Retracing Salford, who produced the successful Streets Museum, have secured Heritage Lottery funding for their latest project, featuring a new collection of photographs from Cheetham Hill and Salford in the 1950s and 1960s. The grant of £161,800 has been awarded to the project team, including volunteers and workers, can restore, protect and digitise a large archive of glass plates and film negatives.
The collection, previously unseen, and featuring over 12,000 images of street life, shops, schools and migrant ancestors, is part of their new project entitled ‘Salford and Cheetham Hill In Focus’.
Project Coordinator Lawrence Cassidy says “the black and white images are a fantastic look at life during that era, and our team are working hard to clean and restore them so that they can be preserved for future generations, when they are deposited at Greater Manchester County Records Office in 2017. The images will also be available to view on an interactive website”.
Sara Hilton, Head of Heritage Lottery Fund North West, said: “This will be a wonderful opportunity for people to view scenes of local life from the middle of the last century and to contribute their own personal memories to the project. Thanks to National Lottery players, we are able to fund this work, much of it by volunteers, to create a real community archive.”
The public will get a chance to view the whole collection next summer in a major exhibition at Salford Museum and Art Gallery, but in the meantime the project will be reaching out to communities in both citys to come and see the collection and contribute memories.
Lawrence explains ; “We will be collecting memories from people who lived in Salford and Cheetham Hill to complement the photographs, and we are organising workshops and displays at venues over the next year. We are excited to be able to display a selection of the images at two events this September, Salford Local History Day in Ordsall on 4th and 5th September, and, as part of the Cheetham Cultural Festival on 13th September at the Jewish Museum”
For more information please see the facebook page ‘salfordandcheethamhillinfocus’ or phone Lawrence Cassidy on 0161 848 8779.
