Culture in Salford

Salford-born Marxist playwright, polymath and songwriter Ewan MacColl famously memorialised the Lower Broughton of his childhood in ‘Dirty Old Town’ (1949). The song is suffused with a warm nostalgia for ship sirens and steam trains, but closes with a chilling vision of the district being razed to the ground. ‘My relationship with Salford has been a love-hate one’, MacColl explained towards the end of his life (1915-1989). ‘I can’t bear the place. At the same time, everything I do, everything I’ve ever written, is to some extent informed by my experiences in Salford.’ These tensions that MacColl identifies—between pride and shame, powerful identification and disavowal, firmly rooted identity and desire for the freedom of flight and self-reinvention—are recurrent motifs running through the extraordinary culture that Salford has generated over the years. Just as the city has become a key location of research into the social pressures created by the rhythms of industrialisation and de-industrialisation, it also has a cultural significance disproportionate to its size. Above all, it has long been central to the ways in which those in Britain and beyond imagine ‘the north’.

The gloomily funny paintings of L.S. Lowry (1887-1976), now on permanent display in the ultra-modern Arts Centre that shares his name, have played a leading role in fixing images of Salford in the nation’s consciousness; they also chronicle how Lowry, a student at the Salford School of Art, found himself as an artist in those smudgy, crowded townscapes shaped by the industrial revolution. His quirky style crystallised when he saw that such dark, satanic scenes were in truth full of opaque light, and his idiosyncratic way of seeing urban space and its inhabitants has in turn influenced some of the iconic films made in and about Salford. Like Lowry’s canvasses, Davis Lean’s adaptation of Hobson’s Choice (1953) found a subdued luminosity in its Salford locations, as did Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1961), a significant film of the British new-wave. These films, which explore questions of class, identity and social mobility, are knowingly invoked in more recent films dealing with life in the city, notably Damien O’Donnell’s East is East (1999) which explores the experiences of second-generation British Asians pulled between inherited beliefs and traditions and the allure of Western sensibilities.

A number of these films draw upon Salford’s literary heritage for material. Lean’s Hobson’s Choice is an adaptation of a play by Salford-born playwright Harold Brighouse (1882-1958)—the original version was premiered just over the river at the famous Gaiety Theatre on Peter Street in 1916—while A Taste of Honey was based on a play written by seventeen year-old Shelagh Delaney and premiered in 1958 at London’s Theatre Royal. Like many Salford writers, Delaney drew closely on autobiographical experience to convey the textures of life in a city famously described by Engels as a ‘very unwholesome, dirty and ruinous locality’ and by Salfordian social historian Robert Roberts as ‘the classic slum’.

Poet John Cooper Clarke has achieved memorable comic effects by magnifying the city’s grimmer aspects into dystopian proportions in poems such as ‘Evidently Chicken Town’ and ‘Beezley Street’. Like recent Salford autobiographical fiction such as Freda Lightfoot’s Watch for the Talleyman (2004), Cooper Clarke’s poems stand in a long tradition of Salford writing whose centrepiece remains Walter Greenwood’s debut novel Love on the Dole (1933). Heavily autobiographical and politically pessimistic, Greenwood (1903-1974) presents a world where those who dream of social change die young; the rest adapt themselves to their surroundings as best they can. The British Board of Film Censors considered the novel too sordid for cinema adaptation in the 1930s, but its celluloid moment came in the form of John Baxter’s Love on the Dole (1941). A novel recording the de-humanising effects of unemployment during the 1930s depression was considered appropriate for war-time adaptation in that, properly handled, it served to remind the British public of the world they were fighting to leave behind.

Much of the enduring music produced from Salford has overlapped with the city’s literary endeavours. Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’ was written for his Salford-set play with the Lowry-esque title Landscape with Chimneys (1951), while John Cooper Clarke’s work hovers intriguingly between music and performance poetry: in the course of his career he published books, cut records and opened for bands including the Sex Pistols and the Buzzcocks. As Salfordians are often quick to point out, the city also has a strong presence in music that has become synonymous with Salford’s better-known neighbour. Though not technically from the city, The Smiths were always keen to identify themselves with Salford’s down-at-heel chic: this took the form of alluding to the writings of Shelagh Delaney in their lyrics, using her photograph on their record covers, and holding photo-shoots in Salford. The gatefold photograph for their 1986 album The Queen is Dead, for instance, was taken outside the Salford Lads’ Club on St. Ignatius Walk; much more recently the band’s guitarist Johnny Marr reinforced the association between band and city when accepting an invitation to become an honorary professor in popular music at the University of Salford.

Tony Wilson (1950-2007)—broadcaster, impresario, publicist and mover and shaker behind key institutions of Manchester music including the Factory club, Factory records and the Hacienda club—originated from Salford, as did Shaun Ryder of the Happy Mondays and Bernard Sumner of Joy Division, New Order and Electronic. Sumner, who grew up in Lower Broughton fifty years later than Ewan MacColl, lived through the slum clearances pre-figured in that final verse of MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’. ‘The place where I used to live, where I had my happiest memories, all that had gone’, he’d later recall of a childhood severed between the family’s condemned terraced house and a flat in a tower block across the river. ‘For me Joy Division was about the death of my community and my childhood.’

Websites such as the Manchester and District Music Archive register the breadth of music made in and around Salford in the wake of pioneering bands such as Joy Division. The critical and commercial success of new bands such as the Ting Tings, who established themselves in an emerging cultural scene revolving around the city’s Islington Mill complex, indicate Salford’s ongoing cultural vibrancy.

Ben Harker