Visual Journalism

Familiar Places: What Towns Do With Their Heroes

On identity, pride, and the quiet politics of who gets to define where you come from

By Sharmaine Entwistle — Photographer & Visual Journalist  |  February 2026

The Two Connors’ number-one single sparked celebration in Oldham, but the real story lies beneath the charts. This piece explores how post-industrial towns use the people they produce — and what it means when those people choose to stay, leave, or return.

The light in the Spindles Shopping Centre in Oldham falls differently to most places. Above the ordinary business of a weekday — the pushchairs, the carrier bags, the people moving through on their way to somewhere else — three enormous stained glass roof lights filter the day into something else entirely. Six thousand seven hundred square feet of mouth-blown glass, among the largest installations of its kind in Europe, designed by a working class boy from Oldham who left school at thirteen on a scholarship and ended up collaborating with Norman Foster and Paul McCartney and Zaha Hadid.

Sir Brian Clarke built them between 1990 and 1993, drawing on the music of Sir William Walton — another working class boy from Oldham, another scholarship, another life that transcended every expectation the town might reasonably have had for him. The panels have the pace and rhythm of a stately march. Walton’s handwritten sheet music is rendered in glass, permanent and enormous, directly above the shoppers who mostly don’t know it’s there.

It was under these windows, earlier this week, that a mutual friend introduced me to Callum Connor. The campaign was already running — thousands of people buying his single “Familiar Faces” for 99 pence, flooding social media, pushing it up the charts — but the number one hadn’t happened yet. He didn’t introduce himself. That’s the first thing worth noting. There was no declaration of charts, no performance of momentum, no hint that he was standing at the edge of something. He was just a lad talking to someone he knew. When my friend mentioned he was a singer, I said the obvious thing — if you ever need a photographer, get in touch. He said he’d seen my work on the library billboard down the road. We parted. By Friday, “Familiar Faces” was the most downloaded song in the United Kingdom.

Because standing under Brian Clarke’s glass, talking to Callum Connor, it was impossible not to feel the weight of a pattern. Three working class boys from the same square mile. Three different generations. Three different disciplines. All of them, in their own way, refusing to let the place be only what other people said it was.

But presence is not the whole story. For every figure who stays rooted in a place, who gives something back, who uses their origin as a foundation rather than a footnote, there is another who uses it differently — as a rhetorical shield, a legitimising detail, a convenient origin story deployed at a distance. Oldham in 2026 contains both versions simultaneously. Understanding the difference between them is, I think, one of the more important questions a post-industrial British town can currently ask about itself.

The Psychology of Borrowed Pride

In 1976, a social psychologist named Robert Cialdini conducted a study that would become one of the most replicated findings in his field. He observed that university students were significantly more likely to wear their college’s insignia on the Monday following a football win than a loss. They used ‘we’ when the team won and ‘they’ when the team lost. He called the phenomenon BIRGing — Basking In Reflected Glory — and it has been studied extensively in the context of sport ever since.

What has barely been examined is what BIRGing looks like in post-industrial towns when a local figure breaks through. Not a football result, which is temporary, but a cultural hero — a person who rose from your streets and made the wider world pay attention. The psychological mechanics are identical but the stakes are entirely different. Because the town doesn’t just feel better for a weekend. It feels, for a moment, justified.

Oldham is useful here not because it is exceptional but because it is unusually well-documented. Within one square mile of a post-industrial Greater Manchester town, you can trace the origins of a world-renowned stained glass artist, a physicist of global standing, a composer performed in concert halls across Europe, the world’s first IVF baby, multiple BAFTA-winning actors, an Olympic gold medallist, a rugby hero who has raised eleven million pounds for motor neurone disease research, and two brothers who topped the Official Singles Downloads Chart on the strength of a grassroots campaign built over four years of pub gigs and 99p singles.

Oldham had cotton mills, coal mines, waves of Irish, South Asian and Eastern European immigration, and a long, slow economic decline that left behind all the consequences and none of the safety nets. What it also left behind, apparently, is people with something to prove.

