Ordsall Hall’s special relationship with weddings

Throughout Ordsall Hall’s rich and colourful 800-year history, marriages and weddings have featured heavily from the thirteen generations of the Radclyffe family who lived there from around 1335 to 1662, to St Cyprian’s Church which sat almost attached to the Hall, from 1899 to 1963.

Ordsall Hall was home to the first recorded place of worship in the historic ‘Salford Hundred’ area – which covered most of what we now know as Greater Manchester. A Licence was granted in 1360 by the Bishop of Lichfield for the (Catholic) Radclyffes of Ordsall to have their own chapel in the grounds, which was placed on the north side of the Hall where our reproduction Tudor knot garden now lies.

In time, the Radclyffe family would probably have had lavish weddings elsewhere: at the Collegiate Church (now Manchester Cathedral) or other large churches of the area, but would have held wedding feasts and celebrations in the Great Hall at Ordsall. One such wedding was that of Sir John Radclyffe to Lady Anne Asshawe on 2 May 1572. The wedding took place at Standish Parish Church (where Lady Anne came from) but the feast is believed to have taken place at Ordsall Hall, which was to be her new home.

After the Radclyffes lost the Hall in 1662, its religious significance dwindled somewhat. Then in 1897, under the ownership of Earl Egerton of Tatton, the house was restored by Manchester architect Alfred Darbyshire and turned into a Church of England clergy training college. As part of this restoration, St Cyprian’s Church was founded in 1899. Built on the site of the original Radclyffe chapel, around 1830 weddings in total were held at the church between it’s opening in 1899 and 1963 when it was sadly demolished due to subsidence.

The first wedding to take place at St Cyprian’s was that of William Lawson and Emily Jones on the 22 of July 1900. The couple lived on Rixton Street, which no longer exists but ran directly down west side of Ordsall Hall. The area is now inside the Hall’s grounds, where the service road and raised beds now lie. The last wedding took place on the 9th of February 1963 (less than a month before the church closed on the 3 of March) and joined Arthur Cooper and Bernice Raines – both were also Ordsall residents.

In the present day, Ordsall Hall is licensed for civil wedding ceremonies on Fridays and Saturdays.

For more information on weddings at Ordsall Hall please contact Sue Bainbridge via email at ordsallhallweddings@scll.co.uk or call 0161 686 7444.