MacColl was publicity officer for the mass trespass on Kinder, and The Manchester Rambler came from that role. I haven't bought the new Ewan MacColl songbook, but I have one from 1963 which contains only one other pre-War song in its collection of 51, the not so great Plodder Seam. So, perhaps Ewan's exploits in Catterick and such places from 1939 onwards were a time for artistic development, although The Second Front Song, and Browned Off are not among his best.

Like others here from Manchester and the sprawl around it I feel Dirty Old Town is an excellent song. The best version I know is at the end of The Singing Streets, far better than the more arranged versions Ewan recorded later. He prefaces it with this passage:

"The minstrels go, and the searchers take over. It is their world now... a world where adolescents walk in an ecstasy of loneliness or stand in idle groups where streetlamps shed their pools of light... a world where young Prometheus becomes a trembling-kneed Apollo on the gasworks' croft."

O to be young again on that very croft, by Tyldesley's flowering redbrick walls! To kick the can across the waste, crying "Best!", to be pulled back into the shadows by womanly-jiggly women with hungry...

Oops.