Between L.S. Lowry and Coronation Street: Salford Cultural Identities
Susanne Schmid
Abstract: Salford, “the classic slum”, according to Robert Roberts’s study, has had a distinct cultural identity of its own, which is centred on the communal ideal of work- ing-class solidarity, best exemplified in the geographical space of “our street”. In the wake of de-industrialisation, Roberts’s study, lyrics by Ewan MacColl, L.S. Lowry’s paintings, and the soap opera Coronation Street all nostalgically celebrate imagined northern working-class communities, imbued with solidarity and human warmth. Thereby they contribute to constructing both English and northern identities.
Key names and concepts: Friedrich Engels - Robert Roberts - Ewan MacColl - L.S. Lowry - Charles Dickens - Richard Hoggart - George Orwell; Slums - Escaper Fiction - Working-class Culture - Nostalgia - De-industrialisation - Rambling - Coronation Street.
1. Salford as an Imagined Northern Community
For a long time, Salford, situated right next to the heart of Manchester, has been known as a place that underwent rapid and painful industri- alisation in the nineteenth century and an equally difficult and agonis- ing process of de-industrialisation in the twentieth. If Manchester, the former flag-ship of the cotton industry, has been renowned for its beautiful industrial architecture, its museums, and its economic suc- cess, Salford has been hailed as “the classic slum”, as in the title of Robert Roberts’s seminal study about Salford slum life in the first quarter of the twentieth century (Roberts 1990, first published in 1971). The equation of “Salford” and “slum”, however, dates back further than that. Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England, written in 1844/45, casts a gloomy light on a city made up of dwellings hardly fit for humans:
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If we cross the Irwell to Salford, we find on a peninsula formed by the river, a town of eighty thousand inhabitants […]. All Salford is built in courts or narrow lanes, so narrow, that they remind me of the narrow- est I have ever seen […]. If, in Manchester, the police, from time to time, every six or ten years, makes a raid upon the working-people’s districts, closes the worst dwellings, and causes the filthiest spots in these Augean stables to be cleansed, in Salford it seems to have done absolutely nothing. (Engels 1973: 92).
Salford was a problem zone during much of the twentieth century, too. The 1930s economic slump hit the city badly, and from the 1970s on- wards, the remaining mills began to close down rapidly. A high petty crime rate, a high teenage pregnancy rate, the notoriously poor quality of housing as well as insufficient health care facilities contributed to making Salford stand out as one of Britain’s worst blackspots. If Man- chester has repeatedly hit the headlines in the last 15 years as the youthful centre of northern nightlife, as the newly emerging tycoon of cultural events (Cass 1996), Salford, unable to muster up a similarly glamorous setting, lies in the shadow of its neighbour. Nevertheless, Salford is much more than a Manchester without clubs: it has its own cultural history, much informed by the working-class people, although the agents of Salford’s history were by no means blue-collar workers only. My contribution aims to show how Salford cultural identities have been forged by resorting to (a) Roberts’s study The Classic Slum, one of the first widely circulated academic texts that constructed, the ideal of a close-knit northern English working-class community as seen from within, (b) folk-singer and activist Ewan MacColl’s lyrics, (c) L.S. Lowry’s paintings, and (d) one of Britain’s most famous and long-running soap operas, Coronation Street. Salford cultural identities need to be seen in the larger frame- work of constructions of “the North”, a fascinating yet strangely un- der-researched field.1 A recent study by Dave Russell, Looking North (2004), maps out the large number of differing, even contradictory images of the North and the mechanisms that lead to the view that the South is perpetually central, whereas the North is marginal. Although
1 Russell provides a comprehensive survey of images of the North and the dif- ferent media/fields through which these are transported (travel writing, litera- ture, speech, drama, film, TV, music, sports). The wealth of material he offers is a good starting point for further explorations of an area situated off the aca- demic’s beaten tracks.