It was with a large amount of irony that a week after I had helped organise a conference on the archaeology and history of Salford Quays I followed online the demolition of the last two cranes on the quayside at Salford. Despite a year-long campaign by local groups to save the electric cranes, first erected in 1966, they were demolished by the local council, who owned them. This was on the grounds that they could not afford to restore the cranes at a time when they were cutting millions of pounds from their annual budget. So how much do we value our industrial heritage? In monetary terms these cranes would have cost close to one million pounds to restore; demolition was a much cheaper one-off cost. Yet the local community valued them enough to attempt to get them listed as historic structures, and to campaign for their retention as monuments…