Alma Road
including Maltkiln Street & The Maltings
Alma Road was built in the 1850s as Rotherham town began to expand outwards. It joins Moorgate to Westgate. I believe that it was named after the Battle of Alma in the Crimean War. In its heyday the area around the road was important and contained Rotherham Workhouse (later Moorgate Hospital), several nice houses, Alma Road School and Bentleys Brewery. Later on South Grove Secondary School was built at the top of the road.
Alma Road now form part of the rat run that avoids the centre of town and the buildings are for the most part derelict or gone. A high technology business park has been built there on the site of the old South Grove School. As is usual in Rotherham you are fighting for a parking space in the car parks. This new Moorgate Crofts Technology Park has now arisen on this site has been built in a variety of styles with some of the buildings incorporating recycled Rotherham Red Sandstone which had been kept and stored after the demolition of Orgreave Hall.
The buildings are supposed to be environmentally friendly and I understand that at least one of them has a roof garden to insulate the building and provide respite for the staff.
In 1838, the Rotherham Poor Law Union purchased a piece of common land (five acres of land at the top of Alma Road) from the Feoffees for the sum of £1000. Loans were granted to complete the building work and the workhouse was opened by July 1840. In 1848 an infirmary was set up to look after the health of the paupers which was the beginning of the hospital on the site.
This is all that now remains of Rotherham Workhouse, also known over the years as Alma Road Institution, The Mount, The General and Municipal Hospital and Moorgate Hospital.
The workhouse hospital was used throughout the various epidemics that hit Rotherham in Victorian times, as a refugee centre in World War I and a home for wounded soldiers. I am not sure when it shut as a workhouse but when my grandmother was admitted to Moorgate Hospital early in the 1970s she was convinced we had put her "In t'Workhouse" which was the worst thing that could happen to a person of her generation. Moorgate Hospital closed when the new Rotherham Hospital opened at Oakwood and these few bits of stonework are all that remain.
After some years of dereliction this house was restored in 2000, and is now a family home again. One espondent thought it was the brewery manager's house. In 2008 it looks as if the front door and at least one of the windows is boarded up.
Alma Road School, both the Infant and Junior School are still standing, though. It was a Board School built in 1896 as the population of Rotherham expanded and especially to provide education for the children of the miners working at Rotherham Main and living in the tenements of Canklow. The Infants School is now the Maltings Centre - a social centre for Canklow. I'm not sure what the Junior School is used for these days.
The road down the side of the Junior School is Maltkiln Street, whilst the Maltings is a road opposite where housing was built on the site of the old brewery. These names are the last remaining remnant of Bentleys Brewery which once stood hereabouts. More about the brewery at History - Trade & Industry - Brewing - Bentleys Brewery.