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On a February morning, in a museum that has watched generations of Salfordians pass through its doors, Catherine Tyldesley picked up a pen and signed her name - another stitch in the fabric of a city marking 100 years.
It wasn’t a red carpet moment. It wasn’t a premiere. It was something smaller, but in lots of ways, bigger - a gesture folded into fabric, memory and community.
Tyldesley, alongside casting director and fellow Salfordian Sarah Leung, added her name to Salford’s Centenary Celebration Book as part of Salford Voices, a new community banner exhibition by the award-winning (and very special) Salford arts company Art with Heart. The exhibition runs at Salford Museum and Art Gallery until 10 May.
Nine banners hang in the space - one a contemporary coat of arms for the city, the others text-led works that gather together what Salford has been, and what it hopes to become. Created by textile artists Chris Alton and Emily Simpson in collaboration with residents and members of Broughton Community Centre, the pieces carry visual references to waterways and green spaces, to industrial heritage and media futures. But more than anything, they carry conversation.
This isn’t heritage preserved behind glass. It’s heritage handled, discussed, sewn and shared.
We talked at the begining of the month about the exhibition - and Emily Simpson, who was born in Salford, and traces her own creative beginnings back to this very museum. As a child, she attended free workshops here with her mum. She remembers standing in front of John Charles Doman’s Famine - fascinated and unsettled in equal measure - returning to it again and again over the years.
“This was the first gallery I visited,” she reflects. “Probably one of the places that made me fall in love with art.”
There’s something quietly circular about her banners now hanging in those same rooms.
Throughout 2025, the Centenary Celebration Book travelled across Salford’s eight neighbourhoods - into schools, food banks, libraries, festivals, community centres. Residents left messages of hope and resilience, pride and promise. Designed by Prestwich family firm Walker Print, the book draws its colours from the old corporation buses: bottle green and gold, civic and familiar.
Tyldesley describes Salford as “an integral artery in the beating heart of Manchester,” speaking of loyalty, work ethic and the “huge, cobbled hearts” of its people. “Salford is my route home,” she says.
Leung echoes that sense of rootedness - the strength and honesty that shape you, the way the city stays with you wherever you go.
Perhaps that’s what these banners hold most clearly: not nostalgia, but continuity. A recognition that a place is made and remade by the people who show up for it.
Art with Heart’s process included artist-led workshops exploring textile and sewing techniques, alongside visits to The People’s History Museum to examine the powerful history of protest and community banners. That lineage of collective voice feels present here too. These are works created by and for the people of the city - marking a century not with spectacle, but with care.
The Centenary Celebration Book remains open throughout the exhibition, inviting visitors to reflect on what kind of Salford they would like to see in another hundred years - for its people, its communities and its future. After the exhibition closes, it will be placed in the Local History Library, where future Salfordians can turn its pages and read the hopes of those who came before them.
There is also a commitment to access woven through the project. Visually impaired writer, performer and access consultant Ada Eravama has collaborated with the team to ensure the exhibition is experienced more fully by blind and partially sighted visitors - reimagining access not as an afterthought, but as a creative act in its own right.
Salford Voices is free and drop-in, located in the museum café’s new Community Cases space - a fitting setting for work that feels conversational rather than ceremonial.
It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t posture.
It gathers. It mends. It remembers.
And in doing so, it offers a quiet proposition: that the story of a city isn’t written only in milestones or monuments, but in hands working together - threading past and future into something that feels, unmistakably, like home.
For the latest exhibition info: CLICK HERE
Header image: Sarah Leung and Catherine Tyldesley at Salford Museum and Art Gallery (Joe Smith)
