Club stars get cheeky namecheck
THE famous have walked its tiled corridors – and posed outside.
Now Salford Lads Club is to mark visits to its Edwardian building with a series of cheeky blue plaques.
An exhibition, called ‘Albert Finney Was Never A Member,’ will see them installed next month in rooms around the building.
They will include one to club members Graham Nash and Alan Clarke, who in their pre-Hollies days performed in a minstrel troupe in 1956 at the club. Another plaque commemorates the day in 2009 that Wayne Rooney and the late Frank Sidebottom were together in the gym – with 170 extras – filming an advert for a Playstation game. The most recent one is dedicated to actress Maxine Peake who ‘wearing marigolds’ was filmed in the kitchen this year as part of a tribute to comedian, actress and screenwriter Victoria Wood.
And in 1983 former boxing champion Henry Cooper served a brew to a club member while filming a television show.
The exhibition will feature about 20 plaques and has been devised by club worker, Leslie Holmes, and designed by artist Amber Sanchez.
Leslie said: “Whenever I go to London I’m always fascinated when I see all these blue plaques showing where people like Charles Dickens once lived. I think there are over 900 in London. We were recently given a red plastic plaque to mark a grant we have received from Comic Relief, so I thought it would be interesting to create some plaques about the club’s cultural history.
“Our plaques are a bluey-green, as the English Heritage scheme is blue and some cities also have green plaque schemes.
“Visitors are always fascinated by the range of people who have posed outside – like The Smiths – or been inside this amazing building and I think this exhibition will fascinate and surprise them.
“We will be putting on tours around the building to view the plaques on Saturday, July 15, and Sunday, July 16, at 11.30am, 1pm and 3pm. We hope visitors to the last weekend of the Manchester International Festival will step outside the city and come to Salford.”