The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
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Manor People
A rare chance to see people at the sharp end of the Thatcher revolution speaking about their lives without leading questions or commentary.
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Overview
A Yorkshire Television documentary from 1987 that allows residents of the Manor area of Sheffield to talk at some length about their experiences of living on the large and impoverished council housing estate. The interviews reflect the affection that many residents felt for the estate, despite the neglect of the houses and terrible lack of facilities. They also reveal both the feelings of community, and where this breaks down.
This is the third of a series of four themed programmes that were aired in August 1987, and later re-edited into a single shorter programme broadcast on Channel 4, this time naming those residents who are interviewed. As so often with similar housing projects, the Manor Estate started out with idealism and as an improvement on the slums it replaced, but which by the late 1970s had a reputation that made many steer well clear of it: it was once dubbed by Roy Hattersley (a former chair of Sheffield’s Housing Committee in the sixties) “the worst Estate in Britain”. By 1987 adult unemployment reached almost 30% – 50% on some streets – with a quarter of the unemployed jobless for ten years or more.
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