Salford Lads Club under threat of closure
Salford Lads Club is at risk of becoming the latest victim of rising costs and a lack of funding. The iconic youth centre in Ordsall has been a beacon for the local community for well over a century, yet the increased costs involved in keeping it running, in addition to a drop in grant funding, mean that the club may well be closing its doors in the near future.
Opened over 120 years ago, in 1903, Salford Lads Club was built upon the foundations of offering activities to the local youth community in Ordsall. Predominantly, the club has offered a place for young people to practise boxing, swimming, gymnastics, and a variety of outdoor activities, too. However, in more recent years, the club was immortalised by Manchester indie rock icons The Smiths after the club featured on the sleeve of their 1986 album The Queen Is Dead.
Even without the influence of Morrissey and company, the grade-II listed building in Greater Manchester still boasts an incredibly impressive cultural history. Not only was The Hollies’ Graham Nash once a member of the club, but it is thought that Ewan MacColl wrote the timeless classic ‘Dirty Old Town’ while looking out at Salford from a window in the Lads Club back in the 1940s. On top of that, the building has featured in various films and television programmes over the years, notably the final series of Peaky Blinders and the first-ever edition of Football Focus.
Aside from its rich cultural history and its importance within the local community in Salford and Greater Manchester, Salford Lads Club is also a rare and well-preserved example of early 20th-century architecture, with its tiled interior still largely original. Historic England claims the building is “thought to be the most complete example of this rare form of social provision to survive in England.”
In spite of all of this, the club has been operating at a loss for some time now. In 2023, for instance, the annual income of Salford Lads Club was only £160,000, while it cost £394,700 to run the club. This deficit of nearly £150,000 has become all the more problematic with the fact that the club has had its grant funding cut.
In response, Salford Lads Club has expressed a need to hire new staff and restructure its organisation so that it can become more applicable for grant funding. However, the club simply does not have the money to do this at current. “The club needs the urgent cash injection now to help close the current funding gap,” Laura Slingsby, head of youth operations, told the Manchester Evening News recently. “As even if £1m is secured for the legacy fund now, the returns wouldn’t be generated until next year.”
The proposed Salford Lads and Girls Club Legacy Fund will aim to create a permanent trust for the club, to hopefully keep it open for years to come. However, in order to get to that point, it is thought that the club will need to raise as much as £250,000 by the end of November. A fundraiser to help the club has since been set up by the MEN, which – at the time of writing – sits at £8,600.
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