Skyliner From the Other City

Page 13

The New Oxford // 11 Bexley Square

The New Oxford stands proudly on Bexley Square, at the end of the square stands the old Salford Town Hall. The square is best known for an unemployed workers’ demonstration in the 1930s.

recounts the attack in Bexley Square, and says of conditions in salford “Places where men and women are born, live, love and die and pay preposterous rents for the privilege of calling the grimy houses ‘homes’”

The Battle of Bexley Square began as a protest march against the government’s enforced means test and the savage cuts that were being imposed during the 1930s. The new measures were most severe on the working classes and suicide rates rose by 25%

During the 1930s the British Board of Film Censors regarded Greenwood’s novel as “dangerous” and would not allow a film to be made. On the parallel side of Chapel Street lies Islington Park. The park is built on the site of an old cemetery where 22,000 people were buried and was known throughout the area as the Plague Cemetery.

Tens of thousands of people marched against the cuts and they attempted to deliver a petition to the town hall but were charged at by mounted police who attacked the public with batons and truncheons. Author Walter Greenwood responded to the unemployment crisis in his novel ‘Love On the Dole’ in which he

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also around here that auof The Secret Garden, FranHodgson Burnett, lived.


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