Between 1968 and 1971, Michael Goodger documented the slum clearances in the Ordsall area of Salford across three films: The Changing Face Of Salford (1969), The Changing Face Of Salford Part Two (1970) and Salford: The Other Side (1971). Goodger, a lecturer at the then-new University of Salford (the Royal Technical College of Salford had become the University of Salford in 1967), caught a specific moment in the social fabric of the mid-20th century and preserved it in celluloid: a life which seems at times as though it should belong to more than fifty years ago but, paradoxically, has aspects which are still with us to this day.
The first film began with a shot of a LS Lowry painting and a title card revealed that the film was looking at Ordsall in 1968-69 before showing us a sight which is no longer possible: the Salford Docks with boats in them. The dockland is now where Salford’s Media City is based and illustrates how the economy and employment market has shifted from manual labour jobs to more ‘white collar’ work over the last fifty years. Over images of cobbled streets, chimney pots jutting out of the slate roofs of terraced houses, and smoke bellowing towers, the narration (written by Michael Dines and spoken by John Garner in all three films) spoke of the lives of the inhabitants of the streets: many leaving their homes to go to work, working at either the docks or in factories, while housewives cleaned the outside of the houses, scrubbing window ledges and using ‘donkey stones’ to scrub clean the doorsteps. Were it not for the film being in colour, one could easily mistake such footage from an early episode of Coronation Street - a show which, despite the sensation seeking plotlines of more recent years, was initially conceived to show what life was like in such a community as Ordsall, with terraced houses, corner shop, and pub close to hand. But even by the late 1960s, the position of the corner shop was under threat from the larger supermarkets - as the narration made clear.
In one of the more striking sequences of the three films, the camera shows a coalman making his way through the back alleys of the streets of Ordsall, walking toward the camera with his heavy load of coal before the camera switches to his point-of-view of the seemingly never-ending alleyway, before the camera swerves toward a green door and a blur transition moves us from the green of the door to the green of a weed poking out of the roof of a building. Another moment which again reinforces the changes in Ordsall over fifty years is the shot of a decrepit and abandoned Ordsall Hall, nowadays restored and a popular visitor attraction, with broken windows and greenery growing out of it. The cinematography of the three films was very impressive both in terms of how the film looked and how it had helped preserve images of Salford from half a century ago.
The two parts of The Changing Face Of Salford have not been without controversy over the last fifty years, however, in particular with their depictions of the ‘slums’ and their demolition, following the enactment of the Housing Act 1957. The first part contains shots of children playing in dirt in the roads (the new housing estates the slum tenants were being moved to promised there would be more ’green spaces' for children to play) or on wasteland where houses had once stood and features an extended sequence showing the inside of the ‘two up, two down’ terraced ‘slum home’ of the Prince family - husband and wife, and three children with a fourth living up the road at her grandmother’s. There was no running hot water (water had to be boiled on the stove), no indoor bathroom or toilet, and the interior was damp ridden with the wallpaper peeling off and newspaper lining the floors. All this for the grand sum of twenty-two shillings a week rent! The second film went into more detail of the ‘bloody slums’ as the then-Salford Corporation was buying slum housing stock up, rehousing the tenants in newly built high-rise social housing, tearing down the old homes. Here, the film’s narration went to great pains to explain that the now unfit for purposes slums had been built quickly and cheaply in the Victorian era to house the ‘working man’ - the greatest tool of the Industrial Revolution – and while the wealthy profited from that labour and lived in their grand houses, the worker who was paid a pittance felt they had to be grateful for their tiny home. The second part of the film differed from the first by having more voices of local residents, many of whom felt that Salford was losing its greatness as communities were being removed from their roots and rehoused, while the employees of the Salford Corporation slowly enacted their responsibilities in line with the government’s Housing Act, demolishing houses at one end of a street while residents were still in place at the other end, having to endure the noise of the bulldozers clearing the rubble (which would form the bedrock of the new motorways) but doing the best they could without more support at a national level. As the second film neared its end, there was a montage of voices from residents reminiscing about their lives in the slums, one even remembering when Trafford Park was an actual park and not an industrial estate! Despite the intentional overlap of the voices, this sequence provided a reminder of how people used to feel part of a wider community, something which feels somewhat of a more remote concept fifty years on.
Goodger’s third film, Salford: The Other Side, benefitted from more input from Salford Corporation than the previous films appeared to have done, and was keen to show off the parks and new social housing which replaced the old torn down terraces of the previous films. While fascinating to see such places as Buile Hill Park, Peel Park, and the University of Salford in the early 1970s, this film had more than a whiff of a “Visit Salford!” tourist advert. The cinematography, as with the previous films, was great, but there felt to be less of an involvement in the day to day life of people living in the city in this film.
Following the screening, there was a Q&A with Goodger (86 years old and still rocking a bow-tie after all these years) and people were invited to reflect on the films. Some spoke of how the slum clearances saw people forced to break away from their communities, as depicted in the films. Others, however, spoke of being ‘patronised’ and claimed the films did not reflect life as it really was back in the late 1960s, that the decrepit slum houses shown in the films were not representative of all of the so-called slum houses, that many took pride in keeping their homes clean, no matter how small and old the house was. While the filmmaker does indeed control what audiences see in their films (mediating the footage they capture) and can shape the narrative they wish to portray accordingly, caution should be placed toward the allegations of the film’s misrepresentation in case the accusers' nostalgia has made their past seem a bit rose-tinted. As ever, one suspects, the real ‘truth’ of life in the slums of Ordsall fifty years ago will be somewhere in the middle of these views.
Even so, it is fascinating to see that the films still have the power to provoke such strong reactions and that, despite the elapsing of fifty years, Salford is changing again, with land being bought up for property developers to build seemingly ever-taller high rise buildings, this time in the name of ‘regeneration’ rather than ‘clearance.’ Within the private rental sector, there are reports of ‘slum-like’ conditions returning (as a 2017 report by Salford City Council into the rental sector exposed) while these towers of “gleaming glass and concrete” promising better living mark the Salford skyline. As the narration in Part One of the film put it back in 1969, “Salford is now the conglomeration of the old and the new.” ‘The same holds true in 2019.
Reviewer - Andrew Marsden
on - 19/11/19
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