This Sunday, the Manchester Histories Festival sees the latest in the series of Red Flag Walks, which centres on Salford's Radical History. Beginning at the Black Lion pub on Chapel Street at 11am, local history guru, Michael Herbert, will lead walkers back through time to the sites and scenes of the city's feisty epoch-defining past.
The walk will include sites from the General Strike of August 1842 when striking cotton workers poured into Salford and closed the mills; the Chapel on King Street attended by Jospeh Brotherton founder of the Vegetarian Society in 1847 and the Greengate site of Salford's first birth control clinic, set up in 1926 by Mary Stocks and Charis Frankenburg.
From there it history moves forward to the suffragettes, who used Caxton Hall for meetings, and then it's on to Bexley Square – scene of the infamous `Battle' of 1931 where police attacked an unemployed workers' protest attended by Dirty Old Town song-writing legend Ewan McColl and Eddie Frow, founder of Salford's Working Class Movement Library.
Bexley Square was the site of Salford's old Town Hall, now flogged off to developers to be made into flats. Indeed, the places that locate Salford's radical past are fast becoming erased so this might be one of the last chances to see it all before it's gone.
"Salford is often over-shadowed by Manchester" says Michael Herbert "yet it has a rich radical history of its own that I will be sharing on this walk."
Salford's Radical History Walk
Sunday 23rd March 11am
Black Lion pub £6/£5
The walk will last two hours. Advance booking is strongly recommended as there are limited number of places available. To book in advance email: redflagwalks@gmail.com
For further detail see http://redflagwalks.wordpress.com
* Michael Herbert has been researching and writing about Manchester and Salford's radical history for many years. His published work includes The Wearing of the Green, a political history of the Irish in Manchester, and Never Counted Out!, a biography of Len Johnson, the Manchester boxer and Communist. He has also published a history of local radical women, Up Then Brave Women.
Main photo shows the Battle of Bexley Square
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