East Manchester before the stadiumUpdated: March 10th, 2007
All this talk about the redevelopment of East Manchester made me wonder what the area used to look like.
So I had a trawl through the City Council’s excellent Local Image Collection to see what I could find.
Here’s what the area looked like in 1912:
(Click on photos to view full-size image)
And this is an aerial view from 1924. The spot in which COMs was built is in the far left middle of the photo:
The final photo shows what Clayton looked like in 1963:
After visting Las Vegas a couple of years ago I can’t say I’m a fan of these super-casinos. But compared to the conditions people used to put up with, they do seem to mark some sort of progress. In western countries, at least.
~ This site has a gallery of old Maine Road pictures here, while links to online photo archives can be found here.
~ There’s a nice poem about the area at footballpoets.org. It also got me wondering about the origin of the name ‘Eastlands’. As far as I can gather the name was first used by Eastlands Homes Partnership Limited, a not-for-profit company that took ownership of all the council homes in Beswick, Clayton and Openshaw in September 2003.