History of Levenshulme and Cheadle Hulme station layouts.

Levenshulme station has a strange layout. The station has two platforms, and they are situated above street level, accessed by staircases on either side of a road bridge. Unusually, though, there is an intermediate level between street level and platform level, which has the ticket office counter and a subway connecting the two sides. This subway is one of the most cramped and dingy I've used anywhere.

Why is it like this? Why didn't they just build a ticket office at street level? This would allow the subway to be much more spacious as it wouldn't have such a constrained height. It would also probably make installing lifts for step-free access more straightforward, although I doubt they were thinking that far when they built it, unfortunately...

Down the line at Cheadle Hulme, there is a similar setup where the ticket office is at an intermediate level between street and platform. In this case, I have heard the explanation is that the ticket office was built at street level, but the street was then lowered to allow larger vehicles to fit under the rail bridge. Is this correct? And is this also what happened at Levenshulme?

It seems less plausible at Levenshulme than at Cheadle Hulme. At Cheadle Hulme the ground slopes steeply up from the station in all directions, and until they added some exterior cladding a few years ago, you could see a line in the ticket office building where the construction changes from brick to concrete (this was, I assume, the old street level). At Levenshulme, the road is pretty much flat, and the ticket office building looks like it was designed like that (there is no visible change at any particular height, and the staircase is inside the building).

My unreliable memory: my mother used to live on Bellfield Avenue in Cheadle Hulme, so it was my grandparents’ house when I was growing up, and in the 1960s Station Road was straightened (to allow the building of an office block closer to the railway line first occupied by the AA) and lowered under the railway lines. I went to school by train in Cheadle Hulme in September 1970 and the work had been done by then - the footbridge is a recent addition and the only way between the platforms was via the steps down/up to the road.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/243615675756635/posts/2267408176710698/ has some information.

Levenshulme I occasionally used from school starting in 1973 (I moved to Manchester Grammar School) but I never though about its layout.

The website below has many photos of both Levenshulme stations over the years, the present station formerly being known as Levenshulme North. It includes some excellent shots of the station being rebuilt in 1959 which may help to answer some of your questions.

Re Cheadle Hulme

Here's an explanation about the layout taken from the Wikipedia Cheadle Hume Railway station page

The lines to Crewe and Stoke-on-Trent were electrified in 1960 and 1967 respectively. In 1963, due to the growing amount of traffic travelling down Station Road, it was decided that the parts of the road that pass under the bridges should be widened, as they were becoming a bottleneck. The bridge carrying the line to Stoke was upgraded first. The road under it was more than doubled in width and the bridge height was increased by 3 feet (0.9 m) allowing double-decker buses to pass underneath.

Work on the second bridge commenced on 8 June 1965, increasing the height and width in accordance with Ministry of Transport requirements. Around this time, the station itself was upgraded: the platforms were demolished and replaced, and new waiting shelters were erected. A new booking office, facing Station Road and approached by a flight of stairs, was built alongside a new booking lobby, toilets and staff accommodation. New entrances to the platforms were built and the station was installed with electric lighting. Station Road was significantly widened and rerouted slightly in 1967, in a further attempt to accommodate increasing traffic.

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