ONCE Vernon Street in Bolton rang with laughter of children at play and echoed to the bustle of life in an everyone-knows-everyone Coronation Street world of tight-packed terrace houses.

But most of the laughter and the teeming life fled from this corner of West Ward in 1966.

In the January, the days were filled with the thunder of bulldozers, the crackling of bonfires, the clonk of sledgehammers and the noisy cascades of crumbling old bricks into lorries, as the houses were swept away under a clearance order.

But life went on for a handful of “survivors” who waited for their turn to follow the hundreds who had moved to new home in other parts of the town.

Here and there in the rows of windowless, doorless, roofless shells that once were homes, a wisp of smoke curled from a chimney over the still-curtained windows to proclaim someone still waited for the word to move on.