Not Manchester (Paperback)

Not Manchester is the book that Salford has been waiting for. A popular history told through its streets, its factories, its families, and the river that has divided it from Manchester for a thousand years.

In 1086, the Domesday Book recorded Salford as a royal manor. Manchester was a footnote within it. Salford received its charter in 1230, seventy-one years before Manchester. The Hundred Court of Salford outlasted every other hundred court in England. And yet the story got told the wrong way round.

Manchester took the name. The Ship Canal was called the Manchester Ship Canal, though the docks were in Salford. When the BBC moved north, it moved to Salford Quays and the headlines said Manchester. This book dismantles that pattern, chapter by chapter.

Inside this book: The Irwell as border. The Civil War siege of 1642. The Industrial Revolution. Engels crossing the river. The 1926 Home Office memo dismissing Salford as "merely a scratch collection of 240,000 people." The Salford Pals marching to France with red roses. The Christmas Blitz. Lowry missing a train and finding his life's work. Shelagh Delaney writing A Taste of Honey at eighteen. Ewan MacColl's "Dirty Old Town." Albert Finney, Joy Division, and the Salford Lads Club. The women who worked the factories and ran the households. The council buying 220 derelict acres for one million pounds. The BBC arriving. The headlines that still say Manchester.

And a DJ called Chunky Baby, who sat at the author's kitchen table with a glass of Guinness and a story that could last an hour.

David Oldham grew up in Salford and now lives in Normandy, where he is Guardian of the British Normandy Memorial. His closest friend there is from Eccles. The couple in the next village are from Pendlebury. Salford was already everywhere its people went.

This is not an academic history. It is warm, honest, and unsentimental. If you are from Salford, you will recognise every page. If you are from anywhere else, you are about to find out what you have been getting wrong.

Signed copies available from dandhpublishing.com

A City That Shaped Britain

Salford produced the first free public library in Britain, opened in 1850. The idea for the Trades Union Congress was born on Chapel Street. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels drank at the Red Dragon pub on the Crescent, discussing the working class of the very city whose working class they were writing about. The Chartists gathered at Kersal Moor. The Saturday half-holiday that became the British weekend was campaigned for by a Salford activist. These are not footnotes. They are the foundations of modern Britain, and almost none of them are credited to Salford.

A Family Story

Woven through the history are five members of the author's own family. Grandfather Alf, who worked Salford Docks in the years when the port was the third busiest in Britain. Uncle Eric at Agecroft Power Station, the coal-fired giant whose cooling towers dominated the skyline until demolition day was delayed by nesting peregrine falcons. Auntie Joan, who walked to the Cussons Imperial Leather factory in Kersal every day for decades and carried the smell of soap home in her clothes. The author's mother, who worked the production line at The UMP on Langley Road, Pendleton, a factory known to every Salfordian by its initials and nothing else. And Auntie Genie, who kept a Victorian house on Regent Road where the attic was haunted, the stairs creaked, and the cure for existential terror was being told not to be so daft.

These are not biographies. They are Salford lives, ordinary and extraordinary in equal measure, and they anchor the history in the kitchens and factory floors and front doorsteps where it was actually lived.

Still Not Manchester