Rose Hill, Northenden

, 1875)]] In 1832, Rose Hill was bought by a wealthy cotton merchant, Absalom Watkin (1787–1861). Watkin was a social and political reformer, an anti corn law campaigner and a diarist, recording life in early Victorian Manchester. The house was inherited by Absalom's son, Edward Watkin. Edward was a noted transport entrepreneur who made his fortune as the managing director of nine separate railway companies at a time of vast expansion of the railways in mid-Victorian Britain. He was responsible for driving the expansion of the Metropolitan Railway into the rural areas outside London, and he also founded the Channel Tunnel Company in 1875, which undertook the first large-scale attempt to…

Rose Hill was built in the mid-19th century on a courtyard plan. The main entrance door has a large fanlight and is topped with a broken pediment supported by Tuscan columns. Absalom Watkin extended the house in the late 19th century with "a single storey loggia of the finest ashlar with Doric order pilasters ... toy battlements appear elsewhere. The interiors are especially fine." The house has spectacular stained glass: "The windows and doors all have very fine and imaginative Art Nouveau stained glass, with rose trees, birds and other flowers and plants and employing clear glass as part of the design."