Diary of a Bluestocking

manchester's magnificent South Bank

2010-08-08T07:44:00.013+01:00

for many modernists, the South Bank is the epitome of Londons iconic skyline, and seen largely undisturbed in an entirety that we rarely get elsewhere, it's truly a feast for the soul. a trip to the capital for me wouldnt be complete without a stroll along its banks to enjoy its many splendours, a happy marriage of riverside life, inspirational architecture and the best of modern art. this short stretch has something for everyone, punctuated as it is with the legacy and progressive ambitions of the 1951 festival of britain - the royal festival hall, the national film theatre, the heyward gallery - with the brooding bankside to relish at the other end, an extraordinary building sensitively restored and imaginatively reused.

and once back home, its all too easy to feel peeved after a saunter through such obvious treasures, impoverished at the lack of similar grandeur on our own doorstep. its harder being a flaneur in your own city, more difficult to appreciate what we still have to enjoy or uncover. yet we are privileged to have a secret south bank of our own, hidden away on the salford/manchester border. no, we’re not talking about the Thames & the Tate but the Irwell and the Peoples History Museum. this is where the manchester modernist society's latest project, the mappa modernista comes into play, with its exhortation to don those metaphorical x-ray specs and revisit the half forgotten landscapes of the 20th century city, lurking shyly down some side street or behind an unfortunate respray or gaudy recladding.

so next time you're feeling a little jaded with the relentless change and fashions of the city, why not rediscover your very own modernist haven, complete with magnificent museum on its left bank! here's a suggested route to start your ongoing adventures along the riverbank....

.....begin your mini modernist trail on deansgate opposite the cathedral, turning down chapel street to take in the space age splendour of Highland House and the unexpected pleasure of the service aspects of the brooding hulk of the often maligned Fairburn House, currently the Ramada hotel. seen from the riverside its intricate levels of stairwells, podiums and swirling car park ramps are crisp, intricate, positively delicate, if a little careworn. a short walk over blackfriars bridge rewards with a hidden descent to the river under the east is east restaurant.

from there you can saunter towards the graceful calatrava (trinity) bridge usually accompanied only by the resident cormorant and a cheeky gaggle of marauding seagulls. contemplate the marvels of its elegant engineering ensconced in the sweeping amphitheatre seating below, before turning to take in the sophistication of albert bridge house and its classic tripartite composition, a view only possible from this very spot. ahead lies perhaps leach rhodes walkers finest hour, the irrepressible aldine house, now Riverside, with its trademark concrete ribbing and saucy porthole windows.

a swift hanger right leaving the river allows you to join the path round the side of the complex rounding back up on to bridge street and the newly revamped pump house with its lovely cafe and mighty selection of cakes. here, weather permitting, take your afternoon tea on the terrace for a riverside seat and a peek at the swans and new cygnets that tend to hang out by the mark addy kitchens.

oh & dont forget to visit the reinvigorated museum, always well worth the trip, and reacquaint yourself with the history of the people who made the industrial revolution & the 20th century city happen; the likes of you and me. for this is not the story of captains of industry, bigwigs and famous leaders, but of the mill girls, the dockers, the suffragettes, the unionists, the clarionettes and weavers - the millions of 'ordinary' people who lived in, recorded and created such extraordinary times. the story of us...

key buildings encountered:

Albert Bridge House - EH Banks, 1958-9, ministry of works, for the tax office, hence perhaps its classical elegance. 18 storeys of reinforced concrete, it is clad in portland stone despite austerity era restrictions. sunlight glinting against its blue glass windows gives a jewelled luxury to the simplicity of the front elevation. from the riverside however, the tripartite composition really comes into play and reveals why Ian Nairn called it 'easily one of the best modern buildings in manchester.'

Aldine House - Leach rhodes walker, 1967. phased development for the land commission and home to the MEN for a while (hence the typeface-named baskerville house) the complex was designed around a peaceful court to provide a sense of community, suitably dressed with sculptures, water features & peaceful nooks, sadly now closed off. distinctive vertical cladding and porthole windows add a nautical flavour. the miesian aldine house itself was added by the firm in 1975 as their own hq, clad in polished black granite, and best viewed from bridge st.

Fairburn House - designed by Cruikshank & Seward, 1965 as offices, and later converted to a hotel, this is something of a grubby brute from the deansgate elevation, saving its unexpected delicacy for the riverside...

Highland House - leach rhodes walker, 1966. a glorious 23 storeys of towering elegance, punctuated with its funnel holed windows of stove enamelled steel, its dignity somewhat diminished by a gaudy purply respray over the original black and white patent finish.

Trinity Bridge - designed by santiago calatrave in 1996, this flagship footbridge between the 2 cities is a sculptural tour de force. a single strut supports the y shaped bridge and ramp by tension cables, resembling the mast of a simple fishing boat, listing salford-wards.

ps. note for fellow edwardians - the pump house is itself a significant building - the only surviving Edwardian hydraulic pumping station in the city, it used to supply power to the warehouses, wound the Town Hall clock and even raised the curtain at the Opera House!

mappa modernista manchester

2010-07-16T10:17:00.000+01:00

the manchester modernist society recently introduced an interactive online map of 20th century manchester’s architectural landmarks as part of MADF2010, a collaboration with the graphics and cartography departments of taylor young architects. i've been involved in some of the research, planning, many walkabouts and endless conversations about this rather massive task, so forgive me for indulging a little in this journal about the current state of play and some of the ideas behind this ongoing project, the first stage in a comprehensive archive of the twentieth century city.

our modernist map is not a regular A to Z street plan - it does not direct you through the brand new city of today. in fact it’s already out of date. instead it is a map of the imagination, a treasure trove of memories, achievements of cultural and civic aspiration. it is a palimpsest, an overlay or acetate, an excavation and a record of the Bold, Beautiful, Brutal and Beleaguered vernacular twentieth century city, already fading into oblivion - a city inhabiting the spaces between the glories of the Victorians and the pastiche and bombast of the post millennium redevelopments. we have attempted to document it all, the great and the small, the successful, the experimental and the less successful.

collaborating with the Taylor Young team allowed the mms to explore these notions of mapmaking and create something digital and sophisticated, an elegant interactive archaeology of the city that delves into the stratigraphy of the 20th century, combining the skills of the cartographer, the artistry of the graphic designer, and inspired by the endless methodologies of navigating the human experience – of transport maps, star charts and even the microscopic maps of our own genetics.
the result is an artefact and resource, an artwork and a database, the beginnings of a renewed relationship with the rich patina of our multilayered city, a living interactive experiment or laboratory that straddles the strangeness and literalness of the medieval mappa mundi, pays homage to the graphics of the 1950’s & 60’s and draws on the excitement and optimism of the post war vision of a modern utopia.

