In 1955 the BBC sent the reporter Robert Reid to the industrial town of Salford, Lancashire, which he had known well twenty years before. ‘Very little seemed to have changed,’ he told his audience.

I found the same grim backs and the same drab fronts. The same houses but twenty years older and that much worse. The housewives still keep up the old tradition of brownstoning the front steps. And you can still buy a hot cooked meal at the shop around the corner.

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