What the Town Does With Them

The claiming of cultural heroes is not a passive process. It is an active, sometimes aggressive assertion. Mark Owen left Oldham for global pop stardom with Take That and the town noted it with pride, but the relationship remained relatively quiet — Owen became famous for being himself, not for being from somewhere. Brian Cox, the physicist, grew up in Chadderton and has become Britain’s most recognisable scientist, yet his Oldham origins feature more as a footnote in his biography than as a defining element of his public identity. The town claims him. He acknowledges it warmly. But the transaction is gentle.

The Two Connors — Callum and Danny Connor — are something different. They didn’t leave and look back. They stayed and looked out. Their identity is not incidentally rooted in place — it is architecturally dependent on it. The ‘Low Life’ branding they adopted early in their career, the self-deprecating reference to being two brothers from Derker, a council estate in the town, was not accidental rawness. It was positioning. It said: we are not polished. We are not manufactured. We are this place, speaking in its own voice, and if you are from anywhere like this then we are speaking for you too.

That last move — from the specific to the universal — is where it gets interesting. “Familiar Faces” is not, on examination, a song about Oldham. It is anchored in Oldham. The Weavers Arms, a JW Lees pub, features in its video. Boundary Park, Oldham Athletic’s stadium, hosted their sold-out shows. But the emotional content — the same faces in the same streets, the feeling of time passing while the landscape stays still, the mix of loyalty and claustrophobia that defines life in any town that hasn’t quite moved on — belongs to everywhere. Leeds sees itself in it. Bolton sees itself. Hull. Swansea. Middlesbrough. The more specific the geography, the more universal the feeling. That is not an accident of songwriting. It is the oldest trick in the storytelling canon.

And in a town where the conversation in early 2026 includes racial tension, political fracture, and the grinding social consequences of decades of austerity, the arrival of something that says ‘familiar faces’ — that says we know each other, we are still here, we are still us — carries a weight that has nothing to do with iTunes charts.

The Well Wasn’t Empty

Sir Brian Clarke died on 1 July 2025, the day before his seventy-second birthday. He was, by the time of his death, widely regarded as the most significant contemporary artist working in stained glass anywhere in the world. His work is embedded in Stansted Airport, in the King Khalid International Airport mosque in Riyadh, in the Pfizer world headquarters in New York. He had collaborated with Paul McCartney, with Norman Foster, with Zaha Hadid. He had been knighted the previous year.

He was born in Oldham to a coal miner and a cotton mill worker. He received a scholarship to the Oldham School of Arts and Crafts at thirteen.

When Clarke was commissioned to create the stained glass roof lights for the Spindles Shopping Centre — panels that are now among the largest in Europe — he chose as his subject the music of Sir William Walton, another of the town’s most significant exports. But this was not simply a thematic choice. Clarke used Walton’s music as a literal architectural blueprint. The specific piece was Walton’s Orb and Sceptre Coronation March, and the installation was designed to carry its pace and rhythm structurally — the panels moving as a stately march moves, the composition breathing like music breathes. Walton’s handwritten sheet music and personal letters were rendered in mouth-blown glass, monumental in scale, embedded permanently into the ceiling of a shopping centre in a post-industrial northern town. One Oldham figure literally building another into the fabric of the place.

The more interesting point is that the candidate existed. That the well was not empty. That a working class town with cotton mills and coal mines and a long, slow economic decline had, despite everything, produced enough genuine cultural history that a world class artist could reach back into it and find something worth referencing.

The Other Side of the Coin

Jim Ratcliffe was born in Failsworth, Oldham. He also left school without much, built something from nothing, made a fortune that eventually landed him among the wealthiest people in Britain. He is the founder of INEOS, the petrochemicals giant. He is a co-owner of Manchester United. He lives, as a tax exile, in Monaco — a move in 2020 that financial experts estimated could save him up to £4 billion. He does give back in certain ways — his Forgotten 40 initiative donates to primary schools in the most deprived postcodes in Britain, the kinds of communities he grew up alongside. That is not nothing. But it sits alongside a tax status that removes billions from the public purse those same communities depend on.