most of all, it is a map of the imagination, permitting us to relate not merely to individual, isolated buildings, as if they stand alone in cities entirely independent of the public realm they inhabit, but to the city as a series of coherent interconnected landscapes, where structures and the spaces in between relate and depend upon each other and the people who bring them to life with their day to day experiences and stories.

delve into the map as you wish, but here to start you off are four suggested voyages into the twentieth century city -

BOLD - this baker’s dozen amply illustrates the sheer inventiveness of a bold modernist landscape that still dazzles today. Relish Manchester’s exuberant and most audacious landmarks: the CIS tower, Express Building, Gateway House, Kendal Milne, Lee House, the Hollings Toastrack, Granada House, Pall Mall Court on King St, Oxford Rd Station and the whole of UMIST a complete Corbusian wonderland!

more classically inclined or a penchant for the elegantly glamorous? try our BEAUTIFUL list: spanning the entire breadth of the modernist era from the deco glamour of Sunlight House, the classic elegance of Central Library, or the mournful elegy of the Lutychens Cenotaph, the undiminished beauty of the twentieth century city sparkles all around us, worthy contenders for any stage. take this little saunter through the splendours of Albert Bridge House, Appleby Lodge, Cenotaph, Central Reference Library, Crown Courts of Justice, Midland Bank/HSBC, Peter House, Redfern House, CWS, Roscoe Building, Manchester University, Ship Canal House, St Augustine’s RC Church, Sunlight House. a twentieth century city that can still fascinate and inspire well into the 21st....

each month we dedicate one of our 3 features to those buildings that have left these earthly shores and departed to the shades of lethe, so in their honour, lest we forget is our BELEAGUERED list – revisit the fading landscape of the modernist city in our guide to treasures long gone or already earmarked for the bulldozer. take a hanky – this mournful homage is not for the fainthearted:
Bernard House, Cumberland Square, Northcliffe House, the Gaumont Cinema/Rotters on Oxford St, the Maths Tower on Oxford Rd, Mobberley Tower and the beautiful Dalwood Frieze, Loxford Tower, the controversial Hulme Crescents (given the Park Hill Urban Splash treatment they might have become the Barbican of Manchester!); and hanging on by a thread the UBO Offices on Aytoun St, Manchester House and the Old Odeon on Oxford St.

last but not least is a landscape that remains much maligned and misunderstood, an attempt to create architecture with an honesty and simplicity that celebrated the new materials and experimental nature of the modernist movement. possibly taken from Corbusier's ‘breton bruts’, translated into English it became something harder and ragingly controversial to this day...

BRUTAL - a dozen brutalist beauties, totemic monuments and landmarks of the Manchester skyline, love ‘em or loath ‘em, they embody the uncompromising spirit of their age. so consider anew our own shortlist – re-imagined as everybody’s favourite antiheroes, the city becomes alive with a veritable league of brooding Mr Darcys or moody but magnificent Heathcliffes! make a dangerous liaison with Aldine House/Riverside, Fairburn House/Renaissance Ramada Deansgate, the Arndale Centre, Bank of England Charlotte St, Lowry House & Post office Tower Spring Gardens, Piccadilly Plaza, Holloway Wall UMIST, RNCM Oxford Rd, the Kantoravitch University Campus. be careful you might fall dangerously in love...

these examples arent exhaustive, just a starting point of course.

but wherever it takes you here’s hoping the mappa modernista enriches our relationship to the city, treasure its faded careworn edifices a little more, and let it inspire a 21st century landscape to be proud of.

the manchester kiosks - a note on Gilbert Scott.

2010-07-09T11:29:00.001+01:00

Giles Gilbert Scott(1880 –1960) was last in a distinguished line of architects. his grandfather was Sir George Gilbert Scott, who built the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras station and the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, whilst his father after a promising start was to languish in asylums and family hideaways for much of his adulthood.

our Scott is famous for his blending of gothic tradition with modernism. he was to become a towering figure in 20th century architecture, creating iconic buildings wherever he went. he was RIBA president for its centenary year 1933, completed battersea power station in 1933, the new bodleian library in 1937-40, rebuilt the commons chamber at westminster palace after the 1941 bombing had destroyed it, and designed bankside power station now the magnificent Tate Modern.

yet he is perhaps best-known for his work on Liverpool Cathedral. when the competition for a 'Design for a twentieth century cathedral' was announced in 1902, he was a junior employee at his firm and an inexperienced 21 year old - he had previously only successfully designed a small pipe rack! nevertheless he was one of the five architects selected for the second round of the competition (his employer's designs were rejected) and subsequently went on to win in 1903. it was to become his life’s work which he worked on until his death in 1960; the cathedral was finished in 1978.

he is now buried with his wife outside the main entrance to Liverpool Cathedral where a K6 can also be found installed in his honour.

K8 - new estates, modernist railway stations, remote windswept spots, 1965 - 1985

2010-07-06T11:11:00.000+01:00

the young pretender -

designed by Bruce Martin, the funky K8 was the first serious challenger to K6. it was used primarily for new sites, around 11000 were installed, replacing earlier models only when they needed relocating or had been damaged beyond repair. the K8 retained a red colour scheme, but in a slightly brighter 'Poppy Red', which went on to be the standard colour across all kiosks. it was sassy, sleek and groovy in a tomorrows world, pans people sort of way, with its full glass panes and streamlined edges. less heritage and altogether more with it, more pop! spot one even today, and it looks modernistic, exciting and futuristic.

yet ironically, its relative success was partly due to its K6 inheritance. it took on some aspects of the failed experiment of the K7 (ie. a modern door handle, and full panes of toughened glass on three sides) but remained constructed of cast-iron, greatly adding to its resistance to the UK climate, and with some exceptions the all-over red livery was considered too important to be dispensed with - some K8's in Liverpool and Manchester were painted a distinctive 'Telecom Yellow', as opposed to 'Post Office Red'.and it never completely replaced the old war horse; K6 and K8 survived together into the 1980's, when the death knell for both were sounded with the arrival of the KX100 series.

this marks the real end of our story. the sad story of the red phone booth - they lost their domed roofs. then their red uniforms, and finally even their doors. they were on their way to becoming little more than posts with phones attached when a conservation movement in the 1990s persuaded BT to renovate, and even re-install, some of the old K6s. but this was all too late for the poor K8, now so rare as to be of special interest to the twentieth century society and a focus for one of their at risk campaigns.

at the last count only a handful of K8 remain. estimates vary from 12 to 20. if you see one, give us a ring and let us know!

