Welcome to Marple Local History Society website

AVRO Visit 2025

MLHS to AVRO

This small museum is dedicated to the aircraft industry which, until early 2010s, constructed and maintained mainly military aircraft on site. Anyone from the area will probably remember the airshows which took place each summer.

AVRO was a British Airplane manufacturer started by Alliot Verdon Roe in Manchester. Around the walls is a timeline detailing all the planes developed by AVRO starting with the first plane in 1909 through acquisition by Crossley Motors, being sold to Armstrong Siddeley (later Hawker Siddeley) and finally to aircraft built by British Aerospace later BAE ending in 2010. AVRO moved to Woodford in 1924 and saw the construction of many different aircraft, too many to name, but chiefly amongst those many would recognise; the Lancaster bomber, developed at short notice in 1943 by the designer Roy Chadwick by lengthening the wings of his Manchester bomber and the inclusion of 4 Rolls Royce Merlin Engines. Sections of each aircraft would be moved through the local streets and constructed at Woodford. By 1945 5-6 planes could be produced per day.

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February 2025: ‘Railway Navvies’

Kevin Harrison

The tidal wave of the industrial revolution swept though Britain, changing it from an agricultural land to one driven by coal and growing crowded towns. Technological change may have been at the forefront and millions of pounds of capital backing was used as to back ambitious schemes, as well as the odd audacious one. But, more than any other factor, it was physically transformed shovel load by backbreaking shovel load by the navvies.

Reaching the three-quarter point in our programme of talks for the 2024/2025 season, we welcomed Kevin Harrison on Monday 17th February to the Methodist Church. That evening Kevin revealed the story of that lost tribe of workers, Navvies.

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