DAVID OLDHAM

From These Streets

Fifty Salfordians Who Changed the World

Salford has given the world a scientific unit of energy, a Christmas carol, the most famous line in football commentary, and a study of poverty that changed how the world understood working-class life. Yet time and again, its people are folded into someone else's story, described as Mancunian, northern, or simply English, while the city that made them fades into the background. From These Streets sets out to put that right. Across fifty vivid profiles, arranged chronologically and thematically through ten chapters, David Oldham traces the astonishing range of people shaped by Salford's streets, terraces, factories, rivers, and communities. Here are astronomers and engineers, poets and punks, actors and activists, footballers and physicists, philanthropists and comedians. Some were born within the city's boundaries; others arrived and were transformed by it. What unites them is not birthplace but connection: what Salford gave them, and what they gave back. From William Crabtree charting the transit of Venus in the seventeenth century, to Ben Kingsley, Ryan Giggs, and Sara Ahmed shaping the twenty-first, this is a book about ambition forged in hardship, talent nurtured in unlikely places, and a city with a character all its own. It is also a book about ordinary greatness: the final profile belongs not to a household name, but to a beloved local broadcaster whose warmth and generosity embody everything the book celebrates. Part collective biography, part local history, part love letter, From These Streets is a compelling act of civic reclamation, told with pride, humour, and deep affection for a place too often overlooked.

✦Fifty astonishing true stories prove one city shaped scientists, poets, actors, and rebels alike
✦A passionate act of reclamation that finally gives Salford credit for changing the world
✦Warm, witty, and richly researched, blending biography, history, and civic pride

If you enjoyed The Classic Slum by Robert Roberts or Manchester by Jeff Hindle, you will love this book. Fans of Bill Bryson's affectionate, anecdote-rich histories and Kate Summerscale's character-driven nonfiction will also find much to admire in David Oldham's celebration of overlooked greatness.

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This is the last profile in this book, and it belongs to Fred Fielder, because Fred was the most Salford person in it. Not the most famous. Not the most decorated. Not the one whose name appears in textbooks or on the sides of buildings. But the one who, if you had to explain what Salford was, what it felt like, what it sounded like at its best, you would point to and say: him. That one. Start there. Fred Fielder was born in 1949 at 248 Bury New Road. He once claimed he had been found as a baby in a Moses basket, floating down the Irwell near the Lanny. This was not true, but it was exactly the kind of story Fred told, delivered with a timing so perfect that by the time you realised it could not possibly be real, you did not care, because the story was better than the truth, and Fred knew that, and he knew that you knew it, and he told it anyway, with a glass of Guinness in his hand and a grin that dared you to interrupt. His DJ name was Chunky Baby. He played records at the Disc-A-Go-Go in Salford and at Barbarella in Eccles, two of the clubs where young Salford went to dance in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1970, he presented the Radio One Club from Barbarella with Dave Eager, and the crowd that turned up made the national news. He went on to present on BBC GMR Radio Manchester for approximately twelve years, becoming one of the most recognised voices in the city. He was not a smooth broadcaster. He was a Salford broadcaster, which meant that the voice had edges and warmth in equal measure, and that the listeners felt like they were being talked to, not talked at. His best friend at school was John Cooper Clarke, the punk poet whose profile appears in Chapter 3. They attended St Thomas of Canterbury together, played in the school pipe band, and stayed close for the rest of Fred's life. Clarke went on to become the Bard of Salford. Fred went on to become the man who knew everybody, who turned up everywhere, who could talk for an hour without taking a breath and leave you feeling better for it. They were two sides of the same coin: Clarke's Salford was sharp, satirical, and poetic. Freds was warm, loud, and generous. Between them, they covered the full range. He was awarded an MBE in 2008 for services to charity. He was patron of eleven charitable organisations, including the Salford Heart Care Unit and Pendlebury Children's Hospital. The MBE was not for one thing. It was for decades of turning up, of lending his name and his time and his voice to causes that needed them, of saying yes when other people would have said they were busy. That was Fred. He said yes.