Progress swept away this great Manchester area. Meet the people who remember how it was

Nowadays its name is rarely heard. But for much of the 20th Century, Hightown was at the centre of Jewish life in Manchester.

Having emigrated from eastern Europe thousands of families followed the well-trodden path north from the slums of Strangeways and Red Bank, to make their homes in the tightly-packed terraced streets around Waterloo Road, in what's now known as Cheetham Hill.

But today very little remains of the original district. Like many other inner-city areas of Manchester and Salford it was swept away in the slum clearances of the 1950s and 60s.

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Retired solicitor Walter Nicholls grew up in Hightown and nearby Cheetham. "From town up, all the way to Cheetham Hill was just rows and rows of terraces," he said.

"All you could see were terraced houses. All the women would be out on the front steps gossiping.

"It was just like Coronation Street. That's what Jewish life was like in Manchester back then."

Walter's family history mirrors that of many Mancunian Jews. His Ukrainian grandfather arrived in the city as a young man in 1903.

As a conscripted soldier in the Russian army his surname was Nikolaevskioy, after the Tsar Nicholas II. But upon landing in England an immigration clerk, a Scotsman called Nicholls, anglicized the name to match his own.

He moved in with relatives in Strangeways and began selling fish door-to-door. Within a few years he'd scraped enough money together to bring his wife and family over. From there he opened a chippy and later set up a Ukrainian restaurant called Kiev on Great Ducie Street.

Mr Nicholls was born at 15 Wordsworth Avenue, near what's now the Fort retail park. It's among the few