David Chadwick’s photographs offer a close, unguarded look at the first people to make their home in the Hulme Crescents, the vast concrete estate once heralded as the future of social housing and, for a time, one of the largest public developments of its kind in Europe.

Taken between 1975 and 1977, these pictures record everyday life among the earliest residents as the new Hulme began to find its footing. Published here for the first time, the series is a rare social document of a community living inside a major planning experiment, captured with patience, proximity and trust.

Chadwick arrived in Manchester in 1972 to study at Manchester Polytechnic’s School of Art. In his final year he began photographing Hulme, returning again and again over the next two years. He was in the right place to capture the area in transition. The old terraces had been cleared, families rehoused, and the new Hulme was still settling into itself.

The Crescents were built quickly. Work began in 1969, the main structure was topped out in summer 1971, and by 1972 the blocks were finished and beginning to take residents. The first tenants were moving into flats that, in places, still felt like a building site turning into an estate. With their elevated walkways and sweeping blocks, the buildings were meant to offer modern living after the clearances of the 1960s. Instead, they quickly revealed their flaws.

By the mid 1970s, problems were surfacing. Damp, faulty heating, rising crime, and isolation on the upper decks made day to day life difficult. Yet through Chadwick’s images you see people trying to shape a life in the middle of it all, moving furniture into blank new flats, chatting on stairwells, watching their kids play in courtyards that still smelled of wet concrete. His photographs preserve the human scale of a story that is often told through policy, architecture and eventual demolition.

This is the second of two galleries charting Chadwick’s time in Hulme, following residents as they adapted to a development that promised much but delivered unevenly. This body of work is an important addition to the BCA canon, extending its record of British life by foregrounding voices and faces that are too often left out of the official picture. A link to the first gallery, which looks at the wider area during the same period, is available at the bottom of the page.