Building a picture of the past

The first guest post; what makes archives and research unique, and a forgotten paternoster lift!

Alexandra Mitchell is the Archivist at the University of Salford based in the University Library and Special Collections. Alex and her colleagues have recently launched the new website for Salford Digital Archives which provides access to some of the University’s collections online. As well as this, Alex is currently involved with a wider project in association with the School of Science, Engineering and Environment to look at the impact of architectural modernity on memory, identity and lives in Salford.

AM: I like to think about archives as some of the most important building blocks of a research project. If theories are the mortar or nuts and bolts that help us make sense of things, it is archives and records that provide the raw materials on which those theories are hung and tested. 

But what are archives? There are lots of formal definitions out there but here is mine: archives are the primary source materials and first-hand accounts that can tell us about what happened in the past. And if that definition sounds too gentle then try this: archives are essentially evidence and contain valuable information.

One of the things I love about archives is the fact that they can come in all sorts of forms and material types, from documents such as official records, contracts, reports, and minutes to personal things like letters and diaries to photographs, audio and video recordings. They can be digital as well as physical or analogue – a digital photo can be archival as much as a physical print; similarly an email or an old fashioned letter. 

All archives are unique, and it is this uniqueness that is essentially their selling point.  Each institution will hold a different set of archives that can’t be found anywhere else. You might find similar collections that compliment each other in, for example, our archives and those of our neighbouring institutions. But each repository has their own collecting priorities. At the University of Salford we collect material about the history of the institution.  We also have collections relating to other aspects of Salford’s past and the research interests of some of our former academics which range from bands brass, British election campaigns, engineering and industrial history, as well as a few Salford and local writers (more of which later).

Many of the photos used on this blog are from the archive held by the University of Salford, and specifically the University’s Photographic Collection which consists of thousands of black and white and colour photograph prints. These provide a visual record of the institution’s history from its foundation in the 1890s as the Salford Royal Technical Institute, to the modern Royal College of Advanced Technology in the 1950s and formation of the University in 1967, and merger with University College Salford in 1996. Images from the collection provide a glimpse of buildings and internal spaces that have now either disappeared or have been altered beyond recognition.

For those familiar with the current landscape of the University campus the photos from the collection that never fail to surprise are those showing the now demolished Chemistry Tower. It was built in 1966 during a period of University expansions and as the photograph (above) taken in the 1970s shows, the Tower sat cheek by jowl between the Salford Museum and Art Gallery and the Peel (formerly Royal Technical Institute) Building fronting The Crescent and Peel Park. This photograph, taken at a similar time probably from the top of Faraday House gives a sense of the scale of the 12 storey Chemistry Tower in relation to the neighbouring iconic Maxwell Building which opened 10 years earlier. 

In this photo we can see how close the Tower was to the Peel Building, which the records suggest was about 10 metres.  Campus masterplans from the 1960s suggest the intention to demolish the Peel Building to make way for a modern cluster of buildings more suited to the demands and aspiration of a newly created University. The photograph below taken in the mid-1970s gives a sense of the proximity of the buildings.  In the foreground is the Cockcroft Building which still stands.  The shed like structure on the right of the image housed the University Bookshop and a snack bar.

As well as the exterior of the building, we also have photographs of interiors. It will come as no surprise that interior photographs of the Chemistry Tower show the various laboratories and equipment.  Perhaps more surprising is the photograph of the Tower’s paternoster lift. This is in fact one of most viewed and downloaded images for our online collection. The Chemistry Tower was demolished in the mid 1990s.  Following government funding cuts in the 1980s and dwindling occupancy of the building it had become too expensive to maintain. 

Not all our archive and special collections are just about the University.  Sitting alongside our photographs of the University in the archive store – almost as close as the Chemistry Tower was to the Peel Building – is the Walter Greenwood Collection.  Greenwood (1903-1974) was a Salford born working-class writer, and I think there is something powerful in physical proximity of these two collections: the photographs we have of a university campus expanding and modernising in the 1960s and 1970s alongside Greenwood’s depictions of working-class life in Salford in his best-known novel Love on the Dole (1933) and the autobiographical There Was A Time (1967). 

The Greenwood Collection contains lots of handwritten manuscripts and typescripts of his various novels, plays and prose works which show the writing process, how he developed ideas and adapted work.  There are bundles of correspondence from other professional writers as well as members of the public sharing their memories and knowledge of working-class and folk cultures.  Perhaps my favourite items from this collection are three volumes of news cuttings about Greenwood and his works.  Meticulously curated by Greenwood himself, the cuttings are arranged by subject matter and are convenient if you want to get an idea of how Greenwood was received on a local, regional and international level.  But there is also something fascinating about what the exercise in ‘scrapbooking’ tell us about the man himself.

I have gone off one a tangent here, but that is the joy (or danger?!) of archives…. Archives hold a wealth of items that can spark ideas and avenues of discovery from photographs and plans of lost places, to letters of spent friendships and cuttings of identities. Readers! Explore the archives of universities and other organisations as repositories of unique, unseen, and rare sources that can be mined for stories and information and get lost in gaining knowledge and understanding.     

For more information, visit the University of Salford’s Archives webpages where you can find more information about the collections we hold and links to their catalogues. If you want to visit get in touch via library-archives@salford.ac.uk.