On Wednesday 22nd May we marked the opening of our final exhibition of the Modern Backdrop with a special viewing. It was attended by friends and supporters of the project, including local residents who shared their memories and photographs that featured in the exhibition. Invisible Cities: Salford before, during and after redevelopment, 1952 to 1974 […]
‘Invisible Cities: Salford before, during and after redevelopment, 1952 to 1974’ is our final exhibition for the Modern Backdrop and will open at Salford Museum and Art Gallery and will run from 18th May to 1st September 2024. We would like to invite you a public viewing of the exhibition on Wednesday 22nd May from […]
A much belated Happy New Year to our readers. As we enter the final stage of the Modern Backdrop, work is underway to design and curate our end of project exhibition which will open at the Salford Museum and Art Gallery in late Spring 2024. Earlier this month we invited members of the community to […]
This week we have a guest post from Belinda Scarlett, Library Manager at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. Belinda writes about the Library’s involvement in The Modern Backdrop project and some of the archive material the Library holds. The Working Class Movement Library was founded in the 1950s by socialist historians, trade unionists […]
In Spring/Summer 2024 we will be holding our final project exhibition at Salford Museum and Art Gallery. To help us prepare to display the findings from the project and our research we are looking for people to bring their knowledge and memories of Salford to the curation process. This is an opportunity for you to […]
Since we started the Modern Backdrop project in April 2022, many of you have kindly shared with us your photographs of Salford ‘as it was’, showing terraced streets and housing before and during the demolition phase in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these images feature you or your family and friends and they give […]
We are fascinated by the lost tradition of ‘donkey stoning’ and want to find a donkey stone to exhibit in our final project exhibition in Spring 2024. ‘Donkey stoning’ was the process of applying a wetted ‘donkey stone’ to the surface of front door steps, window sills and flags to help clean and enhance their […]
The ‘knocker-up’ has really captivated us here at the Modern Backdrop HQ. In this weeks’ blog post we are coming back to share our progress in trying to identify who this person was in Salford during the middle of the last century. When we first posted about the ‘knocker-up’ in April this year, we posted […]
This week we feature a guest post from Eddy Rhead of the Modernist Society written as a response to a news clip on Hanky Park which recently featured on the BBC Archive twitter account. Recently a news clip from 1969 appeared on the wonderful BBC Archive site which looked at the last days of the […]
Last month we held a small in person workshop at the Working Class Movement Library with some of our oral history interviewees. We wanted to give them the opportunity to meet each other and to share, compare and contrast their memories of growing up and living in Salford from the 1960s onwards and the changes […]