The artwork is being featured in a major exhibition in London until September 20 at the Photographers' Gallery


These are the haunting pictures of the last days of Manchester slum-land when houses built during the 19th century to home workers were finally demolished.

Photographer Shirley Baker was the only female photographer documenting British street scenes between the 1960s and the 1980s.

Her work featured urban areas in Manchester and Salford at a time of major social change, catching the dying days of a previous era.

This picture from the 1960s shows a young traveller girl standing amid the rubble of an area of deprivation in Manchester

Here Shirley Baker captures a shot of a young boy in 1967 with a cheeky grin, wearing a old-fashioned jacket

Here, a group of mothers are standing in a street with their children outside their soot-blackened homes in Manchester

Ms Baker captured images of people living in the densely-packed terraced houses in inner-city Manchester - similar type places to that depicted in Coronation Street.

The photographs showed youngsters at play and their mothers standing outside talking in communal groups, something that would appear very strange to modern society.

Speaking to The Guardian in 2012 about the clearances of the slums, Ms Baker said: 'There was so much destruction: a street would be half pulled down and the remnants set on fire while people were still living in the area. As soon as any houses were cleared, children would move in and break all the windows, starting the demolition process themselves. There was no health and safety in those days; they could do as they liked. I never posed my pictures. I shot scenes as I found them.'

In many of the photographs, children were forced to improvise to find ways to amuse themselves. Instead of expensive toys and games, they used bits of rope and even a Second World War surplus gas masks.

The amazing photographs, which illustrated a long-lost era, are on show in a special exhibition called Women, Children and Loitering Men at the Photographers' Gallery in London until September 20.

Ms Baker died in 2014 aged 82 after a short illness.

Ms Baker claimed that she never posed her photographs and instead documented things exactly as she found them

Here a group of children play cricket on the pavement outside their house which seems to have peeling paint on its walls

The images showed children exploring the areas around their homes in a manner that would be unacceptable to today's parents

Not all of Ms Baker's images concentrated on women and children as some showed men loitering around the area

The images show women and children sitting outside their cramped accommodation in the fresh air

In a scene from 1965, Ms Baker captures this image which could have easily come from 50 years earlier

Here a group of girls, probably sisters, sit out the back lane of their home while two older women are in deep conversation

Here a young child poses with what looks like a toy gun while in the background a young girl can be seen standing in a pair of high heels