Made across Beswick, Clayton and Openshaw between 2000 and 2002, Anne Worthington’s photographs document East Manchester as streets were emptied for demolition and residents sustained local networks of care amid industrial decline and regeneration.
Anne Worthington grew up in Blackpool before moving to Manchester. She began making photographs while living among the artist and squat community in Hulme, where she became involved with the Dogs of Heaven performance collective and made her first sustained body of work, photographing the area during its demolition and redevelopment.
Worthington went on to develop a documentary practice concerned with housing, community and the effects of economic and urban change. Over the following two decades, she worked across Britain, often travelling in an old Land Rover and spending extended periods getting to know the places and people she photographed.
The photographs presented here form a separate body of work, made across Beswick, Clayton and Openshaw between 2000 and 2002. Returning repeatedly to East Manchester, Worthington photographed streets awaiting demolition, the people who remained and the local networks that continued to support everyday life as industries and established institutions disappeared.
Photo © Anne Worthington, all rights reserved.
“I took these photographs in Beswick, Clayton and Openshaw, three areas of industrial East Manchester. These were areas that had employed thousands of people, but very little remained. The streets housed a fraction of the people who used to live there.
“Like other parts of the UK, it’s a well-trodden story. The collapse of industry made this area one of the poorest in the city. East Manchester ended up being earmarked for regeneration and, by the time I started to photograph there, streets in Beswick and Openshaw had been emptied and made ready for demolition.”
Photo © Anne Worthington, all rights reserved.
Photo © Anne Worthington, all rights reserved.
“I’d meet people living in the one house still occupied on otherwise empty streets. Kids would take over those streets, walls got smashed in and fires were lit in the empty houses.
“I got to know a family who had started a club for young people to give them something else to do. They would check on the kids most nights, particularly those who were still out late because some of them didn’t have stable places to call home.
“They opened their homes and gave them somewhere to stay. As I got to know the area better, I found more people who looked out for each other like that.”
Photo © Anne Worthington, all rights reserved.
“One place was a tiny Baptist church called the Tabernacle. It didn’t look much like a church, more like a hall full of books, furniture and clothes that had been collected over the years. It was a place that was open to anyone.
“One of the lay preachers who helped run it slept in the building. He had a place in a hostel but didn’t cope well. People said he heard voices and saw things, that his hallucinations inspired his preaching and that his preaching was second to none.
“The Tabernacle building was in a bad state of repair. Someone said the minister had fallen through the floor one Sunday during a service. It was unsafe and parts of it were cordoned off, but it managed to keep going somehow.”
Photo © Anne Worthington, all rights reserved.
“They told me that on the road out to Ashton there used to be more churches than on any other road in England. I don’t know if it’s true, but I came across a Buddhist temple inside a house at the opposite end of Ashton New Road.
“I knocked on their door for two years before I was allowed in. They would give me oranges to take away, and I’d share them with people I got talking to.
“I remember kids climbing on the roof and hanging upside down to look through the windows. I never managed to get a photograph of that. Sometimes you don’t.
“I used to watch the preparations taking place in the ceremony room. When it was time, everyone came to the house with food and shared a meal. They gave something to anyone who visited, perhaps fruit or a meal, sharing what they had.”
Photo © Anne Worthington, all rights reserved.
“I met people down streets and on steps, and became more known as the photographer. It could be a tough place, sometimes a dark place, but rarely unhappy.
“People had a sense of purpose. They saw something wasn’t right and took it on. They had been keeping their community going when other institutions had fallen away. And they knew how to have fun.
“I got to know a few families and saw what can be overcome with that sense of belonging.”
Photo © Anne Worthington, all rights reserved.
Photo © Anne Worthington, all rights reserved.
Photo © Anne Worthington, all rights reserved.
Photo © Anne Worthington, all rights reserved.
“Times have changed since I took these photographs in the early 2000s. Some of the streets aren’t there now. Kids were outside a lot then, and the clothes were different. The Tab and the temple have gone.
“Some people in the photographs still live in the area. They have married, grown up and got older. Some of them have died.
“The regeneration scheme came and went, new houses were built and the areas changed. They remain distinct from the rest of the city, still dislocated perhaps, and the people are still kind, enduring, wise and angry.”
Photo © Anne Worthington, all rights reserved.
Anne Worthington is a British documentary photographer whose work examines housing, community and the social consequences of economic and urban change. Her work is represented by British Culture Archive.