K6, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, one on every corner, everywhere, 1935 – 1965

2010-07-03T11:06:00.000+01:00

designed once again by Sir Giles Gilbert-Scott in 1935 to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of King George V, this was the first truly national or nationwide kiosk, often referred to as the "London" or "English" phone box. it’s the one tourists the world over have their photos taken inside and still evokes the UK landscape whether bustling city or windswept countryside.

that essential tweaking of the K2 can also be spied throughout - the windows give greater visibility with the central panel of each horizontal band being wider that the others, whilst for night use there was an interior light (on a timer). the K6 also featured a writing shelf and, according to the GPO, "combined a smaller exterior with a roomier interior."

about 70, 000 k6’s were installed across the length and breadth of the country from 1936-1965 including four major design changes. boxes from the original 1936 Jubilee Kiosk programme of 8000 boxes have the entry and exit holes for the cable runs on opposite sides of the rear base of the box. from 1939, improved security measures called for a redesign that saw window frames rivetted rather than screwed, improved coin box fixings and the cable runs now brought together on one side of the box. also until 1952 all kiosks bore the Tudor Crown, until the present Queen introduced the St Edward’s crown, the one used for all coronations. this change happened in 1955 affecting all public telephones across the Empire, a useful dating clue for those obsessed by typological ordering.
although we think of the K6 as the red phone booth, there are some notable exceptions - kiosks installed in Hull were not fitted with a crown at all as they were installed by the Hull Corporation & were painted cream. they are also distinguishable by the complete absence of the crown, tudor or otherwise!

meanwhile there were battles fought across the land about the strident red colour, which wasn’t immediately well received and exceptions were made to appease their roll out - boxes for use in areas of outstanding natural beauty, could be painted Dark Battleship Grey with PO red window bars.

such teething problems ironed out, the K6 was to dominate the landscape for the next 30 years until the break-up of the gpo and the introduction of the new generation telecom boxes. in reality people increasingly had a phone in their own home, then came the mobile phone, the home computer and wifi, changing the way we communicate yet again, and making the need for these miniature buildings almost entirely obsolete. decommission was inevitable by the late 1980’s. yet the redundant k6 had an army of devotees, and a series of public campaigns led to some protection for some of the stragglers, with around 3000 becoming listed.

nowadays any surviving K6 can be designated a Grade II listed structure. the 4 survivors in city centre Manchester (two in st peters square, one on the corner of deansgate and Liverpool rd, and one on the top of st johns street) fall into this lucky category. they are in a pitiful state despite residing in prominent conservqtion areas of our 'original, modern city'.

pity that marketeers tag doesnt extend to the truly original & modernistic K6.....

K2, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, London 1925 – 1935

2010-07-02T11:16:00.000+01:00

the londoner -
our story really begins in 1920 with the Post office’s first attempt to commission a standard public call box to replace the multitude of weird and wonderful ‘silent cabinets’ randomly popping up everywhere. the result was the concrete K1 with its noticeable red door. though hardly any survive (the concrete frame weathered predictably badly) it did pave the way for the subsequent model the K2 - the first proper, familiar looking red phone box.

the domed roofed and all-over red K2 was the result of a competition held in 1924 and won by Sir Giles Gilbert-Scott, who was to continue refining his iconic design until the 1960’s. learning the lessons of the K1prototype, he made it entirely of cast iron and weighing in at over 1 ton it certainly didn’t come cheap, limiting its production chiefly to the capital and the south east. consequently it’s probably the K2 more than the K6 that visitors to the UK think of when they think red call box. look closely in places where they coincide, as they frequently do in the capital and you’ll notice that the K2 dwarfs the later K6 and that its horizontal windows are of equal width. all K2 boxes are listed buildings, and though predominately a London phenomenon, a handful escaped to the provinces, notably Oxford. there are also several dotted around the UK in private collections and museums.

cost and bulk aside it was cleverly constructed and an instant success. ventilation was provided via the crown in the roof section - it was made up from small, round holes – and legend has it that the dome was Scott's homage to the 18th Century architect Sir John Soane, R.A. (1753-1837) whose family tomb is surmounted by a very similar feature. whatever the inspiration this is a proper roof, dealing effectively with the elements, rain and litter. an ingenious design suitable for town and country, just waiting that little bit of tweaking to take the entire empire by storm and revolutionise the way we all talked to each other....

tales from the red telephone box

2010-06-30T11:19:00.001+01:00

this spring has been truly busy at mms, seeing us waxing lyrical about the good old public pay phone.

...you know, those bright red kiosks that used to be on every street corner from lands end to john o’ groats, as ubiquitous as the post box. much loved and recently declared a design classic, these national treasures have stayed in the public imagination long after their day to day utility has declined. after all when was the last time you actually got your 10 pence piece out, pulled open that iconic (and rather hefty) red door and climbed inside to make a call? not since your mobile became your laptop, camera, media player and all round personal assistant....

the phone box was first commissioned by the Post Office in the 1920’s to standardise the many different "call offices", "silence cabinets" and "kiosks" that had sprung up in shops, railway stations and other public places since the turn of the century. by the 1960s over 60,000 of the familiar red boxes had been installed across the whole country. since then the rise of the mobile phone, email and social networking has made the public telephone box, once so ubiquitous and centre stage, largely redundant and financially untenable. and despite a conservation campaign in the late eighties when 2000 boxes were designated as listed buildings, the new millennium has seen it recede to the peripheries, a forlorn relic of bygone times, decommissioned, vandalised, misused or threatened with removal.

only 4 such boxes remain in Manchester’s town centre: nestled unnoticed in pivotal conservation areas they visually embody the evolution of the modern city; that original, modern city that the marketeers constantly evoke and exploit...

this little box seemed to us at mms a fitting metaphor for the entire modernist project and so the invitation by FutureEverything to take part in their 2010 festival with its widened theme of the City offered the perfect chance to explore this notion via an art project, one which would re-connect these small buildings & listed structures with their surroundings, celebrate and commemorate their 75th birthday and raise their profile as at risk yet much loved structures.

the result was Ailis Ni Riain’s haunting sound installation which premiered in MOSI's red kiosk and remained installed throughout the festival. we have plans to expand the project in the future, but in the meantime here for the historically minded is the story behind the smallest 20th century listed buildings in the country, maybe the world...

read on for all the history and drama of the K2, k6 and ill fated K8...

the practice of writing; 20 lines a day

2010-06-15T08:32:00.000+01:00

Harry Mathews - famously the only american member of the OuLiPo, the experimental french literary group, and friend of perhaps its most well known member Georges Perec - in his book '20 lines a day' set out to follow a rule Stendhal once set himself, to write ‘Twenty lines a day, genius or not’. it was an attempt to overcome ‘the anxiety of the blank page’; an integral if not crucial part of his writing practice, his way of warming up if you like, before going on to whatever his actual writing project may be.

i began this diary, this little journal, hidden away inconspicuously amongst mountains of other bloggers, in the same spirit (but minus the talent) - not as an attempt to perfect an idea or topic, but simply a place to practice getting things down on paper in the first instance. a method for overcoming the fear and loathing of that intimidating blank page. a place where i could just write something, anything, and see what might emerge and where it might take me.

