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Shameful city snapshot now a piece of history

4/ 9/2003

A FILM which upset Salford councillors has been voted one of the most important archives in the North West.

A snapshot of the turmoil caused as slums were cleared on the Ordsall estate in the 1960s it is one of the highlights of a special festival later this month.

Recording the hardship of families living in spartan terraced housing, and the dust, demolition and grime that surrounded them, it is rare footage of a time of immense change.

Images include poor kids making a playground of a wrecked old car and a Coronation Street-style corner shop.

When councillors saw it they insisted on a positive scene being added and eventually commissioned the film maker to do a second documentary called Salford - The Other Side.

The film was the work of Mike Goodger, a lecturer at Salford University, and is now held by the North West Film Archive at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Mike, now aged 70 and living in Wigan, said: "I was lecturing on the state of the environment. I had been taking still pictures of all sorts of places, then the head of the department found a film camera in a cupboard and asked if I would like to use it.

"I went out and button-holed people, putting a mike under their noses. They told me exactly what it was like to live there.

"People were incredibly co-operative; one couple let us film them bathing their four kids in a metal tub in their house.

"We had problems with the council and I was forced to film an extra bit from the top of a block of new flats to placate them.

"The council eventually got a PR firm to do a film and they decided to ask me to make it. It was a sweet film showing the nicer bits of Salford."

Excerpts from the film will be screened at the Cornerhouse in Manchester on September 9 along with other rare footage about the history of Greater Manchester.

The Salford film made the top five out of a final list of 30, which also includes pictures from 1890 of the building of the Manchester Ship Canal, after thousands of archives were considered.