Lark Hill Place / Boracic

Salford Museum And Art Gallery was closed for most of the first year after we moved into the house in Salford. Since it reopened we've popped in many times for coffee or lunch and a mooch around their gift shop but today was the first time we had a proper look around the gallery and perhaps its most famous exhibit, Lark Hill Place.

A mocked up Victorian Street, it was first opened in 1957 by a curator who was keen to preserve the heritage of the communities that were being uprooted as the Victorian stock was cleared for new housing. The Saturday morning children's museum club was enlisted to ransack everywhere from skips to their grandparents' houses to collect the artefacts that were then used to create the street.

It's a wonderful place. "It's always teatime on a winters* day in Lark Hill Place - the low levels of lighting help us to preserve the delicate artefacts on display". Thus we spent a happy half hour wandering around in the dusk, peeping through windows and looking at the displays.

One item that caught my eye was the 'Boracic Lint' that you can make out in the picture. It turns out it's an "antiseptic, absorbent lint" but I know of it because of the rhyming slang from my youth in south London: to be boracic - or "brassic" as we pronounced it - was to be skint!


*Apostrophe twitch