When laying new turf I know its best to lay in brickwork style going up & down the garden but has anyone tried laying lengthwise then width wise?

It doesn't matter whether you lay the turf widthways down the garden, or lengthways - what does matter is that the joins are not in the same place in each row. Oh how I wish I could do a drawing here . From your picture, the top end looks right, but not too sure about the nearer end, looks like some of the joins run in a line.
What I'm trying, badly, to say is let's suppose you've put down the first row of turf (and I always do it widthways!), then the second needs the end of each turf to be in the middle of the previous one (I mean the short end of each turf, not the long one!) so that you don't have a checkerboard pattern, as you say, more like brickwork.
And can I just say, if that's your partially laid turf, I can see there's a hump in it where it gets to the manhole cover - this is not good - every time you mow, you'll be scalping the hump round the manhole cover, so really, the level of the soil in the garden should be brought up to an inch (or a turf's depth) below the manhole, so that when the turf is down, it is flush with it. Otherwise, you will need to cut round the bump of the manhole so that there is no grass surrounding it, probably 2 or 3 inches clear all round.

Thanks for reply Bamboo.

The pattern is classic brickwork style at the moment and no adjoining lines. Just the way the picture has come out.

The manhole issue I know about, I lost light in the end last night to sort that out. Going to trim the edge so it's flush this afternoon when it stops raining.

I'm going to lay the rest lengthwise as i've been doing and a few width wise close to the brickwall this afternoon.

I realise I forgot to answer your original query! Inevitably, you always end up doing fill-ins that don't run the same way, in order to avoid having small pieces of turf to fill in gaps, so do it whichever way gives you the longest, widest bits of turf, sideways, lengthways, whatever. As long as the joins are tamped and slightly filled with a compost mix, and you don't let it all dry out, it'll be fine.

Well all finished now. Looks a little better than the picture suggests. Just gotta wait for it to start growing out them joins now! lol. The last section with all the cut outs took longer than to do than the 1st 3/4 of it. Remember returfing my Mum's lawn that is a 70ft X 40ft garden and that was easy compared to this as it was just 1 big rectangle that was split in 2 by the footpath. That was done nearly 10 years ago and still growing strong so must've done something right! lol