For the love of the street: Remembering Tony Warren and the stories that made us

In a city that proudly honours its cultural icons, from Tony Wilson to Mark E. Smith, from George Best to Caroline Aherne, one name perhaps doesn’t get mentioned as often as it should: Tony Warren. Yet his contribution is among the most profound. Warren, who passed away on 1 March 2016, was the creator of Coronation Street, and with it, he reshaped the landscape of British television and gave working class Manchester a permanent place on the nation’s screens.

Warren was just 24 when Coronation Street first aired in 1960. The idea, sparked from his own observations growing up in the North, was revolutionary. Until then, the lives of ordinary people, especially working-class communities in places like Manchester, had barely registered in drama. But Corrie, as it became affectionately known, broke that mould. It brought grit, humour, tenderness and truth into people’s living rooms three times a week, and still counting more than six decades on.

For those who grew up in the old terraced streets of Manchester, like the ones down by Brooks Bar in Old Trafford, Coronation Street was not escapism. It was recognition. Those crumbling houses with lino curling at the edges, neighbours who knew all your business but would never let you go without, and women with iron wills and quick wits, were not characters. They were your aunties, your mums, your mates. It’s no wonder some households didn’t initially tune in. Why watch a show about your life when you’re already living it?

That said, over time, even the most sceptical came to appreciate Warren’s genius. Especially as the family moved to a council house with a garden, and, crucially, indoor plumbing, watching Coronation Street became part of the routine. The drama on screen no longer felt like a mirror to hardship but a nostalgic nod to something that was slowly being left behind.

Tony Warren had the ability to make working-class life visible without caricature. His characters weren’t stereotypes. They were sharply observed, lovingly written people. It was why, even years later, former machinists could watch scenes in Mike Baldwin’s factory and immediately spot when someone “was no bloody machinist.” The truth was always there in the details.

The show’s success created a curious kind of myth. For southerners who had never been north, Coronation Street became their lens on Manchester. Some seemed to believe the whole region was one big cobbled set, where life moved between back kitchens and factory floors, where no one ever left their street except to work in a mill or a mine. But even in that distortion, there was something magical: a whole city, a whole region, had been placed at the heart of national culture.

And it’s still there. As the sense of tight-knit community living fades, Coronation Street continues to reintroduce it to us. It brings the sounds and rhythms of those lives back to us, reminding us not just of how things were, but how people endured with humour, love, and grit.

Life was hard in those days, and poverty was common, as the poet John Cooper Clarke famously noted. But despite that, there was a closeness among neighbours and a way of life that Tony Warren captured brilliantly.

What Tony Warren captured endures because it mattered then and it matters now. His legacy isn’t just a long-running soap. It’s a cultural inheritance, a time capsule of lives that were rarely shown and rarely celebrated until he gave them a voice.

His work gave the world a window into our streets and our stories. On this day, it feels right to raise a glass to Tony Warren and to all the mums and families whose lives he honoured on screen. A lasting legacy for every proud Mancunian.