3 years later and i still manage considerably less than 20 lines a day, so it is perhaps fitting to conclude the theme of these last few posts with this encouraging segment from Mathews' own preface, to bolster the spirits of even the most timid scribbler...

like many writers, i often find starting the working day a discouraging prospect, one that i spend much energy avoiding. four years ago i was reminded of an injunction Stendhal gave himself early in life: vingt lignes par jour, genie ou pas. stendhal was thinking about getting a book done. i deliberately mistook his words as a method for overcoming the anxiety of one blank page. even for a dubious, wary writer, 20 lines seemed a reassuringly obtainable objective, especially if they had no connection with a serious project like a novel or an essay. for the next year or so i began many writing days with a stint of at least 20 lines, written about whatever came into my head on a pad reserved for that purpose.

hopefully Mathews own 'dubious wary writer' might fanally put paid to the ogre of the unstoppable driven genius forever hovering at our shoulder....

the problem with writing – episode 3...

2010-06-05T23:49:00.001+01:00

with this bilious reality forever goading me, its perhaps not surprising that the longer i leave it, the more impossible the idea, let alone the act of, writing becomes; the more severe my allergic reaction to the terrifying glare of that accusatory sheet of blank paper. a flick through this journal over the past three years amply attests to the tedious cycle of self pity and naval gazing i regularly succumb to.

but what strategy for thwarting all this lamentable wallowing can best be deployed by the reluctant writer? part of my own aversion to committing ideas to paper is the fear of not being ready, of my thoughts not being polished and honed to perfection; of exposing myself to ridicule or disdain by others more expert than myself. of delaying and procastinating until i am absolutely sure of my veracity and authority – but when, in reality, is there an end to research, when is meaning ever complete, definitive or total?

perhaps it’s best to rid oneself completely of all this mythologizing of the writer, let go of the intimidation emanating from all the books already written and embrace the idea of writing as a processual, dialogical process; as a work in progress, constantly under construction and revision. of recognising the notion of the artist/writer/creative as one more voice in an open ended, ongoing collaboration of ideas and enquiries: an ongoing conversation with yourself as well as all the others out there trying to make sense of the world. a strategy that acknowledges the fallacy of the written word as the perfectly resolved articulation of the 'genius' mind, a definite authoritative full stop. if we can accept the principle that as individuals we are ever in flux, always growing and changing, constantly being influenced and transformed by everything and everyone around us, then the proposition of a fully resolved definitive piece of writing becomes implausible - a veritable intrusion to scholarship, a prohibition to learning.

so far, so sensible, even obvious. but how to action this new modus operandi, this potentially liberating tactic?

in recent months it has come to my attention that a couple of bright young bluestockings, whose keen minds i rather envy, share some of the anxiety and discomfiture about the practice of writing that i all too often describe to you dear diary. so despite the blatant absurdity of attempting advice on this thorny topic given my own state of mind, here for the benefit of anyone else labouring under the weight of their perverse compulsion to communicate ideas in words, is my humble Advice To Reluctant Writers:

strategies for writing - i dont have one:

- i just cry for about a week before i'm due to write anything, procrastinate endlessly, stop dressing or washing (this is shamefully true!), crawl in and out of my bed in my pajamas for a tearful, headache ridden snooze, get up again, feel sick, take migraine tablets, wander round the flat for a bit in a hopeless daze, open my laptop, look at my notes and research files to fuel my depression, go on facebook, look up loads of things instead to intimidate myself with the fact that the subject im attempting to tackle has been thoroughly and expertly covered by everyone else anyway, cry some more, fall asleep for hours, get up at about midnight in a snot filled, delirious haze and desperately stay up all night til a version is churned hysterically out, go back to bed about 5am, get up at 8am and do it all over again........

things to avoid – rushed deadlines; i know i tend to leave it all too late:

- im fine with the reading, the looking things up, the thinking and mulling, but find it impossible to create a plan or precis to follow. i tried all that planning and ordering during my masters and it always defeated me - i was still finalising the abstract to my dissertation as i was photocopying the body of it in triplicate for binding on the morning of the hand in day. not funny or good practice....

ideas to hold on to – ‘practice’; understand the way you write and prepare and accept this practice rather than try to alter it:

- it’s the only useful thing my tutor told me. he said that maybe the crying, the blockages, the not-washing and going to classes in my pajamas (again this is tragically truthful - the masters stage of my course saw me regularly arrive for tutorials and seminars still in my bedwear, and i would start to cry in class if anyone just looked at me....awful) was my 'practice' (i should explain that this was the art school so my behaviour was seen as creative not deranged) and that writing was as much of a process as drawing or painting. this, though probably obvious to most people was something of a revelation to me and has been a useful mantra ever since. it has allowed me to attempt to work with what i’m actually like rather than try to over analyse or change it. i now (in theory) understand that i need to start the whole sorry process much earlier than i think i need to, to allow it to proceed along its natural course.

- also i try to recognise that my obsession with research is more to do with insecurity as academic rigour and eventually stifles any fragment of faith in my own initial idea or thesis - so remember that you should stop when 'they' (all those pesky experts) start intimidating you. write what you feel, take a break and then start smoothing and editing this initial, unruly stream of consciousness. i find writing smaller things regularly for no one other than myself really helpful - its why i started the diary. a private vehicle for trying out ideas and topics of interest that might eventually be useful for something bigger.

- lastly have someone to talk to – often an problematic idea becomes suddenly clarified when you’re describing it out loud to someone else....

well that’s it - thats the advice. the sum total. that’s all i’ve got.

