Snapshots of hidden lives

How an 80s photographer documented town's burgeoning immigrant community

- DAMON WILKINSON

WHEN Malcolm Glover first set foot in Rochdale in 1983 it’s fair to say he wasn’t particularly enamoured with the place.

“I thought it was really quite depressed if I’m honest,” says the renowned documentary photographer.

Malcolm, then aged 28, had moved to Rochdale for six months to become the town’s photographer-in-residence. It was his first big commission but, initially at least, he was struggling for inspiration.

“There were quite a few cotton mills still running and some that just lay dormant,” he said.

“There was all this architecture that gave a glimpse of what the town had once been about, but at first I found it quite grey.”

But eventually he discovered what he looking for in the denselypacked terraced streets on the outskirts of the town centre, in areas such as Milkstone, Deeplish and Wardleworth, where the Pakistani and Kashmiri immigrants who had arrived in Rochdale in the 1950s and 60s to work in the cotton industry had made their homes.