‘Dirty old town’ captured on canvas for Salford centenary celebration

A new exhibition has opened to mark Salford’s centenary of being given city status, capturing on canvas its social history and most infamous inner-city slum.

Self-taught, local amateur artist Dave Downing is enjoying his first artistic exhibition, aged 79, with his paintings of the people and places of Hanky Park, a name not found on any “official” maps of Salford.

The setting for Walter Greenwood’s depression-era novel Love On The Dole, the area around Hankinson Way, now the site of the towering 60s shopping centre Salford Precinct, it was for decades affectionately known by locals as Hanky “Park” – as the only blade of grass for miles were the weeds growing between the cobbles.

Painting by Dave Downing of Hanky Park, Salford, on exhibition to mark 100 years of city status for Salford. (Pat Hurst PA)

A retired painter and decorator, after work Mr Downing would put down his roller and pick up an easel to paint from memory the area he once knew, using skills he learned from decorating long-gone pubs in Salford.

He said: “Gradually, over a period of 20 years, in my own time, I’d start to do one, then another one, then another one.

“I might leave it for a year or so, then I’d do another one. So, it actually built up to about, say, 15 paintings.”

Mr Downing was born and brought up in Hanky Park among its 6,000, soot-blackened back-to-back terraces, cobbles, corner shops, churches and pubs.

He said: “So all the streets are, and people were, very, very close, socially very close together. Every house had characters.

“Growing up, it was just an adventure.

“You know, all the kids were like, they were more athletic than the kids now.

“Because you’re out all the time, football, or climbing, jumping out of windows, jumping onto mattresses.

“We all did that. Climbing on the roofs, taking the lead off the roofs before the demolition men got it.”

Official documents in the 1950s reported, “slum conditions as bad as any to be found in the country” in Hanky Park.

So in post-war Britain as in many cities, the official municipal mission became to completely “obliterate” the district, rehousing residents in high-rise flats or new estates on the edge of Salford.

Painting by Dave Downing capturing the new high-rises as the old terraces of Hanky Park in Salford were bulldozed. (Pat Hurst PA)

As street after street was bulldozed, all that was left were the “crofts” sparse areas of flattened brickworks and timber, with the odd corner pub still standing.

Mr Downing said: “Every day, I was going to school, I noticed the crofts were getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

“The pubs were like little islands.

“Families would just disappear.”

Gone were the outside toilets and tin baths, in came the high rise and new estates with real gardens and real parks.

Thousands of families though, lost a way of life.

Painting of Hanky Park before the bulldozers moved in, by local Salford amateur artist, Dave Downing. (Pat Hurst PA)

Mr Downing added: “They meant well, obviously, Salford City Council. They’re putting them in better houses, but the community was separated. Everybody disappeared.

“I’ll put it this way, if I had the choice to live anywhere else, I wouldn’t.

“If you say, ‘Would you like to live in Prestbury or Alderley Edge?’ I wouldn’t.

“Because even though they’re successful, clever people, whatever, they don’t seem to have that same spirit that working class people have.

“I’ve noticed that. When we used to go painting, you know, houses there, the posh houses.

“And the people were nice, but I always felt there was some, not quite, they didn’t have that, you know, explosive spirit, you know, and that humour.

“So, I’m happy, to have been born where I was born, amongst crazy, happy, friendly, funny people, you know.”

– The exhibition, marking 100 years of Salford being granted city status, runs to October 17 at Pendleton Gateway in Salford. Prints of Mr Downing’s paintings, priced at £20, are available at the exhibition – with all money raised going to a charity for men with prostate cancer.