...all i have to do now is practice what i preach.

the problem with writing. episode 2

2010-06-03T00:33:00.000+01:00

so even reading has a downside. it reminds me of the shadowy 'writer', an elusive figure forever scribbling away just out of eyeshot. purposeful, driven, indefatigible.

this image of the genius author (the 'intellectual' personified) constantly torments me, mocking my pitiful, irrelevant attempts to set down my own meagre thoughts on the passing of the 20th century and the forging of the 21st. as something of an obsessive reader, whose lifes small memories can be best conjured up or recalled by the books she was reading at the time and an amateur historian and erstwhile classicist, both my business and pleasure has always had books and their writers at its heart. writers loom large in my world and enjoy a privileged, somewhat hushed, awed status for me.

so i am forever returning to one eternal truth. to the idea that writing is somehow an innate or effortless practice, at least to actual, proper writers. that it is the natural preserve of the thinker, the intellectual, and best left to them.

and it cannot be learnt, cannot be forced but rather, is a need, an urge, a compulsion. that when all else has failed the author, the novelist, the commentator or poet in their paltry life, at least there is the act of writing, of setting it all down on a page and with it some personal meaning and self affirmation. a defiant two fingers to an indifferent world, a mark making that says i was here, i was real – i write therefore i am.

a writer is self evidently identified by the act of writing. it’s what a writer IS, is what defines them - its in their blood. in interviews, memoirs and biographies its always the same; clues scattered everywhere as to this one eternal truth - the pure unadulterated instinct to write. writers are simply always writing, always scribbling away, getting an idea down on paper to turn into something poetic, brutal, incisive, timeless. even as a child it seems any proper writer always knew they were a writer and spent their infancy constructing tales, telling stories to their teddies and entering writing competitions whilst barely out of nappies....beguiling and intimidating, deconstruct the life of any writer and its invariably there. the writing gene.

i was never like this. i will never be like this. i spent my childhood eating up the words of others, not creating them for you to eagerly devour at some future time. i didnt entertain my teddies or the family pet with tales of my own devising. i read instead. stripped moston library bare by the time i was ten - it was a small library i confess. worried the neighbours with my peculiar predilection for wandering through the streets armed with a tower of books and reading them whilst crossing the road or tucked up alone in some corner of the vast wastelands around my home. but never, not ever, did i attempt to emulate one. never had the urge. there was simply no need when so many literary giants were freely providing me with so much knowledge, pleasure and friendship.

so what exactly makes a non-writer attempt to write? and how does one proceed, learn the rules, practice the craft and perhaps improve or find a valid voice and not feel foolish in daring to inadvertently aspire to the pantheon of gods just described? join the fray so to speak.

where did this emerge from so late in life - and what on earth is the point? this is the million dollar question. far from identifying an urge or complusion to write, ive identified the opposite - a dread of writing, a fear of it. my instinct is if anything NOT to write. yet a visceral swell of self loathing and physical sickness begins to surge up if i havent tried to make sense of something forming in the corner of my brain by writing it down somewhere.

then it proceeds to claw away at me and make me nauseous. i avoid it, wrestle with it, research it and read about it, dive off into interesting culverts and cul de sacs, cry about it and sometimes finally commit something of it to paper. then i feel a surge of joy, merely i suspect that this self abusive cycle is spent - a surge of relief is more like it, of freedom and levity.

until the whole damn process starts all over again.

happy birthday manchester modernist society!

2010-06-01T10:23:00.000+01:00

one year ago today i wrote about the brand new manchester modernist society on these pages.

i had just finished typing up our manifesto and had put the final flourishes to the fledgling website with a welcome call-out to fellow modernists near or far. our facebook page was a day or two old and had just three members; myself, young jack hale and my assistant maureen. we sat in cornerhouse cafe with our laptops and giggled at the arcane preposterousness of creating a society between us, a society that had no intention of being official or trailblazing or of marketing for members. simply an idea based on the gloriously amateur clubs of yesteryear, like the ramblers and the clarionettes or the even the suffragettes. a hotch potch of all the things that personally inspired us, with inclusivity and conviviality at their heart - plus a little civil agitation thrown in for good measure.

it was all a little tongue in cheek as little did we guess that anyone might be interested in our peculiar obsessions. we had no idea how to go about it or how it would work, we simply wanted to start doing something rather than endlessly talk about it. something that was in the playful spirit of the lovely loiterers, the specificity of the 20th century society and the art/subversion of apartment, my former home. something that combined actual live activity or exploration each and every month, with some solid but accessible information and signposting to further reading and specialists on matters of interest or topicality, and regular collaborations with other groups or disciplines to create new ways of celebrating or highlighting our 20th century cities.

our first tentative expedition was a trip to leeds to the New Monumentality exhibition & talk at the henry moore foundation, attended by just three of us. thank you alan and amanda for a great afternoon and for all your subsequent support and ideas.....

one year on we are busy evaluating our first art commission and programme of activities attended by about 90 people or more, a moonlit paean to the odeon attracting around 120 adventurous souls, plus the launch of our embryonic modernist map of manchester at salford's the hub, attended by 60 or so modernists, urbanists and map lovers.

here's to the coming year. whatever it brings, the heart of our remit remains the first thing we wrote one year ago today...

We want to explore the extraordinary story of the 20th century in the broadest possible sense, especially its everyday vernacular landscape, start conversations, bring people together, raise awareness and perhaps even make the occasional difference – but most of all to get out there and enjoy ourselves in it.

hope to see you enjoying the city with us sometime soon!

guilty pleasures and ingrained habits...

2010-05-30T19:16:00.000+01:00

suddenly its the cusp of summer and there's been a lot going on in niblock towers to lead me astray.

too many ideas and scribblings have made it straight from my notebooks onto the pages of the manchester modernist society rather than here. in between researching the modernist map and getting it launched in time for MADF2010, commissioning the kiosks project for FutureEverything and installing it at MOSI and working alongside the MMDC/UHC on a moonlit presentation cum protest at the delapidated but dignified husk of the city's former odeon/paramount cinema there has been little time to organise my own thoughts and assemble them for the diary. and now in the brief gap before hurtling headlong into our autumn/winter projects i find i have a pile of abandoned jottings on topics that have taken my interest over the past few months and a bunch of faded cuttings that seem woefully out of date to quite know how to tackle.

so defeated have i felt at so obviously failing to keep up with my pointless doodlings about the city and its everyday splendour that i confess to burying my head in what i know best - the pages of a book or four.

the official laziness of the bank holiday, when everyone it seems lets out a sigh of relief, kicks off their shoes and takes it easy, has been the perfect opportunity to further avoid writing and instead indulge in a good old read of the pleasing stack of books littered around niblock towers. there is always a veritable tower block of books to hand - second hand finds, amazon bargains, plus those bought on various 3 for 2's at blackwells or waterstones - half read, waiting to be read or being leafed through sporadically. for at heart dear diary, as you know too well, miss niblock is a reader not a writer.

