The site – which at times had dozens of trains an hour – used to see express trains, now it has a Tesco Express
Tom Burnett Content Editor
17:12, 10 May 2026
Didsbury Station as seen in 1910(Image: Public Domain )
In recent weeks the Manchester Evening News has looked at a number of long lost railway stations whose buildings have since been repurposed.
What was once Fallowfield railway station is now a Starbucks, and elsewhere the former Manchester Mayfield Station is undergoing another refurbishment.
In both cases, the original structures that served those areas are still standing. And they are far from the only examples, with Manchester Central being the most prominent of the city’s former station buildings still in use long after the final train departed.
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However not every station built during the great railway expansion across the region is still standing today.
Some have been completely erased, to the point you would never know they were there to begin with. Only a few traces remain of others.
Didsbury station is one of them.
Like many railway stations across the area, Didsbury started life in the late 19th century at the peak of the train network’s expansion across Britain.
The first trains started departing from the station in 1880 to destinations including London St Pancras, Sheffield, Derby and of course Manchester Central.
The clocktower is all that remains of Didsbury station(Image: Tom Burnett/Manchester Evening News)
The two-platform station’s location meant it saw a large number of services and after a new line opened in 1901 it was seeing around 38 trains an hour passing through in each direction. That is the kind of frequency the public transport planners (and users) of today could only dream of.
Unfortunately, while the station boasted an impressive timetable, time keeps on ticking and after the Second World War services to the station started to decline in frequency, and many Manchester Central to London express trains started calling at Cheadle Heath instead (these days many London-bound passengers will find themselves making a stop at Stockport instead).
Decline continued when the line from Manchester Piccadilly became the main route for rail services to the capital and the station was earmarked for closure in the Beeching Cuts of the 1960s.
The last train, a 6.45pm service to St Pancras in London, departed on January 2 1967, with the line closing completely to passing trains in 1969.
The station building itself would have something of an afterlife as a hardware store called – with some predictability – the Station Hardware Store.
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However it was not to last and the building became derelict before being knocked down. A new development has since been constructed on the site, including a Tesco Express and a number of other businesses.
One, quite prominent, part of the station remains however.
In 1910 a Portland stone memorial clocktower was constructed outside the station to commemorate John Milson Rhodes, a local philanthropist who had died the previous year and was remembered on the tower as ‘A Friend to Humanity’.
For almost 60 years passengers arriving or departing from the station would have walked past the tower. No doubt some gave it a passing thought as they rushed to their destination.
The trains have long gone (although there is now a Metrolink stop nearby), but the clocktower stands to this day.