RSSSalford: Phoenix of the north
Published: 2009-11-16 10:10:38
Fancy a weekend of art and culture? Then head for Salford. Yes, really, says Simon Horsford.(Sourced from Daily Telegraph.)
In July, it was claimed that almost two thirds of the BBC staff scheduled to move to Salford Quays had refused to go. Perhaps they had read Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England, where he described the area as "unhealthy, dirty and dilapidated". Or maybe they had heard Ewan MacColl's song Dirty Old Town with its original line: "Smelled the spring in the Salford wind/Dirty old town, dirty old town."
More fool them. Salford has a story to tell, and a good one at that, as I discovered on a weekend break. It's best known for the artist LS Lowry and as the inspiration for Coronation Street. During the Industrial Revolution, it was the greatest of cotton towns, part of a dynamic region that had been boosted by the building of the Manchester Ship Canal, and which saw its population rise from 12,000 in 1812 to 70,000 just 30 years later.