we all have a favourite genre, a guilty pleasure so at odds with the carefully constructed version of self we present to the world that it ranks almost as a vice, a sordid secret. books we feel might shock or disappoint those we want to impress. books that arent erudite, learned or important, that arent of literary or academic worth. but books nonetheless that we cant put down, that we read in one sitting til we've reluctantly turned the final page. holiday or convalescent books, books to enjoy with a nice cup of tea and a biscuit – the equivalent of an afternoon columbo or murder she wrote.

surely everyone has such a secret vice, the books we turn to when the world has let us down, when we need reassurance that some things are solid and dependable, that can cheer our gloomy spirits, be it celebrity biog, romance, chick lit, sci fi....

and it struck me as i picked up the ones most calling out to me from my wobbly book tower that my own filthy habit, my own dirty secret is crime. admittedly ‘smart’ waterstones/guardian endorsed fashionable euro-crime, such as wallander, dibdin, montalban, mosley, reverte perez and the rest. books with a certain following since the dramatic arrival of stieg larsson to the scene. suddenly crime is the hot topic of the chatterati.

but it wasnt always like this. my little secret wasnt always so acceptable, so trendy - ever since i can remember ive read one whodunnit (as they used to be called) to every half dozen serious or 'proper' books, both as a school girl and later as a bone fide classics student. and it was ever so since childhood. cant help it, i cut my teeth on the determinedly unfashionable, from nancy drew and the hardy boys, to sherlock holmes, wilkie collins, agatha chistie, ngaio marsh, margery allingham, dorothy l sayers, and even enid blyton's rockingdown mystery series.

and i cant hide them, these pecadilloes, never could. they remain on my shelves to reread whenever the going is tough and my brain needs a breather. they are rarely demanding, are packed with rules of the games and loaded with conventions, or cliches, depending on your point of view. really, each one is the same. a predictable formula.

so just what is it about them? and why am i not ashamed of this somewhat lurid obsession? because in their own way they are familiar and reassuring, offering a hint of (safe) excitement in the chase, but no actual danger. and no, for me its not the crime itself that interests, its the mystery and its solving, the making of order out of chaos.

i even love cluedo. its the only game i've ever had the inclination to play. sad but predictable.

anyway cant stop here chatting, im off to watch an episode of columbo....

save our ghostsigns....everyday frescoes of the people!

2010-04-15T14:53:00.000+01:00

good to see jonathan glancey taking up the cause of those once ubiquitous faded signs adorning and decorating the sides of crumbling old buildings great and small, or ghostsigns as the History of Advertising Trust’s online archive evocatively call them. as he points out,

British towns and cities boasted a promiscuous palette of painted adverts like these. Standing on the tops of ladders, signwriters had a field day celebrating Bovril, Hovis, Boots and Nestle's Milk "Rich in Cream", along with Puck Matches, Bile Beans, Peterkin's Custard and any number of local crafts, trades and services.

Many signs survive, in ghostly form, on the sides of ageing buildings. I bet there's one near you. Ruthless modern development means that such "ghost signs" (as they are known by the History of Advertising Trust) are disappearing.

And yet they deserve to be saved. Here are urban folk-memories from an age before the triumph of the paste-up poster, cinema, magazine, telly and internet advertising.

back in September 2009 over at the manchester modernist society we ran a little homage to the peculiar beauty and cultural significance of these fast disappearing relics in our own city, prompted in part by the sudden passing of one particular local favourite, the much loved barkat sign on dale st, needlessly painted over by one assumes its new owners.

here’s what we said ....

Our post war murals are in effect treated no differently to the vernacular street signs adorning so much of the city like Barkat Knitwear, perhaps the boldest and most colourful example of the genre which lit up Dale St for god knows how long until being unceremoniously, criminally painted over by its new owner /property developer. Like our commissioned murals it brightened up the daily trudge to work, school or the shops come rain or shine, a landmark, an icon, an everyday fresco for the common man.

A quick perusal of flickr shows that the Barkat sign was until very recently a much loved fixture in the landscape, admired for its colour, exuberance & the rugged, battered textures of its surface; appreciated as an invaluable slice of social and cultural history; as much a historical artefact as anything dug up on an excavation, a window into the day to day life of the twentieth century city, as valuable as a wall of Latin graffiti in Pompeii. The Barkat sign straddled the boundary of Ancoats and the outer edge of Northern quarter, once the heart of the textile, food and commercial district, a bustling labyrinth of workshops, showrooms and factories. These buildings – their sides, facades, doorframes - were literally, physically, billboards for products, signposts and adverts in an era before PR and marketing departments, television ads or internet publicity campaigns. Sign writers were skilled artists and their work was detailed, meticulous and in great demand. Though the industries declined and the businesses disappeared their memories remained, faded peeling apparitions, relics and remnants of former glories.

And whilst they share many of the attributes of post war murals, the fragility of their materials, their commercial nature and inherent anonymity renders them even more vulnerable to the threat of regeneration, demolition or eradication. From modest pieces such as the Barkat to lavishly painted adverts promoting everything from universal products to specific, local services and businesses, they are both visual treasures and social/cultural documents, multiple narratives of the city past and present enriching the built environment.

Perhaps the time has come not only to challenge our notions of what art is but to broaden the boundaries of what constitutes the archaeological object. Every time we paint over, dismantle or jet clean one of these images we erase a crucial element of the fabric of the city, a little bit more of our history and yet more of our archaeological record, the story of ourselves. Furthermore, Bristol council’s decision to consult the local population on the fate of graffiti art covering the walls of its city buildings demonstrates the beginnings of a welcome reassessment of the ‘canon’, one that reflects and acknowledges the value and importance of art and design in the public realm, beyond that which is traditional or officially sanctioned. Perhaps it’s also time to include an anonymous oeuvre that paved the way for the banksys of today. These quotidian frescoes embody art, social document and historical artefact. If we can accept graffiti as art then why not sign writing and graphic design?

Reimagined as a vast open air Tate Modern minus the exhibition fee and restrictive opening hours, bursting with paintings, murals, sculpture and pop art from every era, the city becomes a living canvas, a vibrant and thought provoking backdrop to our everyday lives, reflecting like all major collections, media and styles of every period. But this is a collection that boasts artwork from the famous to the unknown, reflecting the times and cultures of the changing city, always thought provoking, visually stimulating and a pleasure to visit and inhabit.

RIP - barkat door sign, needlessly erased, 2009

How property development became the new punk....

