Stanley Place



During the 1770s Stanley Place and Stanley Street were developed. At the time of this sale the entire area was known as the Grey Friar's Close or, alternatively, as the Yacht Field. Stanley Place provides a virtually intact and complete example of a Georgian street of townhouses. One of these was once a nursing home during WW2. The first baby born in Chester on VE Day was a son for Mrs. Hodgson, Holly Cottage, Christleton, who arrived at 2.15am in the Chester Nursing home, Stanley Place.

Stanley place was not always as prosperous as it is now. The city's worst slums lay at its heart, just behind Town Hall Square. Little was done to remedy serious overcrowding there until the 1930s, when the city started to move slum dwellers to less visible housing estates in the suburbs. People from the clearance areas who could not afford council-house rents moved into formerly respectable neighbourhoods, where single rooms were sublet to whole families, so creating new areas of overcrowding. The results were evident in a complaint of 1937 that people in Watergate Street, Crane Street, Stanley Place, and Paradise Row stood in doorways with shawls over their heads, their children screaming, rolling iron hoops, and kicking footballs in the streets, or sitting in doorways.