Wrens Nest Bramhall Lane

I think this house was on Blossoms Lane, Handforth, Cheshire, at its junction with Moss Lane and Moor Lane. I traced it via the George Best and Harry Yeung ownerships as reported in newspapers, finally getting a postcode from a planning application. The identification was confirmed from the 1910 Ordnance Survey map available online as part of Cheshire’s online Tithe maps.
In 1911 Wren’s Nest was occupied by one John Henry Colston Steer – landscape gardener. The census records for that year and earlier show that he had travelled widely, presumably in pursuit of work.
He was born in 1875 in Wortley, Barnsley, Yorkshire. His father, who was also a gardener, came from Surrey and his mother from Somerset. In 1881 he was with his family in St Asaph in North Wales. Ten years later 16-year-old John Henry, gardener, was a boarder in a household in Leyland, Lancashire.
In 1898 he married a girl from Corwen, Merionethshire and the 1901 census shows they were boarding in Oakfield Road, Altrincham, Cheshire. He was a Foreman Gardener and his wife a dressmaker.
The places where their children were born suggest they were in Llanberis, Caernarvonshire in 1905 and in Stillorgan, Dublin, Ireland in 1907. They had a penchant for long personal names: the children were called Annie Augusta Colston Steer and Percy Joseph Colston Steer.
He died in Doncaster in 1924, aged 49.
Further back, in the 1840s, the cottage and the land it stood on, together with an adjacent meadow, were owned by Peter Pearson. Samuel Downs occupied both these plots – which together only amounted to 2,500 square metres, or about 0.6 of an acre. These facts were all recorded at the time when the tithes paid to the local vicar were being converted from payment in kind – 1 in 10 of your lambs, 10% of the oats you grew etc, to the payment of an equivalent value in money.