| Ellor Street Redevelopment, Pendleton | Professor R H Matthew of Edinburgh University, one of Scotland’s leading consultant architects, has accepted a commission to prepare a master plan for Salford’s Broad Street redevelopment scheme which will cost £9 million. It includes a major re-housing project, reconstruction of a main shopping area, provision for a civic centre and major improvements on the A6. [Guardian 12 April 1961]
Bounded by Broad Street (A6), Cross Lane, Churchill Way and Fitzwarren Street, and centred on Ellor Street, the area was one predominantly of working class housing built in the first half of the nineteenth century which by the 1930s had become synonymous with some of the worst slums in the country. Better known as “Hanky Park,” it was the setting for Walter Greenwood’s novel Love on the Dole (1933) and Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey, (1958), as well as one source for L S Lowry’s typical northern landscapes. Desperate to eradicate all traces of the area’s past. the City Council determined upon a scheme of total redevelopment, replacing all the terraces with high-rise blocks by 1968. But while successful in removing the physical evidence, the fiction remained. Only weeks before Matthew’s appointment and the commencement of demolition work, Granada Television broadcast the first episode of Coronation Street on 9 December 1960.
The planned civic centre was not progressed. Following Local Government reorganisation in 1974, Salford Town Hall and Civic Centre was moved to Swinton while the art gallery and theatre was finally built some forty years later as The Lowry at Salford Quays.
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