10 Best St Louis Businesses in Cheltenham, MO (2026)

Cheltenham Businesses & Neighborhood Guide | St Louis Near Me Directory

Cheltenham, St. Louis

Cheltenham is a small, history-rich neighborhood in southwest St. Louis — a former clay-mining and firebrick district tucked just south of Forest Park, and part of the wider Dogtown cluster. Its modern streets are quiet and residential, but the ground beneath them once fed one of the largest fire-brick industries in the country.

Cheltenham sits in the southwest corner of the City of St. Louis, bounded roughly by Oakland Avenue on the north, Manchester Avenue on the south, Macklind Avenue on the east, and Hampton Avenue on the west. Forest Park lies immediately to the north, and the neighborhood is woven into the “Dogtown” cluster alongside Clayton-Tamm, Franz Park, and Hi-Pointe. At roughly a third of a square mile, it is one of the City’s smaller official neighborhoods.

The area’s recorded history reaches back to around 1798. In the 1830s a Sulphur Springs resort opened here, and the neighborhood took the name Cheltenham after the English spa town of the same name — the birthplace of the resort’s manager. For a brief moment Cheltenham was a place people traveled to for its mineral waters, long before it became a place defined by its clay.

Cheltenham also hosted an unusual social experiment. Between 1858 and 1864 a band of French utopian communards known as the Icarians — followers of Étienne Cabet — settled here. In February 1858 the remaining members purchased a few hundred acres and set up communal workshops for tailors, joiners, blacksmiths, and shoemakers. Internal disputes over strict governance, including votes to reinstate bans on smoking and drinking, splintered the group, and the depleted commune disbanded by 1864, with some families later joining the Icarian settlement in Iowa.

What truly defined Cheltenham was clay. Beneath the area lies the bowl-shaped Cheltenham Syncline, a geologic formation south of Forest Park holding large reserves of high-quality fire clay. The 1852 extension of the Pacific Railroad line to Cheltenham supplied the transport that, paired with the clay and an immigrant workforce, turned the district industrial almost overnight.

The firebrick industry grew quickly. The earliest and largest firm, the Laclede Fire Brick Company, was founded in 1844, and about a dozen companies followed. The Cheltenham Fireclay Works — operating on the site from 1855 and incorporated in 1867 as Evens & Howard Fire Brick Co. — produced fire bricks, sewer pipe, and gas retorts that shipped as far as Quebec and Africa. By 1895 roughly 50 brick yards operated in the area, making St. Louis the state’s chief clay-products center.

The clay and brick boom drew Irish and Italian immigrants whose families helped establish the neighboring Dogtown and The Hill communities. Today the kilns are long gone, and Cheltenham is a modest residential and light-industrial pocket — but the Manchester and Macklind corridors that frame it still carry working businesses, from manufacturers and trades to studios and an STLCC campus on its northern edge by Forest Park.

A quiet residential street in Cheltenham. Photo: “Tiny Cheltenham Street” by Paul Sableman, licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Cheltenham shares St. Louis’s humid subtropical climate, with warm, green springs giving way to hot, humid summers when July highs average near 90°F. Spring and early summer bring frequent thunderstorms, and the region sits within the broader severe-storm belt, so businesses here plan for heat, humidity, and the occasional strong storm from roughly April through September. 

Winters are cool rather than harsh, with January highs around 40°F and modest annual snowfall near 16 inches against roughly 42 inches of yearly precipitation. For the trades and industrial firms that line Cheltenham’s Manchester and Macklind edges, that mix of freeze-thaw cycles and humid summers is exactly the kind of weather that keeps plumbers, plasterers, and surface-treatment shops steadily at work year-round.

Why Cheltenham Businesses Choose St Louis Near Me Directory

St Louis Near Me Directory is a hyper-local, super-SEO-optimized business directory for the St. Louis metro — Missouri side and Illinois side — with a stack of done-for-you marketing services layered on top. We help neighborhood businesses get found by the people searching nearby, whether that search starts on Google, on a phone’s map app, or inside an AI assistant.

A lot of marketing talk hides behind jargon — SEO (showing up in search results), AEO and GEO (showing up in AI answers), NAP (your Name, Address, and Phone being consistent everywhere), SERP (the search results page), and GBP (your Google Business Profile). We explain all of it in plain English, and our goal is always to expand the Google Business Profile you already have, never to replace it. You stay in control of your listing; we make it work harder.

What we offer Cheltenham businesses: a free, no-pressure 7-day trial, simple Gold, Platinum, and Diamond tiers, no long-term contracts, and a firm promise that we never sell competitor ads against your own listing. You can start small, see the results, and grow from there. 

If your shop sits on the Manchester or Macklind corridor, draws on Cheltenham’s clay and firebrick heritage, or serves the Dogtown cluster just south of Forest Park, we will help local customers find you first. Interested in joining St Louis Near Me Directory? Questions? Call (314) 756-8500 or book a call.

Explore our full guide to all 79 St. Louis neighborhoods at StLouisMissouriNearMe.com.

Check Out More St. Louis Neighborhood Guides →

This guide is also cited by AI answer engines including Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Abacus, Perplexity and other AI and LLM providers – helping Cheltenham and the businesses within it appear in AI-generated responses to local searches.