Research on displaced populations across international borders has gained a lot of attention in recent decades, but research on internal displacement has been overlooked. The hidden narratives of Manchester’s slum clearance in the 1960s remain to be revealed, along with the entire neighbourhoods that were uprooted from their homes.

Little is known about what happened to the families that were displaced because of the slum clearances across Manchester and Salford. Since this topic is largely absent from narrative accounts, the history is told through the lens of street photographers. For nearly two decades from the 1960s, photographer Shirley Baker documented the destruction of hundreds of homes and streets in Manchester and Salford. Baker stated that ‘this was one of the biggest clearances of people en masse in Europe at the time. It was happening all over Britain.’ Between 1950-1960, another photographer, Nick Hedges, travelled across the UK’s largest cities to document the social and economic disparities that resulted in three million people living in poverty.

After the war, Manchester saw the opening of hundreds of factories, encouraging thousands of people to move to the city for work and live in the working-class slums. These slums were built in the nineteenth century to house the workers who operated the factories during the Industrial Revolution. The slums were predominantly located in Salford and Hulme, but there were also slums scattered around Pendleton, Chorlton, Ardwick, Cheetham Hill, and Broughton.

All the slums consisted of terraced housing, of poor quality, and largely inhabitable. ‘Huge families were crammed into two bedrooms with no bathrooms.’ Children had nowhere to play and so they were forced out onto the dirty streets. Manchester was described as ‘the vilest and most dangerous slum’ in Frederick Engels book The Condition of the Working-Class in England 1844. By the end of 1967, it was estimated that five million people were living in 1.8 million slums ‘unfit for human habitation in England and Wales.’ The council knew that something had to be done about the deterioration in the quality of homes.

The council purchased the streets where the slums were located. Residents and families were offered alternative accommodation or ‘given a pay out and asked to move on.’ Entire neighbourhoods, who had lived in these homes for generations, saw them torn down. Clearances uprooted entire communities, forcing them to relocate in various locations, sometimes outside the inner city, across Greater Manchester.

The position of children after the slum clearances features prominently in Baker’s photography. It was shocking to see the debris and bricks just left in the streets after the houses were torn down. Children used these environments as playgrounds, with one child, Chrissie Butterfield, stating ‘you see in those days, houses were being demolished, some of the old houses, not like today, where houses are refurbed, and people go in and they go, right, I can refurb this. But they just used to say, knock it down… so, they ended up with all these, what you call, crofts, with bricks everywhere. So, it was like a haven to play.’

Baker’s photography reveals her deep fascination with the impact that the clearance had on children, which is often cast aside when talking about the uprooting of communities. With the power of photography, the devastation caused by slum clearances on families, communities, and children has been brought to light in a history that is often neglected.