Salford Voices banner exhibition
A collaboration between textile artists Chris Alton and Emily Simpson and residents at Broughton Community Centre
Banner exhibition
Textile artists Chris Alton and Emily Simpson have collaborated with residents at Broughton Community Centre to help design a banner marking 100 years of Salford’s city status. The group have learned textile and sewing techniques and visited the People’s History Museum, where they explored the powerful history of protest and community banners.
Through hands-on activities and open conversation, they will celebrate the voices that shape our community and discover how banners have been used to express shared values and local pride. The group will create 9 banners in total, a large banner and 8 smaller banners which will be on display in Salford Museum and Art Gallery from Saturday 21st February to Saturday 9th May 2026. The exhibition is free to visit and suitable for all ages. Full information can be found here.
Location: Salford Museum and Art Gallery, Peel Park, The Crescent, M5 4WU
Dates: Saturday 21st February to Sunday 10 May 2026
Gallery Opening hours:
Monday: Closed
Tuesday – Friday: 9.30am – 4.00pm
Saturday – Sunday: 11.30am – 4.00pm
This exhibition is part of Salford Voices, discover more about the project here. 2026 marks 100 years since Salford was officially granted city status, and we’re on a mission to capture what it truly means to be from Salford, putting Salfordians firmly at the heart of the centenary celebrations.
Sign our centenary celebration book
Exhibition visitors can get involved by signing the centenary celebration book where residents can reflect on what kind of place they would like Salford to be in 100 years’ time – for its people, its communities, and its future? The book will be deposited in the Local History Library at Salford Museum and Art Gallery for future Salfordians to enjoy for years to come.
The book has been created by bookbinders Walker Print, a family firm founded in Salford, and its design is a tribute to the old corporation buses of Salford, fusing bottle green with a gold coat of arms. Throughout 2025 the book travelled across all 8 neighbourhoods of Salford for local residents to sign. The book travelled to schools, food banks, community centres, libraries, museum, festivals and fayres, during which time residents left messages of hope and celebrations of community for future Salfordians to enjoy.
Lead Artists
Created by Chris Alton and Emily Simpson in collaboration with Broughton Community Centre community members, commissioned by Art with Heart.
Chris Alton and Emily Simpson have been working collaboratively since 2020. They host dinners, facilitate workshops, publish writings, and create textile-based artworks. Their shared practice centres sincere care, active listening, and gentle tending.
Chris Alton’s practice spans a range of media and approaches, including; socially engaged projects, artist films, textile banners, and publications. Since 2021, he has been working in collaboration with Emily Simpson on a project regarding grief, the lack of language for expressing it, and the creation of public spaces for it to be shared. Exhibitions and commissions include; Grief Must be Love With Nowhere to Go, Bloc Projects (2024, with Emily Simpson); Tied to Everything Else, Paradise Works, Salford (2023) The slabs whistle; a song under my wheels, KARST and Take A Part (2022); Survey, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art; Bluecoat, Liverpool; g39, Cardiff; & Jerwood Space, London (2018-19); and Adam Speaks, The National Trust, Croome, Worcestershire (2017).
Emily Simpson is an artist whose socially engaged practice invites people to share experiences of grief through communal activities like sewing, cooking, pickling and grief karaoke. Their recent work explores folklore, natural cycles and tending their dad’s allotment after his death – how grief takes root in the landscape. Emily often shares a collaborative practice with Chris Alton. Together they’ve created large-scale textile installations which explore grief and the language available to communicate it. The hope is that by going public with what living with loss looks like, we can better support each other collectively through the inevitable. Emily was born in Salford and has a cat called Tofu.
Opening art for blind audiences
Art with Heart are excited to collaborate with Ada Eravama to enhance the experience of blind and partially sighted visitors. Ada is a visually impaired writer, performer, and access consultant whose work opens up the arts for blind audiences, reimagining access as a creative act and catalyst for artistic innovation.
Ada works at the intersection of story, community, and creative access. Ada’s work transforms the personal into the universal, shaped by lived experience, rooted in truth, and offering audiences moments of recognition in themselves or in the people they love. Ada is drawn to the messy, tender complexity of belonging. Exploring how communities hold us, how they fail us, and what grows in the spaces where community is missing. Much of Ada’s practice asks what it means to gather, and how shared rituals, humour, memory, and joy can knit people together, even if only for a moment.
As a specialist in integrated audio description, I reimagine access not as an add-on, but as part of a story’s creative dramaturgy. Access shapes how I build work, how I collaborate, and how audiences experience the world I’m inviting them into. Whether I’m consulting with organisations such as Leeds Play House, developing new creative access tools with LIPA, or shaping my own performances with CRIPtic Arts, I treat access as an act of care, culture, and imagination.
Broughton Community Centre
Broughton Community Centre has been serving the Broughton and Salford communities for 100 years. Broughton Community Centre and Broughton Community Church (known locally as “The Naz” Community Hall) is a bustling ministry hub in the Lower Broughton area of East Salford.
They specifically focus their ministry and community work on the relief of poverty, food deprivation, and social isolation, signposting to specialist agencies and providing facilities for a range of community groups. They value inclusion, justice, sustainability, learning, seeing lives transformed, human dignity and wellbeing.
With thanks
This project has been made possible by the generous support of the GMCA, The Booth Charities and The Radcliffe Trust. It has been funded by UK Government with support from Salford CVS and Salford Council. A special thanks to our brilliant partner, Reform Radio.
Donations
We are Art with Heart, and we want to bring together as many people as possible to unlock their creativity and connection to each other. As a registered charity (1205611), donations make it possible to deliver accessible, representative and inclusive projects, to engage more people, employ more freelancers and plan further into the future. Together, we are building Art with Heart, we would love you to join us! CLICK HERE to donate through our Ko-fi campaign.