So we made it the place where Salford's stories happen.
New traders, community campaigns and a golden anniversary, told to the people who live there.
The highlights
Food items donated to Salford Foodbank at Christmas
Years marked with the centre's first artist in residence
Plus BBC North West, Yahoo News and That's TV
A shopping centre that has been open for fifty years can easily become part of the furniture. Salford Shopping Centre needed local people to see it as theirs again, and new traders to see a reason to choose it.
We built a press office around the people inside it. The Market Hall's family traders told their own stories about keeping decades-old stalls going. When Sports Traider opened Britain's first chain of charity sports shops at the centre, with everything £5 or less, it made the Manchester Evening News and BBC North West, and the MEN covered the queues when Mother Hubbard's chip shop opened too.
At Christmas, the centre worked with the supermarkets under its roof to give over 4,000 food items to Salford Foodbank. For its golden anniversary in 2022, it appointed its first artist in residence, local painter Chelsea Entwistle, whose commission brought the centre's old shops back to life, and That's TV covered the celebrations. Free book giveaways for primary school children, a clothes swap that reached Yahoo News and a new centre manager announced in the retail trade press kept the story going year after year.
"These are particularly hard times for many people, particularly in our community, and this year we felt compelled to do something that would directly benefit the lives of people in Salford."
Nick Pitt, Centre Manager, Salford Shopping Centre
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