Audio File
Michael Baron, Patricia Phoenix
Northern School Of Music (NSM)
2020

Michael Baron describes Oxford Road in the 1960s/1970s.

Michael: On Sydney Street there was a building opposite there called the Palace Hotel. Now I know the Palace Hotel now is a posh place, isn’t it.
Heather: Yeah.
M: What was a refuge building. But there was the Palace Hotel which was a bit dingy and goodness knows what sort of hotel it was but… Then the rest of All Saints there was a typewriter shop, there was a penny—No— you know, probably shilling in the slot for renting a television, and then there was maybe an art shop, and Johnny Roadhouse "I sell and buy everything”, a little tiny , the narrowest sweet shop you’d ever saw and another shop called Carroll Arden who claimed himself the stylist for the stars and he was a hair dresser and his writing was in beautiful but faded Art Deco style, the 50s Art Deco you know modern letters. And the stars he was the stylist were people who came to Hulme Hippodrome.
Whatever— Yeah, but he certainly did Elsie Tyler’s hair at one point. Pat Phoenix she was called. So it was quite a lively place and on the other side of the road there were three bus stops which are probably still there. We had to stand at the right one otherwise you couldn’t get the right bus into Manchester and there was also gents ladies below street’s convenience, All Saints Gardens, Loxford school, pub on the corner of Loxford Street itself and there was a huge chapel at the back of the All Saints, massive, which I think was a store warehouse when I was a kid, and the Manchester ear hospital was there. And it was proclaimed in big letters, painted on the front ‘Manchester Ear Hospital’. And on the other side of All Saints was the art school and Cavendish church. So it was big important spacious, you know Manchester’s a bit hemmed in now. You could see the sky though.
So that’s what it was like, it was a big place, big school

Part of the #NSM2020 project "A 20/20 Legacy: the centenary of the Northern School of Music" supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.