In early 2026, Ratcliffe made a series of comments about immigration that provoked national outrage. The language he used — framing migration in terms of colonisation, of hostile invasion — was described by the Labour leader as offensive and wrong. Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, said the comments betrayed the values of solidarity and inclusivity that the region had always stood for.

What was largely absent from the national coverage was the detail of his origins. Ratcliffe is from Oldham. He is, in the most literal biographical sense, one of the town’s products — a self-made man from a working class background who built something extraordinary. The same origin story that The Two Connors wear as their whole identity, that Brian Clarke never forgot, that Frank Rothwell has turned into a life’s mission of civic restoration.

Andy Burnham and the Politics of Place

Andy Burnham understood something early that most politicians take years to learn, if they learn it at all. Regional identity, in post-Brexit, post-austerity Britain, is not background noise. It is the thing itself. It is where people live, emotionally and literally, when the national conversation no longer speaks to them.

His construction of a Greater Manchester political identity — the coat, the Canal Street appearances, the ‘we do things differently here’ that became almost a slogan — was deliberate and sophisticated. He turned a mayoral role with relatively limited powers into something that functioned as a cultural brand, a statement of northern difference, an implicit opposition to the values he saw emanating from Westminster.

What makes Burnham interesting alongside The Two Connors and Clarke and Ratcliffe is that his relationship with place is the most consciously constructed of all of them. He didn’t simply come from somewhere and carry it with him. He understood that place could be a political instrument and he built one. The north as alternative. The north as resistance. The north as proof that there is another way.

Whether that construction ultimately serves the places it claims to represent, or whether it serves primarily the politician who wields it, is a question worth sitting with. The same question, in different registers, applies to all of them.

What Towns Actually Need

The BIRGing framework helps explain the psychology of why communities rally around cultural heroes. What it doesn’t fully account for is the cost of that dependency — what happens to a town’s self-image when the hero complicates the narrative, when they sell out or move away or say something that fractures the identification, when the mirror they held up starts reflecting something the community doesn’t recognise.

The Two Connors are currently in the most delicate phase of their trajectory. They have moved from DIY graft to professional representation, from pub gigs to stadium shows, from grassroots mobilisation to major label interest. Sony and DJ Semtex are reportedly circling. All of it is necessary. And all of it carries risk. The risk is not that they will become successful. The risk is that success will make them feel different to the community that built them.

The deeper question — the one that sits underneath all of this and has no easy answer — is what it says about a place that it needs its heroes so badly. That a 99p single purchase can feel like an act of civic resistance. That a chart position, even an official chart number one, can make a town feel seen. The emotional need for heroes is directly proportional to the years of feeling politically forgotten — and Oldham, like dozens of post-industrial northern towns, has been accumulating that debt for a long time.

He didn’t wait to be claimed. He came back and claimed the place himself.

That, perhaps, is the distinction that matters most. Not whether a town produces remarkable people — apparently they all do, if you look closely enough. Not whether those people achieve recognition, or whether the town rallies around them when they do. But whether the relationship is reciprocal. Whether the hero and the place are in genuine conversation. Whether what comes back to the town is more than pride.

In Oldham right now, on the same streets, in overlapping timelines, you have a stained glass artist who embedded himself permanently in the town’s fabric before he died. You have two brothers who are asking a fractured, anxious community to find itself in a song about familiar faces. You have a billionaire whose origin story is the same but whose relationship with it is its precise opposite. You have a politician who has turned regional identity into a serious political force. And you have, underneath all of it, a town trying to work out who it is and what it is worth.

The chart position was always irrelevant. That was never the story. The only story that matters — for Oldham, for any town that has ever claimed a hero — is whether what leaves ever truly comes back.