Promising Home – Creating a New Pendleton – the 1960’s

“Forward to the City Centre Beautiful”, Salford City Reporter, 11th March 1961.

Image courtesy of Salford Local History Library

At the start of the 19th century Pendleton was an independent township, largely an agrarian patchwork of farms, meadows and crofts. Housing in the area was comprised mainly of timber framed cottages. From the late eighteenth century onwards, the area witnessed the arrival of merchants and their families from Manchester and Salford. Escaping the urban centres, they built large houses along the main roads and “breezy heights” of Pendleton and so doing, gained cleaner air and less crowded conditions. By the 1840’s when Friedrich Engels was researching the conditions of the working class in the Salford area, the majority of Pendleton, along with surrounding townships however now formed “unmixed working people’s quarters, stretching like a girdle, averaging a mile and a half in breadth” around the centre of Manchester (1).

Promising Home – The People’s History Museum, Manchester

From October 29th to January 13th The People’s History Museum, Manchester will host an IUD ‘temporary research space’ in its Community Gallery. The research space will make available a range of photographs and materials we’ve produced while documenting the changing state of council housing in Pendleton, Salford.

IUD Archive Image (2014)

Based in a tower block in Pendleton, we have been recording and researching the estate since 2004. The Community Gallery exhibit will highlight a wide range of images and research materials from this extended period of research that critically examines the estates recent transformation.

IUD Archive Image (2013) – Walk with Dr Simon Faulkner & David Reeb

“Finally Got The News” – Radical Documentary

How do workers coordinate a struggle when the bosses and Union are the enemy?

Inspirational radical documentary made in the late 1960’s in association with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The film charts the racism and exploitation of black auto workers in Detroit and their attempt to collectivize and gain a voice in their workplace despite the violence and corruption used to suppress them. The League didn’t just see the need for black workers to organise but emphasized the potential power of all the working class.

A Walk in Berlin: Bruno Taut’s Falkenberg Housing Estate

IUD recently visited the Treptow-Koepenick borough of Berlin to walk around the Falkenberg Gartenstadt (Falkenberg Garden City) with new friend and historian of the everyday, Andreas. Falkenberg is comprised of three streets, Akazienhof, Am Falkenberg, and Gartenstadtweg, with 128 homes developed by the modernist architect Bruno Taut between 1913 and 1915.

Berlin, Germany: 2015. IUD image.