'It was done in the name of modernisation... but when they demolished it they destroyed a community'
Sitting on the doorstep of her family's terraced home in Greenheys, little Liz Murphy gazes into the camera. It's a poignant image of a typical childhood in inner-city Manchester.
"My great grandmother was the matriarch of the family and the whole area. It was a special place. People looked out for one another." Waves of Irish, Polish and Caribbean immigrants settled there, drawn to the city for work in its factories and mills. And for much of the 20th Century Greenheys was a largely poor, but bustling community.
"And alright, maybe some of the houses weren't in the best structural condition, but the majority of them were immaculately kept. It's not a rose-tinted view, because they were hard times as well. Most of the people there didn't have much, but what they did have was family and community." "There was a genuine hope, even if it was probably naive and utopian, that they could change things for the better. It was a vision of a very different kind of city. But we now know that that it was much harder to implement."
"Nowadays Greenheys is hard to visualise on a map. Bits of it have been gobbled up by the universities or lost to road widening. Its identity is much weaker than Hulme or Moss Side." He launched a campaign and enlisted the help of the then Lord Mayor of Manchester, and the Bishop of Manchester, and over the course of the next three days, more than 200 people, black and white, gathered to take part in a demonstration outside, standing together against the licensee's ban.
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