“You can’t stop progress. That’s one thing you’ll never stop.” So says Jim Prescott, a retired newsagent from Leigh in Greater Manchester.
The Friends of The Manchester Centre for Regional History are inviting you to watch the award-winning film ‘The Town’, directed and produced by Neil Harrison, on Wednesday 14 October 2015 at 6.30pm.
Having previously been employed by the formerly ubiquitous Lancashire cotton industry and later by one of Leigh’s largest employers, the erstwhile British Insulated Callender’s Cables (BICC) Ltd, he should know. Jim is one of seven interviewees to feature in The Town’. With excerpts brought together from a wider oral history project, the film is an impressionistic take on the experience of living and working in Leigh during a period which has seen the local economy shift from a dependence on industry to now being primarily based on retail.
The film takes as its starting point the year 1974, and begins with archive footage taken from a documentary made in that year about Leigh and the local boundary changes about to take place, entitled ‘Leigh 1974: Year of Local Government Reorganization.’ The 1974 film neatly encapsulates the anxieties felt by the town, as its geographic and economic contours come tangibly under threat. The emphasis upon the potential loss of the town’s regional identity provides the main theme, and it charts the ways in which, forty years on, those changes have impinged on Leigh’s fortunes and, importantly, to record the reflections of local people on the loss of Leigh’s status as a borough and its “takeover” by Wigan.
‘The Town’ contains few answers. Rather, as a film, it represents an attempt to ask questions of the notion of “progress”; how has a generation of people understood, interpreted, and come to terms with, the changes they have witnessed? How have those changes affected their relationship with a town that, in most cases, they have called home all of their lives? Finally, can Leigh be considered the same place that it was forty years ago?
‘The Town’ has been awarded the Friends of the Manchester Centre for Regional History Dissertation Prize 2015.
film screening with Director Q&A and refreshments on Wednesday 14 October 2015 at 6.30pm in Room 339, 3rd Floor, Geoffrey Manton Building, Manchester Metropolitan University , Oxford Road, Manchester All welcome.
