Argyle Street, originally Manchester Street, was named after the former Argyle House.
On Tompson’s map of 1803 this area was laid out as fields - there were no previous streets or buildings here.
Argyle Street had been planned by its developers Dunstan, Flanders, and Robinson in 1823–1824 but was begun in 1832. Cruchley’s map of 1827 shows its extent only planned as far as Dutton Street. The whole street was finished by 1849.
It absorbed the former Manchester Street and was then renumbered.
Charles Dickens’s sister Fanny and her husband Henry Burnett, a singer and music teacher, lived here in 1839.
The development was aimed at the working classes. However, it was decidedly middle-class in the 1841 census, with many resident barristers, clerks and a solicitor.
By 1848 the entire area was reported to be overcrowded and squalid. When G. H. Duckworth walked round the area in July 1898 as part of an update of Booth’s poverty maps, he noted the existence of a ’home for fallen women’ at the southwest end. His police escort, PC Robert Turner, told him there had been brothels in the street.
Manchester Street School was built here in 1880 and extended in 1902
