The shaping of The Street
Coronation Street's brand new home at Media City UK has been revealed!
Them ol' cobbles have seen a whole lot of drama over the years... Watch the 'Shaping of The Street' video montage now.
"As you wander down the cobbles of Coronation Street after filming has finished for the day ghosts seep up at you from the cobbles and take hold of your mind - the black and white ghosts of early Coronation Street - Elsie Tanner having a cat fight with the Street looking on delightedly, Jack Duckworth slipping out for a quick one in the Rovers when he should be performing his weekly marital duty, Ena Sharples huffing off to the Mission Hall for a good funeral...
"And the more recent full colour ghosts – Richard Hillman, Norman Bates with a briefcase, sneaking back across the road to Gail’s house having dispatched Maxine with a crow bar, Sally in an hilariously unseemly wrestling match with Anna over a disputed bottle of ketchup, a tram crashing over the viaduct, across the cobbles and into the Kabin and pinning down Rita (‘What is it with me and trams’), Sunita, unfairly framed for fire that killed her and burned down The Rovers." -John Whiston, Creative Director, Continuing Drama, ITV Studios
Tony Warren, creator of Coronation Street, said: "It is fifty-three years since Denis Parkin and I drove round the streets of Salford in his little Austin motorcar. He was to design the sets for the new show I had created. We were looking for somewhere that matched the place of my imagination and that’s how we came upon Archie Street in Ordsall.
Visitors in a shiny car with a camera must have been rare and as we got out we found ourselves surrounded by a milling gang of very small boys - who presumed we must want to see a Mrs Colman. Mystified, we allowed ourselves to be led to her open front door and over the threshold. Was she, I wondered, a fortune teller? But no, the illuminated display cabinet in the corner told the whole story: this lady wasthe mother of Eddie Coleman – one of the Busby Babes who had perished in the Manchester United Munich Air Disaster.
Soon her chimney pots were to be as famous as her sporting son for these were some of the ones used in the original opening title sequence of Coronation Street. Denis built the first street exterior setting in one of the new studios inside the Granada building on Quay Street in Manchester. The first of the cobbles were actually painted on the studio floor. The next set was our first outdoor one at Granada - on the site of an abandoned railway goods yard. It already had cobbles but they slanted the wrong way. I remember it as a dank hole. Between shots the cast could take shelter from the wind and the rain in an old Nissan hut. All the interior scenes have always been filmed in the studio.
"Denis finally got to build his real street in the early 80’s. This was when Coronation Street got its own purpose built unit named Stage One. That street is the outdoor set we have used until now.
The day we gave that gang of little boys half a crown to ‘mind’ Denis’s car outside Mrs Colman’s we were not to know that princes, a prime minister, a pair of poet laureates, Alfred Hitchcock, sundry Hollywood stars and even the Queen of England would come to visit Coronation Street. And now we are moving our whole production into this new home on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal. But these bricks and mortar and slates and cobbles are not the real Coronation Street. That is still wherever you want it to be – inside your own imagination."
Find out more about Coronation Street's new home here.