The proud and unique Greater Manchester town that's ready for change with regeneration on the way

The town centre is full of empty units, overshadowed by an ugly multi-storey car park that no one has used in a long time. Thankfully, like many similar towns in Greater Manchester, Eccles has been promised regeneration – starting with the demolition of the car park. 

But change takes time. The demolition phase is set to begin this year, but a developer will not be appointed until next year. So in the meantime, those empty units are being put to good use – as exhibition space for a new photography project titled “Picturing Eccles.”

The exhibition, commissioned by Salford City Council and curated by Eccles’ photographer in residence Paula Keenan, includes the work of several local amateur photographers. It aims to celebrate the people and places that make Eccles unique, as well as reconnect residents to the town they live in as it prepares for change. We went along to the opening of the exhibition for a guided tour with Paula and some of the other people involved in the project. Here’s what to expect. 

Paula is from Wigan but has a long history of working with communities throughout the North West as a documentary photographer. She was selected by Salford City Council to lead the project in collaboration with the Liverpool-based Open Eye Gallery. 

The Picturing Eccles project started with a call-out on a Facebook group for amateur photographers. These photographers then accompanied Paula and local historian Mark Charnley on guided tours around the town to learn more about the history and landmarks of Eccles. Paula also went on her own journey to capture and understand the town, which introduced her to a whole host of community groups – from allotment owners and bell-ringers to boxing club members, or “communities within communities”, as Paula describes them. 

She told Manchester World: “When I first started the project, I was just finding my feet and I got my camera out and someone said: ‘Come on then, take my picture.’ I just think people have embraced it, and they've wanted to talk about Eccles and what makes it unique.”

As she started photographing and interviewing groups of people, they would in turn recommended other groups to visit. She found that people were more than happy to share their treasured memories of the town. 

“It was as if, almost a smile and a please got you involved in all these conversations of their lives and their memories of Eccles,” Paula said. 

Over the course of nine months, thousands of images were submitted. Paula then had to whittle them down to a few hundred, together with Salford City Council and the Open Eye Gallery, trying to find the balance between sentimental value and quality of images.  

Some of the photographs in the exhibition are old images from personal archives dating back decades. There are pictures of the long gone Talk of the North nightclub, the charity pram races during the seventies and old-style fire rucks, in a nod to the town’s history as the first ever to get a motorised fire truck in 1901 – a fact that was highlighted to ManchesterWorld on our tour of the town. 

It’s this rich history that Salford City Council are aiming to preserve as they formulate plans for the town’s future. Kate Charnock, the regeneration project officer at the council who has helped oversee the Picturing Eccles exhibition, told ManchesterWorld that she hopes the people of Eccles will look at these images with a sense of local pride. 

She said: “We really wanted to pick the best of Eccles and show that to everybody. I would hope that people are really proud of it, and proud of them, and each other, because there's so many different people in the photographs. And people are interested in people.” 

Local pride is also something that Paula hopes locals will take away from the exhibition. She is grateful to all people she met along the way and the amateur photographers that embraced the project. She said: “I'm taking away that my faith has remained intact, that people are proud of where they come from, that we all feel comfort in the things we know and that it doesn't take much.

“You might get someone saying, 'it's rubbish 'round here,' but then you start talking about the past and they're so obviously defensive of the area, so they then start talking, with pride, about what makes them proud to be from Eccles.”

The Picturing Eccles exhibition will be on display in Eccles shopping centre and the Public Library until 19 October.