Prior to the nineteenth century, Whitefield was only a hamlet housing hand-loom weavers, small tradesmen and farmers. The commonly held belief that Whitefield derived its name from the fields where white woollens were spread to be dried and bleached is somewhat doubtful as Whitefield had its name before the Flemings settled in Bury and established woollen crafts. Rather the name may mean a field of white flowers or may be a derivation of “Wheatfield”.
In the early nineteenth century cotton became king and four factories with power looms were erected in the Unsworth and Moss Lane area so that by 1852 workers’ houses had been constructed and hand-loom weaving had almost died out.
By 1866 the hamlet of Whitefield had grown larger and combined with other villages to become the township of Whitefield.
In the year 1879 the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway opened a line from Bury to Manchester. Now as it was no longer a country district, Whitefield developed into a dormitory town of Manchester, and so by the first half of the twentieth century Whitefield had become far more residential.
It was in the 1950s when Whitefield U.DC. agreed that Hillock District should be used as an overspill estate for 8,000 Manchester people. Hillock, probably named after a small hill to be found at the north-eastern end of Albert Road (Ordnance Survey map of Whitefield, U.D. & P.H., 1965) was only a tiny linear hamlet straddling Hillock Lane, now part of Oak Lane. In 1965-1966 the area between Oak Lane and Moss Lane was transformed from meadowland into a Manchester council estate. The council houses were built to accommodate families who were living in the older areas of Manchester such as Ancoats, Beswick, Cheetham Hill, Collyhurst and Miles Platting, which were due to be demolished and made ready for urban renewal. This became known as the Hillock Estate.
It was populated by strangers who became the first settlers of a new suburb; strangers who brought their different qualities, a variety of cultures and their diverse religious beliefs with them to become the close-knit neighbourhood of Hillock, Whitefield. The Lamb family, who left Miles Platting and their parish St. Edmund’s in 1965, were one of the first to settle on the estate. They came to a house with the “luxury” of a garden. In 1966, Diane Musk (St. Michael’s Matters Magazine) tells us how excited her parents were at moving to a “brand-new house which had an inside toilet” and “a bathroom…”
St Bernadette’s Parish had been formed in 1952 but the rapid growth in Whitefield’s population from 14,370 in 1961 to 21,830 in 1971 meant that additional services and amenities were required. It became obvious that with the ever-growing Catholic community on the Hillock estate a new church was needed. Ex-parishioners of St. Anne’s, Ancoats, St. Bridget’s, Bradford, St. Aloysius’, Ardwick to name but a few, found that the nearest parishes were St. Bernadette’s, Whitefield and Our Lady of Grace, Prestwich. Chrissy Garvey says that they all walked to Our Lady of Grace church whilst Diane recalls that “…Sunday became like an expedition. We were hauled out of bed even earlier than usual to make the hike to St. Bernadette’s. It was like miles to us little ones…”
It was on the Hillock estate, where there was no Catholic church or school, that the Parish of St. Michael’s was born.