Invitation to a one-day workshop at the University of Salford
Date: Friday 24 March 2023, 9:30am – 5pm
Venue: Maxwell Building, Room 413b
Free event
To book a place follow this link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-making-of-modern-salford-1950-1975-ideas-and-reality-tickets-538793384517
This is the second workshop as part of the research project The Modern Backdrop: Memories of Salford. In this workshop we will be investigating how the ideas, ambitions and dreams of planners, architects and councillors influenced and shaped modern Salford between 1950 and 1975. During that time, large-scale modernisation efforts were put in place that altered or destroyed long-standing working-class neighbourhoods. Terraced housing was replaced with tower blocks or large-scale housing complexes; shopping streets were replaced with shopping centres; and 19th-century urban layouts were exchanged for modern ones.
At the workshop researchers and writers will present their research that discusses the genesis of the architectural, planning and housing ideas, nationally and internationally, that shaped Salford during this time.
Schedule
9:30 Arrival. Coffee and refreshments
10:00 Peter Walker and Tanja Poppelreuter: Introduction to The Modern Backdrop
10:30 John Boughton: The Municipal Backdrop + Discussion
11:45 Martin Crookston: The UnModern Backdrop + Discussion
1:00 Lunch
2:00 Miles Glendinning: The International Backdrop + Discussion
3:15 Peter Walker: Workshop Closes
3:30John Aitken and Jane Brake: Walking Tour of Salford
Travelling to the University of Salford and venue information:
Travelling to the University of Salford:
Travel | University of Salford
Venue of the Workshop: The University of Salford, Salford, M5 4WT
Maxwell Building – Google Maps
About the Speakers
John Boughton
The Making of Modern Salford: The Municipal Backdrop
John Boughton will give an overview of municipal housing in Britain including bye-law housing from the later 19th and early 20th century, pre-World War 1 council housing in Salford and beyond, tenements and cottage suburbs, and post-World War 2 housing and planning. He will consider how inner-city decongestion overspill, and design for the ‘motor age’ shaped British cities. The talk will centre on events in Salford, using local developments to highlight broader national trends and policies, with a particular focus on post-war high-rise – specifically the Pendleton Estate – and regeneration.
John Boughton is a social historian. He has written two books, Municipal Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Council Housing (Verso, 2018) and A History of Council Housing in 100 Estates (RIBA Books, 2022). He is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the School of Architecture of the University of Liverpool. He blogs at municipaldreams.wordpress.com.
Miles Glendinning
The Making of Modern Salford: The International Backdrop
Miles Glendining will set the international backdrop to the making of modern Salford. Amongst other themes, he will argue that the role of tangible cultural heritage in the development of a common Europe need not be confined to easily preservable traditional-style monuments but can also be expanded by including one of the broadest categories of everyday built heritage, namely the vast areas of state-sponsored housing complexes for lower-income citizens, especially in tall apartment blocks. These were built across Europe, including Salford, mostly in the post-war reconstruction decades between 1945 and 1990. Miles will also speculate on how, with its immediacy in the lives of citizens, mass housing might help in developing a common European vision of a locally embedded heritage for all.
Miles Glendinning is Director of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies and Professor of Architectural Conservation at the University of Edinburgh. He has published extensively on modernist and contemporary architecture and housing, and on Scottish historic architecture in general: his books include the award-winning Tower Block (with Stefan Muthesius), The Conservation Movement. His current research is focused on the international history of mass housing, and he has just published the first comprehensive global overview of this topic: Mass Housing – Modern Architecture and State Power – a Global History (Bloomsbury Academic Press, February 2021). Other planned books include a history of public housing in Hong Kong (Routledge; likely publication 2023) and a history of postwar housing in London.
Martin Crookston
The ‘un-modern’ backdrop: the low-rise housing of ‘corporation suburbia’
The focus of Martin Crookston’s talk will be on ‘corporation suburbia’: the municipally built low-rise housing seen on thousands of estates across the UK and Ireland. New housing was of course an integral part of the post-1945 welfare-state settlement: its forms drew initially on the garden city model which had inspired pre-war social housing, and only later did it increasingly reflect the influences of ‘modernist’ design and layout. This concern with traditional housing design, as seen in many places in Salford, could be described as the un-modern backdrop to the making of modern Salford.
Martin Crookston is an independent strategic planning consultant whose work over the last two decades has focussed on housing regeneration, particularly in the North and Midlands. He was a member of Lord Rogers’ Urban Task Force, advising on the use of urban capacity to reduce pressure on greenfield land, and is a Board Member of Architecture & Design Scotland. His book Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow (Routledge, 2014) explores the potential of the council-built cottage estates. He is married with two grown-up children, and lives in Central London.
Walking Tour
John van Aitken is a photographer and artist exploring urban gentrification through the dynamics of creative destruction. His current practice based PhD with CREAM, University of Westminster, centres on the transformation of Salford’s landscapes through housing-led redevelopment. John is Principal Lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire.
Jane Brake is a writer and artist, who has a Masters in Research Architecture, Goldsmiths. She was Senior Lecturer in Interactive Arts BA, Manchester School of Art, for over 20 years, leaving in 2021 to pursue an independent artistic practice. She is currently working on a poetry collection and a novel.
In 2004 Brake and van Aitken formed the Institute of Urban Dreaming (IUD), which investigates gentrification; council housing and its privatisation; the environmental conditions and crisis inherent in contemporary modes of urban development. Based in a Pendleton tower block until 2021, IUD has amassed a significant archive and unique personal records of the transformation of Salford through housing led redevelopment. IUD organise occasional walking tours; host and undertake residencies; have exhibited and curated public events at The People’s History Museum, Tate Liverpool and others. Their most recent journal article explores the use of atmospheres and sensory spaces in the marketing of new vertical lifestyles: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1472586X.2020.1840091