A delightfully detailed miniature village built in the front garden of Manchester family home has sadly now disappeared forever.
The home-made hamlet was built by council gardener Alan Teague, who sold the house in Levenshulme in 1993 following his retirement and moved to Devon. The tiny garden village included a pub, church, thatched cottages, post office, grocery and bakery with opening doors and lace-edged curtains.
It was built purely for the enjoyment of the neighbourhood and his family and even featured a sign that read: "You may walk around if you wish". Alan began building his budding empire in 1979, helped by his partner and fellow gardener, Nigel Joynson.
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Both Alan, a foreman gardener with Manchester corporation at Wythenshawe Park, and Nigel, the curator at the Fletcher Moss Botanical Gardens in Didsbury, spent years making their little empire look realistic. The project was finally completed in 1988 and came with intricate details like tiny glass windows and real electric lights.
The bakers even had miniature cakes in the windows and there were flowerbeds and tiny bicycles. Speaking to the M.E.N. in 1989, Alan said: "We got to a great deal of trouble to get the right materials. I've named one set of houses York Terrace, and the pub is named the Duchess of York after the baby hospital."
Another building had the names Joyce and Sylvia on the front. Alan has said in interviews that they were the names of his mother and his partner Nigel's mother.
The M.E.N. caught up again with Alan and Nigel again in 1992, a year before Alan took retirement and sold the house. By this time, word of the tiny village had spread and become something of a tourist attraction.
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Busloads of visitors would stop to see the miniature slice of old England in the unlikely setting of a Manchester suburb. Alan said: "People come in and many knock on the door saying how lovely it is."
Looking back on his creation in 2014, Alan spoke about how he went about building the model village, saying: "I did little drawings and did all the woodwork and built on flat stones in the attic then put everything together in the front garden. My dad then wired them all up so each one lit up from a switch in the kitchen and it looked lovely in Winter.
"All the children had grown up with it. There is a school not far from us and everybody used to stop on the way and have a look. It made me feel happy."
Sadly, following Alan and his family moving down south in the early 1990s, things didn't fare well for his labour of love. The buildings were not maintained and began to decay.
Despite the new home's owner saying it would be okay for Alan to take his creation apart and ship it to his new home, the cost involved proved too prohibitive. One person who became interested in the story back in 2014 was Hayley Flynn, who runs www.theskyliner.org, a website she set up to promote and preserve Manchester's heritage.
Click below to see a gallery of images of Alan and Nigel's lost miniature village.
Specialising in the city's unspoken stories and unseen sights, Hayley will be running tours for Manchester International Festival this summer, details of which can found on her website and Instagram account @skylinermcr. Kindly providing the images for this story of the, by now, decaying village taken in 2014, Hayley has some of Alan's original photos showcasing the village in its heyday on her website.
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Hayley said: "It was such a lovely thing to have discovered. It was great to see pictures of it when it was in its peak. I'd heard from a few friends who'd lived around there that had really vivid memories of it growing up."
Sadly photos, including Hayley's, are all that's left of Alan and Nigel's model village, which was demolished in 2018.
Does this story awaken any memories for you? Let us know in the comments section below.
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