure that defined life for the urban poor, a lot of the convicted children had been arrested for stealing food.

Next to the photos, handwritten ledgers recorded height, occupation, physical marks, and distinguishing features. These details now offer clues to lives otherwise forgotten. And collectively, they show a city struggling with the fallout of rapid industrialisation.

Cool nickname of the day - Patrick ‘Paddy the Devil’ Cox is photographed by Manchester City Police in the 1890s. Cox, alongside his legitimate profession as a sailor also operated a potentially lucrative sideline as a ‘coiner’ in Victorian Manchester. Coining was the practice of clipping precious metal from the edge of coins or reproducing coins in their entirety but from base metal.To prevent coining, much currency was designed to be difficult to reproduce or interfere with. If you look around the edge of a modern English pound coin you will notice the words ‘DECUS ET TUTAMEN’ engraved into the rippled edge. The term means ‘An Ornament and Safeguard’ and its origins date back to the Stuart era.The information about Cox’s crimes is sparse in this early Manchester City Police intelligence ledger. We learn little of Cox but the fact that he was born in Manchester, has a sallow complexion and, among other features, had six moles on his left arm. He may well have been a lucky man and only been sent to prison. Had he been operating a century or earlier it is likely he would have received death penalty.

In Wartime and Beyond

As Manchester modernised, Newton Street remained a constant. During World War I, the station played a key role in managing civil order, with officers tasked with enforcing blackouts and anti-German demonstrations. Later, during the Second World War, it coordinated local defence, responded to bomb damage during the Blitz, and dealt with wartime rationing offences.

James Sutch was 19 years old when this image was taken in 1920. He had just been fined £3.15s (three pounds and fifteen shillings) at court in Bolton. His crime was the theft of a bicycle. His past – like his hat – seems somewhat chequered. In 1917 he had been bound over fro twelve months for the same offence. In between, he had been fined 10/- (ten shillings) for the offence of gaming.

In the post-war years, the job changed again. Radios replaced whistles. Fingerprinting and forensics were introduced. By the 1960s, Manchester was grappling with new issues, organised crime, youth gangs, and protest movements. But Newton Street soldiered on, absorbing these changes, until the building finally reached the end of its operational life in 1979.

The End of the Beat — and the Echoes That Remain

After the closure of the station, many other former police buildings across the UK were sold off or demolished. Newton Street, however, was spared. And though it was eventually repurposed as the Greater Manchester Police Museum in 1981, its architectural integrity remains largely untouched.

Thomas Murphy is ‘assisted’ by a person unkown while having his photograph taken in this police image from the 1880s. Murphy was convicted of a variety of crimes - chiefly stealing purses – by courts in Yorkshire and Lancashire from the 1880s to 1890s. This image is taken from an early Manchester City Police intelligence ledger.

Today, its cells still line the rear corridor. The charge office desk is still there, worn smooth by decades of paperwork. Visitors who pass through the same doors that once ushered in thieves, fraudsters and frightened children often comment on the eeriness, as if the past never quite left.

And in a sense, it hasn’t. Because this building didn’t just police Manchester’s history, it lived it.

Sources:

Greater Manchester Police Museum Archives – www.gmpmuseum.co.uk
“Manchester Police: A History” – Manchester City Council Heritage Services
“Policing Manchester: Crime and Social Order 1830–1940” – J.A. Sharpe, Manchester Historical Review
Newton Street Station records and image holdings, cited in Greater Manchester Police Museum curator notes (2021–2024)
Historic England – Newton Street building listing and architectural notes: historicengland.org.uk
British Newspaper Archive – Manchester Guardian articles on Newton Street arrests (1900–1940)
Oral histories from retired GMP officers, collected by the Museum’s Community Heritage Project (2018–2022)