About Salford & Cheetham Hill In Focus

The project is based on an archive of images from the 1950s and 60s, showcasing life in Salford and Cheetham Hill, two central districts next to each other. Cheetham Hill is an old established district in Manchester, neighbouring Higher Broughton in Salford. In the late 19th Century and early 20th Century the area grew due to industrial expansion, attracting people from across the country because of the many new employment opportunities.

During this period Irish, Jewish and Ukrainian communities also settled here. In the 1950s and 60s, migrants from Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia also came to live and work in the locality, contributing to cosmopolitan life.

If you have any memories of any places or photographs shown, please send them to us and contribute to our memory book to help us identify the photographs.

The district was radically altered during the 1960s and 70s due to demolition and housing clearance, when many people moved away. Even so, the area has remained home to a wide variety of cultural groups. Photographic archives from the 1950s give us an opportunity to reflect on the post-war conditions that people lived in and also to share family memories of migration.

The Salford photographs show schools , sports, some industries and other events. The Cheetham Hill photographs show shops, products, schools, industries, buildings, dance halls, cinemas, furniture making, family snaps and more. The migrant family photos from across the world are from families who came to Cheetham Hill at different times and a selection of these are on our migration map on this site. A local map of Cheetham Hill shows shops and buildings in the district.

If you have any memories of any places or photographs shown, please send them to us and contribute to our memory book to help us identify the photographs.

The Project

I want to thank you for putting this site together, reading all the memories of people has rekindle my memories that had been buried. Muriel Townsend

The Retracing Salford project focuses on collecting artefacts from demolished urban communities in central Salford and Manchester, including family snaps, street signs, oral histories, maps, photographs and related memorabilia. We exhibit these in travelling exhibitions across the city in museums and local galleries. The project is inspired by The District Six Museum, Cape Town, a highly successful community-led project. Their first exhibition titled ‘Streets; Retracing District Six’ is reminiscent of lost Salford Streets. In the future, we also aim to place our collection in a permanent space like the District Six Museum, so people can share memories and reconnect in a physical space.

The archive of photographs from Cheetham Hill on this site was preserved and digitised by us as part of a Heritage Lottery award and the physical and digitised collection will be deposited with Greater Manchester County Records Office in 2017.