The Great Manchester Run
26 May 2003. The first running of the Great Manchester Run, photographed along Trafford Park Road and the Wharfside.
The first Great Manchester Run was held on 26 May 2003, over a 10 kilometre course through Trafford Park and Salford Quays. Click any photograph for a larger view.
The race
Photographs that did not survive. The original page carried further frames: the female and male leaders coming onto the Wharfside and running down Trafford Park Road, runners passing Old Trafford football ground, the mass of the field, and a shot simply captioned “the pain is beginning to show”. None of those files was captured by the Internet Archive.
About the race
The Great Manchester Run was first held in 2003 and immediately became one of the largest 10 kilometre races in the country, with a field that quickly grew into the tens of thousands. The route has changed over the years, but the early editions ran through Trafford Park and along the Wharfside at Salford Quays before finishing in the city centre.
The date is worth noting because of what else was happening in Manchester that spring. The city was in the middle of the redevelopment documented on the Manchester Developments page, and the race route passed directly through the ground being rebuilt: Trafford Park, the Quays, and the Ship Canal corridor.
Photographing a road race
The two surviving photographs happen to illustrate both approaches. The pace car frame is a photograph of the event; the Wharfside frame, with the field spread out along the water, is a photograph of the place the event passed through. On a course like this one, with the Lowry and the docks as a backdrop, the second is usually the more interesting picture.