The last ten days of October has become the home of the annual Manchester Science Festival. This ninth year was organised by the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, with support from a variety of partners, and the University of Salford contributed its largest set of events to date. As part of that contribution I…
2014 saw the completion of the excavation evaluation stage of Dig Greater Manchester and the end of Year Three of the project. The last three of our eleven exploratory digs took us to Tameside, Blackburn and Trafford where we investigated the Victoria villa residences of the region’s new manufacturing elite as a contrast to the…
From the 5th to the 10th September 2014 the Association for Industrial Archaeology’s annual conference comes to Chester. Since the mid-1970s, the AIA has a been a major force in promoting the discipline of industrial archaeology and the understanding of the archaeology of industrial societies in the UK and beyond. One of the ways the…
Dig Greater Manchester, our five year community archaeology project funded by AGMA (and the largest such project in England at the moment) arrived in Rochdale this month. Amidst the showers and some long-awaited summer weather (last seen in 2011), around 300 school children and more than 60 adult volunteers helped uncover the foundations of the…
Earlier this month, I was lucky enough to be invited to talk at a symposium on the changing urban landscape of mid-20th century Manchester. This was held in my old office building at Manchester University: Humanities Bridgeford Street – or the architecture building as it was in my day. So it was with more than…
The coldest March in more than 50 years might seem a strange time to be going back into the field, but our flagship community archaeology project, Dig Greater Manchester, has just finished its first excavation of the year. Moss Bank Park, Bolton, sits on the site of the Halliwell Bleachworks, founded by Peter Ainsworth in…
There is a terrific history series on BBC Radio 4 called the ‘Long View’. The premise is to take a contemporary issue in society and politics and to look at it from the point of view of a parallel case in the past. The publication this month of further summary data from the 2011 Census…
It may be early autumn (where was summer 2012?) and the estates staff at the University are already sweeping the drift of leaves away from the war memorial in front of the Old Fire Station, but Dig Greater Manchester grows apace, despite the cold and wet. Thus, in September 2012 the third DGM evaluation excavation…
Conferences are one of the ways in which archaeology refreshes itself, through presenting new work, challenging orthodoxy and making new linkages between data and colleagues. This year’s Association for Industrial Archaeology (AIA) research seminar, part of the Association’s annual conference, had the theme of ‘Archaeological Work on 20th Century Industrial Sites’. 1 All the speakers…
Emerging from woodland on the outskirts of Worsley village are the remains of one of Manchester’s great lost Victorian county houses. A maze of 20 rooms and three corridors stands to head height with fireplaces, brick floors, windows and worn steps still in place; it’s as if Roman Pompeii has come to Salford. The ruins are…
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