Dirty Old Town

"Dirty Old Town" is a British song written by Ewan MacColl in 1949 that was made popular by The Dubliners and has been recorded by many others since.

History

The song was written about Salford, Greater Manchester, England, the town where MacColl was born and brought up. It was originally composed for an interlude to cover an awkward scene change in his 1949 play Landscape with Chimneys, set in a North of England industrial town, but with the growing popularity of folk music the song became a standard. The first verse refers to the Gasworks croft, which was a piece of open land adjacent to the Gasworks 53°28′50″N 2°16′36″W / 53.4806°N 2.2768°W / 53.4806; -2.2768, 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”. Thanks to Luke Kelly, the Pogues, U2, and others Dirty Old Town has all but taken out Irish citizenship in the years since it was written and has allowed the song to be unofficially adopted by Dublin.

Dirty Old Town (film)

Ted Leo & the Pharmacists: Dirty Old Town is a 2003 concert film by director Justin Mitchell documenting a day in the life of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists on Coney Island. The bulk of the footage is of the band's energetic performance at the Siren Music Festival, interspersed with interviews, boardwalk montages, and a cameo by comedian David Cross. This film is named after the old Ewan MacColl song "Dirty Old Town"; Leo performs a live cover of this song at the beginning of the movie.

External links

Old town

The old town of a city or town is its historic or original core. Although the city is usually larger in its present form, many cities have redesignated this part of the city to commemorate its origins after thorough renovations. There are many places throughout the world named old town (and this is sometimes construed as a proper noun and capitalized). This is a list of some famous old towns:

Africa

Algeria

Egypt

Kenya

Morocco

Tanzania/Zanzibar

Tunisia

Asia

Bangladesh

China

Old Town (song)

"Old Town" is a song released by Thin Lizzy frontman Philip Lynott from his 1982 self-titled solo album, The Philip Lynott Album. The song was written about the breakup of two lovers, and contains piano by Darren Wharton. In the music video, Lynott can be seen on the Ha'penny Bridge in Dublin.

"Old Town" was the first record to be officially played on Irish legal Independent Radio. It was the first song played by Dublin's Capital Radio 104.4 on its launch on 20 July 1989.

Chart performance

Track listings

The Corrs version

The Corrs covered "Old Town" on their 1999 appearance on MTV's Unplugged series, and again with a studio recording for their 2005 album Home.

The live version was released as a single, titled "Old Town (This Boy Is Cracking Up)" in 2000 in Singapore, Belgium and the Netherlands. In 2005 the studio recording was released as a double A-side with "Heart Like a Wheel", and was included on the 2006 compilation Dreams: The Ultimate Corrs Collection. They also performed this song in their In Blue Tour.

Old Town (Lviv)

Lviv's Old Town (Ukrainian: Старе Місто Львова, Stare Misto L’vova; Polish: Stare Miasto we Lwowie) is the historic centre of the city of Lviv, within the Lviv Oblast (province) in Ukraine, recognized as the State Historic-Architectural Sanctuary in 1975.

UNESCO

Since 1998, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) lists Lviv's historic center as part of "World Heritage". On 5 December 1998, during the 22nd Session of the World Heritage Committee in Kyoto (Japan), Lviv was included to the UNESCO World Heritage List. UNESCO gave the following reasons for its selection:

The territory of the Lviv Historic Centre Ensemble covers 120 hectares (300 acres) of the Old Russ and Medieval part of the city, as well as the territory of the St. George’s Cathedral on St. George’s Hill. The buffer area of the Historic Centre, which is defined by the historic area bounds, is approximately 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres).

List of featured landmarks

Beside the listed items of three major areas there are some 2,007 other historical landmarks within the Old City's area, 214 of which are considered national landmarks.