The song was written about
Salford, then in
Lancashire (now in
Greater Manchester) England, the area where MacColl was born and brought up. It was originally composed for the 1949 play
Landscape with Chimneys, produced by
Joan Littlewood and
Theatre Workshop and set in a North of England industrial town. With the growing popularity of
folk music in the 1960s the song became a standard in the repertory of British folk club singers. The first verse refers to the "gasworks croft" which was a piece of open land adjacent to Salford gasworks, and then speaks of the old canal, which was the
Manchester, Bolton & Bury Canal. The line in the original version about smelling a spring on “the Salford wind” is sometimes sung as “the sulphured wind”. But in any case, most singers tend to drop the Salford reference altogether, in favour of calling the wind “smoky”. (This is the case in MacColl's own 1983 recording of the song.) ==The Pogues version==