FROM PORT TO PORTAL


INTRODUCTION


Although I am based in Manchester I regard Liverpool as my second home. You will have heard about the historic rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester; these days we try to work together. There has been great rivalry down the years and, in some ways, that rivalry has been productive. One of the things I intend to explain in this paper is that a little rivalry can be a good thing.


In this paper I have been asked to draw on my experience of regeneration in the North West in general but that is too broad a canvas. Instead I will focus on the area I know best of all, Salford, and in particular Central Salford, which was the old city of Salford. It is illustrative of what has been happening in the North West as a whole.


Salford


Salford is a city, and is, in fact, older than the adjoining city of Manchester. Salford has been around a long, long time but unfortunately during the period of the Industrial Revolution, when it was said that the streets of Manchester were paved with gold, Salford’s streets, where they had any streets at all, were usually covered in something much less attractive. The city really did get the rotten end of the deal. It provided much of the labour for its neighbour’s new industries but it was poorly paid labour. It was said that many families in Salford had only one set of good clothes between them to the extent that not everybody in a family could get out of bed in the morning and get dressed because there were not enough clothes to go around. Even as late as the 1930s there were still hunger marches in Salford.


This was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, where raw materials brought into the Lancashire area were turned into the textiles that fuelled so much of the economy. The problem was that we had to import our raw materials, principally cotton, and our difficulty in Manchester was that this could only be done through Liverpool. If you look round that city you will find some of the most magnificent historic buildings in this country. Liverpool has more Grade I Listed Buildings than any other place in this country outside London. Liverpool was awash with money earned from the slave trade and the import taxes it imposed on the raw materials of the Industrial Revolution. Eventually import duties were as much as the cost of the raw materials and their transport across the


44 Felicity Goodey CBE


While it was thriving, and hugely successful, it was known as the Port of Manchester.


Next door to the port was Trafford Park, once the largest industrial estate in Europe. There we made aircraft, steel, and engines; we did wire drawing, the machine tool industry was the best in the world and, of course, we made textiles, lots of textiles. One Salford textile mill was owned by the Engel’s family from Germany and the son, Friedrich Engels, worked there. Engels and Karl Marks were locals, and drank in our pubs, and it was what they saw in Salford that inspired Das Capital, and the communist party manifesto.


ASSET - Liverpool-10


Atlantic put together. Liverpool was threatening to put the Industrial Revolution out of business.


The Port of “Manchester”


One of the great attributes of the North West, and particularly the Greater Manchester area, is lateral thought! The good “Burghers” of Manchester decided that the solution to the import duties problem was to bring the sea to Manchester. And that is what they did. Just a little over 100 years ago the canal was dug, largely by hand, and the sea was brought 36 miles inland to Manchester. Actually the canal ended in Salford.


And here was built this huge port, which, in its heyday, was Britain’s third busiest.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68