One day in 1973, acting on a whim, two final-year photography students at Manchester Polytechnic attended a Granada TV open day to view the newly reconstructed set of Coronation Street, and learned that location filming of the soap opera was shortly to end: wholesale regeneration was sweeping away the ranks of Victorian terraced streets and their stone setts, the very features that defined how a television audience expected the north to look. The discovery inspired them to find a classic street-like location to document before the bulldozers moved in. They settled on June Street in Ordsall, twenty houses still fully occupied, and worked there over some eight weeks with the college Hasselblad and a photoflood bulb screwed into the ceiling socket.