FORGOTTEN MANCHESTER: The unusual tale of the Shudehill gun shop

Once upon a time, before the arrival of Shudehill’s famous kebab shops, there once stood an establishment selling guns.

As one Redditor so eloquently put it, Mancunians could ‘pop down to the Printworks for a few cheap pints and a Nando’s, and pick up a shotgun on the way home’.

Yep, thanks to the T. Stensby & Co shop, people back in the day could actually get their hands on firearms in the city centre, an idea that makes many of us feel slightly uneasy in today’s current climate.

Pete Birkinshaw / Flickr

Unsurprisingly, T. Stensby & Co is no more, having been brought down by UK’s complex history with gun laws and regulations.

According to the its old website, T. Stensby & Co opened all the way back in 1810, and managed to stay open and flogging firearms right up until 2011, a remarkable feat for any shop in that time period, let alone a gun shop.

The shop’s trade was an uphill struggle almost from the get-go, however, thanks mainly to the introduction of the Vagrancy Act of 1824 fourteen years after its grand opening.

The act was brought in by the government in an attempt to curb the large number of people roaming around the country with weapons brought back from the Napoleonic Wars, giving the police free rein to arrest ‘any person with any gun, pistol, cutlass, bludgeon or other offensive weapon… with intent to commit a felonious act’.

T. Stensby & Co

And that wasn’t the end to the shop’s struggles, as this law was followed by the Night Poaching Acts of 1828 & 1844, the Game Act 1831, and the Poaching Prevention Act 1862, which made it an offence to shoot game illegally by using a firearm.

Luckily for T. Stensby though, 1870 brought about the Gun Licence Act which allowed a person to obtain a licence to carry a gun outside his own property. It cost about £30 and could be bought over the counter at the Post Office.

Read More: FORGOTTEN MANCHESTER: The grisly story of the Taylor murders on King Street

Throughout this time, it was also possible to buy guns for the use of sporting events, were of historical interest or indeed were needed for pest control. 

So because of this, T. Stensby spent most of its time producing and selling guns, as their dated website proclaims, ‘primarily for shooting sports and the gun trade’.

T. Stensby & Co

The shop also offered repair work if your gun was a little on the rusty side, and also famously sold BB Guns – gas powered pellet guns and crossbows – which were proudly displayed in their windows for years.

Though T. Stensby’s wasn’t without controversy over the years; in 2004, The Mirror named and shamed the business after they sent in an undercover youngster to buy a gun in an investigation into Britain’s ‘shambolic’ gun laws at the time. 

The article, headlined in a tabloid-appropriate ‘BOY, 14, BUYS KILLER GUNS’, details how a fourteen-year-old boy was able to purchase weapons from four gun shops around the country, T. Stensby’s included.

According to the article, he was sold a Umarex pistol for £145, a CO2 powered BB gun. 

Reddit

The assistant in the shop who sold the young boy the gun allegedly explained: “There’s so much fake ID around we find it better to ask questions. I don’t believe I’ve sold a gun to a fourteen-year-old.”

Things didn’t get much better for T. Stenby’s after the damning article, with the shop eventually facing permanent closure at some point in 2011. 

Today, if you take a wander down Withy Grove, there is no evidence of T. Stendby’s having ever existed, but instead the Arndale Shopping Centre, an abundance of new and modern apartment blocks and, most prominently, loads of kebab shops. 

Who can complain?