2010-04-01T15:05:00.000+01:00

owen hatherley’s ideas have long found favour on these pages and i often return to his writings for inspiration and intimidation. in yesterday's guardian podcast he turns his unflinching gaze onto our own fair city and as usual hits the nail on the head.

its a brilliant piece. exploring the impact of architecture on manchester’s cultural scene, he elucidates what some of us have been trying to suggest for the last decade to a largely disinterested citizenry, in thrall with the all pervading orthodoxy of the reigning post bomb narrative; that of the great entrepreneurial victorian city reborn triumphantly to the present day. this mythology of the ‘original modern’ city, brashly beguiling with its relentless self aggrandising swagger, has successfully airbrushed out a whole century and the experiences of the people in it.

to many of us still living outside the shiny glass and steel bubble of the regenerated centre, in the ordinary fragmented spaces not yet given the urban splash treatment, hatherley’s thesis is nothing new, but to hear it boldly enunciated is still something of a novelty. inevitably hatherleys reading will go down like a lead balloon to those wedded to the hollow sham that is spinningfields and new islington, vulgar neo-ruins in waiting to the false idols of the free market economy.

but just what did become of the 20th century city, the urban topography of postwar manchester in particular? the idea that prior to ’96, the entire city was a dismal shithole - and by extension, the lives and experiences of all who inhabited it - has held sway, unchallenged, for far too long. the grand civic aspirations and modernist landscape envisaged as a new utopia replacing squalid unsanitary slum dwellings, seen so clearly in recent excavations over on dantzic street, were sold off, obliterated and missed by no-one. as hatherley explains,

this is the narrative about modernist architecture that exists in numerous reminiscences and histories – we loved it at first, in the ’60s, then we realised how appalling it was, so we knocked them down and rebuilt simulations of the old streets instead.

in manchester, after the ira bomb of 1996 and before the 2008 financial crash, property development became the new punk rock...a post-rave urban growth coalition of old punks, ravers, developers and new labour mandarins took control of the city, transformed it into Britain’s regeneration flagship, done in the name of a city that created joy division, factory records and the hacienda, wiping out as much of the 60’s city they took inspiration from as they possibly could, in an orgy of demolition and rebuilding.

nowadays, when manchester is profiled and reminisced over, its most often than not from a narrative which leaps from the victorian city of manchester liberalism, the unrestrained capitalism much loved by thatcherites, to the city recreated and regenerated after the bomb. its old entrepreneurs built the mills where workers toiled 12 hour days and died before they were 40, and the new entrepreneurs sell the same mills to young urban professionals as luxury housing, with rooms half the size of the old council flats. the poverty of 19th century manchester and the inequalities of today are effaced whilst in between is a no man’s land – except that now, after the recession, these empty spaces are back and the estates of ancoats left in ruins after failed regeneration schemes.

is the post bomb deal with the devil finally beginning to crack? as the fissures begin to appear in first of the great glass shards of 'new' manchester, collective amnesia is no longer the order of the day...

*************************************************
launched in july 2009, Loops is a new journal of music writing; a promising urbanist marriage between publishers Faber and Faber and Domino Records. its second edition is fresh out....im nipping out to buy an issue immediately. it sounds right up my high rise....

the train now departing platform 12…

2010-03-09T15:32:00.000Z

long before the instant gratification of cheap airlines, the railway station was the epitome of glamour and modernity, gateway to far off lands, symbol of the triumphant submission of time and space to a new metropolitan world order.

accordingly the railway was a central motif on the silver screen, a rumbling cathedral to sophisticated urbanity, to the relentless efficiency of the metropolis, all whirring pistons, bustling smoky platforms, colossal clocks and the clackety clack of the destination boards, site of passionate trysts, clandestine assignations and mysterious intrigue. from dr zhivago to some like it hot, the lady vanishes and brief encounters, the railway has long evoked both the romance and menace of the urban experience.

in contemporary life this ubiquity might have receded but its nostalgic hold on our collective imagination is reaffirmed in the harry potter franchise. who hasn’t secretly looked out for platform 9¾ when they’ve passed through kings cross? or at least wished it might be possible? in our hearts we all long to be whisked away on a journey to a far off world, real or imaginary…..

as you might recall, dear reader, brunswick sits in the crook of the city’s two giant causeways, the mancunian way and piccadilly station, the latter prime gateway to the north west since its opening in 1842. my daily routine is consequently dominated by travel, speed and noise; other people’s schedules form the backdrop to my life and mundane existence. and whilst i could walk around the station in my customary expeditions across town, i invariably prefer to walk through it, relishing the muffled tannoy announcements, basking in the hustle and bustle of commuters, day trippers and holiday makers and its tantalizing glimpses into the lives of so many strangers.

so it was only natural that i should gladly accept an invitation to a journey with a difference departing at 6.30pm on march 4 from platform 12…

‘night and day’ is a photographic celebration of the musical footprint of the city by jan chlebik, a lyrical, poetic text by phil griffin and musical annotation by guy garvey; the elbow frontman’s observation that the halle orchestra was in fact the first manchester band being the springboard for this temporary exhibition.

chlebik’s raw and seemingly unassuming depictions, shorn of artifice, special lighting or crafty photoshopping, perfectly captures the grimy, unlikely and often uninviting geography of the musical landscape of the city and reawakens the excitement of hunting out a favourite band down some dingy alley or improbable spot in the days before purpose built arenas held sway. in these wistful images, stripped of the glamorous paraphernalia that follows the cult of the musician, the venue becomes a metaphor or receptacle; a memory box or more literally a musical box ingrained with a unique archive of precious memories and seminal encounters, reverberating with the soundtracks to a multitude of lives, connecting otherwise disparate generations and musical tastes across time and space. and all the while word wizard phil griffin conjures up a truly melodious topography casting music as ‘city cement’ where ‘the city is stage, and performed, set, script and score’, its notes saturated into the very masonry of the buildings.

and ‘off the plinth’, outside the usual gallery confines, the long walk along platform 12 becomes the ideal frame for accompanying our guides headlong, pied piper-like, into the stratigraphy of the city on an acoustic ride through the free trade hall, via the opera house, the ritz and bridgewater hall, calling at the band on the wall, the roadhouse, night and day and the nearby star and garter, which the taller amongst us (like the nearly 7ft tall mr haslam) could just about spy on his tippy toes.

