Ads of Yore: R. Halliday and Co.’s Hothouses and Orchard Houses
Text-only version:
(Five 1st Prize Medals recently awarded in open competition.)
R. HALLIDAY & CO.,
Hothouse Builders and Hot-Water Engineers,
Royal Horticultural Works, Middleton, Manchester.
Vineries, Stoves, Greenhouses, Peach Houses, Forcing Houses &c. constructed on our improved plan, are the perfection of growing houses, and for practical utility, economy, and durability, cannot be equalled. We only do one class of work, and that is THE VERY BEST.
Conservatories and Winter Gardens designed architecturally correct without the assistance of any one out of our firm, from the smallest to the largest. Hot-water Heating Apparatus, with really reliable Boilers, erected, and success guaranteed in all cases. Melon Frames, sashes, Hotbed Boxes &c.. always in stock.
Plans, Estimates and Catalogues free. Customers waited on in any part of the Kingdom.
Our Maxim is and always has been—
MODERATE CHARGES. FIRST-CLASS WORK. THE BEST MATERIALS.
This advertisement, from The Gardeners Chronicle for October 13th 1873 caught my eye during a recent research trawl, because the hothouse builders and hot-water engineers in question were based in Middleton, and that’s an area of Manchester not a million miles away from where I live.
I did a bit of online digging and found that back in the day the firm constructed everything to small conservatories, such as the one that still stands at National Trust Sunnycroft, to massive complexes of glass and steel, including the vast complex of glasshouse ranges at the de Rothschild’s Waddesdon Manor. The latter once included “a huge, 400 ft. long wall with a ‘lean-to’ glasshouse, the so-called Fruit Range”, but they were all demolished in the 1970s.
Fruit Houses were an essential part of any large estate garden in the heyday of productive growing, back in the mid nineteenth to early twentieth century. Thomas Rivers, the renowned fruit nurseryman of Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, wrote a short book entitled The Orchard House: or, the Cultivation of Fruit Trees in Pots Under Glass – the second edition (1853) is the earliest available on Google Books, and the latest is the greatly expanded sixteenth edition (1879) which was edited by his son, T. Francis Rivers – in which he detailed the design, construction and operation of a variety of types of glasshouses, and the care of the fruit that could be successfully grown in them: apricots, peaches, nectarine, plums, cherries, figs, pears, grapes, apples, mulberries, strawberries and almonds.
I wonder how many of Rivers’ concepts and designs made their way into R. Halliday and Co.’s repertoire?
Hallidays of Middleton was still going in 1990, when they planned to put mark their 121st anniversary by putting together a booklet of photographs of their glasshouses past and present. But it seems the firm is long gone now, at least if the August 2025 Google Streetview image of their old address at 72 Market Place is anything to go by. Is that the ruin of the Royal Horticultural Works, lurking amidst the weedy greenery?
Unless of course Halliday’ upped sticks and moved premises at some point in the last couple of decades instead? Who knows, perhaps they’re still out there in some form, still producing precision-engineered glasshouse fruti ranges to the exacting standards of their Victorian-era founders? If you know, do please let me know, via the comments.
