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Manor Top Telephone Exchange


eldomsmith

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On the Manor Top beside the Park and Arbourthorne club is this out of place block of shops not contemporary with the surrounding buildings. It's always bugged me why since childhood. I was told the previous building was an air raid victim, but...

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A trip to old-maps reveals the site was previously a Telephone exchange - presumably Park Telephone exchange - mentioned elsewhere on this site, which was replaced by the exchange at Intake as the population density shifted.

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I contacted BT archives who said

Quote

It does seem to have been called Park and I do have an address of City Road, Sheffield, 2. It survived to 1967/9 before disappearing. It was Strowger based and in the 60s became part of the linked numbering scheme of Sheffield which meant that subscribers numbers would have changed from Park xxxxx to Sheffield xxxxx. Unfortunately we don’t have any further detail. Generally any plans were kept by the Ministry of Works who build building for the Post Office

Ministry of Works Archives are now held by the National Archives. Unfortunately searches and correspondence with them haven't turned up anything else..

Recently a photo of City Rd from 1935 showed telegraph poles with arms full of wires, presumably overhead routes before underground cabling works

But image searches at Library and Britain from above haven't yielded any success. Does anyone have any more info, or old photos showing the exchange? 

 

 

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This aerial shot was taken in 1938, but the telephone exchange is barely visible.... if that’s what the building under the red arrow actually is? It’s set back off the main road, at right angles to the other buildings, between the shops and the club car park. It looks like a single storey building, with a pitched roof, but it’s not very clear?

i looked on BFA and there are two shots of the area, this building tantalisingly off the edge of both shots!

Another post from some time ago mentions ‘Park’ exchange, but only in passing...

 

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Thanks RLongden, i'm sure that is it. As you say everything is so close but so far away. Frustrating thing is that this is within my lifetime and I can't recall it.

When I looked at the photo and the building shape on the map there are differences though.

 

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Interesting, Andy, though I don't quite grasp it. So, our phone number in Sheffield in the early '60s was 37605. What can I deduce from that number?

 

(And, I wonder, why on earth do I still remember it?)

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16 hours ago, andy1702 said:

Was 37605 your actual number, or is there a local code in front of that? What area were you in? It may be that although your area was called Sheffield, 37 could have been a code for your local exchange (say Park for example) under a thing called a linked numbering scheme. Then within that exchange your actual number was 605. This means anyone else connected to the same exchange would be able to reach you by dialling 605, but anyone in other parts of Sheffield would have needed to dial 37605. Finally other parts of the UK (assumiong STD was operational back then would have dialled the code for Sheffield (0742 I think?), then 37 to get to your local exchange, then 605. Unfortunately there aren't any hard and fast rules though, so this logic doesn't always work.

It was our actual number: Sheffield 37605. STD codes had not yet been introduced then as far as I'm aware. We were in Gleadless Avenue, Sheffield 12.

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