Written and produced by Salfordians for Salfordians
With attitude and love xxx
The Salford Star is celebrating ten years of `attitude and love' this summer.
Inspired and kickstarted by communities fighting to save their houses in Charlestown and Lower Kersal, with its founding public meeting at the Racecourse pub on Littleton Road, the first issue of the Salford Star hit the streets in May 2006.
The big glossy magazine featured Colin `Tiny' Brown and his wife Mary on the cover, talking of being fed up of living in limbo waiting for the Whit Lane regeneration that was never fulfilled. Only now, ten years later, is anything even beginning to happen on the estate and, sadly, Tiny never lived long enough to see it through.
It was in that first issue that the community subject to the £53million Charlestown and Lower Kersal New Deal for Communities (NDC) voiced their fears that it was about `social cleansing'. Well, in 2016, whole streets have been bulldozed, and the only actual houses that have been built so far are in Kersal Heights, way out of the pockets of those whose houses were trashed.
The NDC was a shocking £53million failure. Indeed the area now looks like it needs £53million spending on it!
Throughout the ten years, the Salford Star has documented in real time the attempted transformation of a city that has seen the bulldozers tear through Higher Broughton, Lower Broughton, Seedley, Langworthy and Charlestown, leaving communities fractured, as MediaCityUK and lots of glitzy unaffordable apartments arrived. For what? As the new Salford Mayor stated only last week, "poverty and despair isn't shifting"...
Meanwhile, the Salford Star continues to expose a massive planning scandal that has seen developers evade £42million in payments to the city.
Over the years the Star has covered everything from exposing these regeneration rip-offs, to the Hazel Blears expenses scandal, to police brutality at the Barton Moss anti-fracking protests, to dodgy dealings by Salford City Council...
"The Council hasn't spoken to us for over four years, so we must be doing something right" says Salford Star editor, Stephen Kingston "I think we're the longest surviving genuine community magazine in the country. Even the Chartist paper the Northern Star, from which we took our inspiration, didn't last this long.
"We aim to give the community a voice, untouched by vested interests" he adds "And for that we survive on virtually nothing but the sales of t-shirts, a bit of advertising and donations from things like car boot sales."
The Salford Star has produced eleven huge free print magazines, has over 3,000 articles on its website and has won too many accolades over the years – as well as too many knives in the back from those who would rather silence what the National Union of Journalists has called `a fearless and independent voice'...
As well as hard core investigative journalism, the Salford Star also covers community events, campaigns and protests that no-one else will cover, digs out real heritage and happenings, and has interviewed almost every Salford celebrity – from Peter Hook, to John Cooper Clarke to Ben Kingsley, Christopher Eccleston and Maxine Peake who says "The mag is fabulous...like nothing else around"...
The Salford Star - ten years of `attitude and love'
For all the thousands of online articles and electronic versions of the print mags either use the Archive section, which gives a month-by-month breakdown or use the Google search bar on the top right of the page to search specific articles.
* See also Ten Years of Salford Celebrity Interviews...
Part 1 - click here
Part 2 - click here
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