of course, this musical tour includes the obligatory hacienda and younger sibling the boardwalk but this is no mere harping to factory mythologizing or madchester glories but a thoughtful tribute to a long standing love affair which outlives temporal fads and fashions, with room for alternate itineraries such as the twisted wheel, the jolly angler and the short lived hardrock, whose residues seep into gutters and along drain pipes and remnants still drift on the breeze faintly audible to the odd soul stepping out for a smoke on the night air outside such johnny-come-latelies as the warehouse project or deaf institute.

this ‘city for fagins boys and bar room bores and ladies of the night’ drew me back into half forgotten dives such the international, fagins or the desolate b&q car park where once ziggy stardust played guitar amidst the ghosts of a former bowling alley, or debbie harry’s vocals might still be detected besides the hurly burly of the turkish cheese counter...

so if you find yourself at piccadilly station be sure to make your way to platform 12. who knows where this trip might take you....

snow, a transformative cartography

2010-01-30T15:15:00.000Z

cartography (in greek chartis = map and graphein = write) is the study and practice of making geographical maps. combining science, aesthetics, and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively

a transformative cartography reimagines the map not as fixed or permanent but fluid and multi layered

………………………………….

the snow continued.

the moon, a cutlass slash in an ink-black sky, glittered over an icebitten brunswick more brothers grimm storyboard than inner city estate; the mancunian way a sinuous white river, cars drifting silently by; the graveyard usually windswept and forlorn now a byronesque ruin; common or garden urban decay transformed into fields of arctic wilderness, desultory barbed wire fences an armoury of stalactite daggers.

in the days that followed the city held its breath and stayed indoors, venturing out for many merely a tiresome battle with nature. for others it was an adventure playground, a winter wonderland of impromptu opportunities to lark about, all snowball fights, elaborate snow constructions and spontaneous strolls. cul de sacs became mini ice rinks and parks aspen ski slopes, with tea trays, summer inflatables and handy ‘for sale’ signs reinvented as sledges, snowboards and toboggans.

each snowfall seemed to signpost yet more undetected enthusiasms, whimsies and idiosyncrasies, including a man sauntering through hulme, large parakeet on shoulder; a lone skier gliding effortlessly on long poles towards ardwick green; a cheeky robin red breast perched on the carotted nose of a jolly snowman in umist; a long legged heron picking its way across the mancunian way revetment and onwards through the underpass; a gaggle of birdwatchers huddled in heaton park snapping squirrels, robins, jays and chaffinches against a picture perfect alpine scene; a daisy chain of enthusiastic tobogganers hurtling down blackley golf course connected only by one another’s jackets and a string of carrier bags…

but as the days progressed and the novelty of narnia became just a slippery day to day normality, each new delivery of snow mapped another brunswick – more workaday but equally fascinating - a world of otherwise intangible habits, gestures, rituals and routine suddenly exposed, a noisy, visually arresting tapestry of footprints capturing the habitually elusive and ephemeral; a daily trail of routes and journeys, of dog walking and jay walking, of exuberant delight in treading fresh snow versus a pedantic desire to retain virgin crispness.

an ephemeral archaeology of everyday activity as fragile as bare feet in sand washed away by the incoming tide….

in this cacophony of footprints a secret life of brunswick and its inhabitants is disclosed.

far from dominating the landscape as we like to think, in reality we share our space with other populations, their daily routines etched intaglio style into the snow; a world with squirrels and foxes as prevalent as pets, all busy navigating our alleys and ginnels, walking through our playgrounds and nosying in back gardens, getting on with lives every bit as intricate as our own; a world where pigeons prefer to walk up footbridges than fly over them and cats make their way across car parks from bonnet to bonnet rather than sidle around or beneath them; of blackbirds, wagtails and sparrows as frequent as magpies, and where frozen canals testify to a bustling thoroughfare of ducks, geese, coots, swans and passing seasonal visitors.

in his ‘practices of everyday life’ de certeau developed a new vocabulary for differentiating space and place where place is the fixed, objective order of things and space how we deal with spatiality as a ‘practiced place’. extending this analogy to mapping and touring, maps can be read as ‘frozen’ representations depicting environments as unchangeable and monumental, entirely at odds with the personal, animated way people actually navigate space in their daily lives. once upon a time mapping was simply a record of where we had been and how we got there; itineraries essentially, with traces of the describers still visible. but over time these maps have become ever more fixed and abstract and the describers (ourselves) have disappeared completely.

for de certeau our everyday activities animate place - civilian tactics in a battle to reclaim our place in the grandiose isolating narrative of the planned city. and in each fresh flurry of snow our footprints map out this quotidian animation of place, outlining the itineraries of the past 24 hours or less – those habitual, unnoticed, intangible traces doomed to remain undetectable in a future archaeological record.

here vividly displayed in the snow is de certeau’s ‘practiced place’, each mark a conversation or visual eavesdropping. some are spontaneous, a snapshot capturing the exuberance of unselfconscious playfulness, an unbridled celebration of the season, others more deliberate declarations or social messages, but mainly they are just business as usual, mundane minutiae of our day to day lives. whilst the ever present urban graffiti and occasional vandalism cements the typical clichés of the inner city, these temporary traces tell another story, less well told, their sheer number and proliferation eloquently describing a population that is altogether more convivial and productive than can normally be discerned, a cartography of our everyday world, as told by the people who inhabit it. a map animated and enlivened by our intricate, intertwining journeys, just as de certeau imagined; its describers (ourselves) at last, if only briefly, reinstated.

snow, a transformative practice

2010-01-29T14:40:00.000Z

“it was growing darker every minute and with the snowflakes swirling all around him he could hardly see three feet ahead... everything was perfectly still as if he were the only living creature.” Edmund discovers Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe…

**************************

the night the ice queen transformed brunswick it had seemed an ordinary night much like any other…

at first a gentle flurry of soft white flakes, just enough to glaze the roof tops, before long a thick blanket strewn across the mancunian way, reducing the clamour of the traffic hurtling past my window to a whisper, as though cocooned in a deep shag pile carpet. looking back, maybe the moon loomed a little lower that night; more luminous, almost blue, against a bright, inky sky. but that was all.

later, much later, awakened by an unaccustomed silence deafening my motorway perch, i wandered on to my balcony into a whirling life-size snow-globe. delighted, i reminded myself that this would all be gone by morning, this being manchester not new york, and after a brief foray downstairs to frolic in the magic dust, i reluctantly trotted back to bed and the deep contented sleep of a child exhausted by an unexpected christmas eve snowfall.

but when morning came, it had not melted away.
far from it…

looking out from my balcony, instead of the usual bold skyline and rich textures of the city, was nothing.

no colour, no buildings, no sound. no city.
only white.

only snowflakes. a softly whirling all obliterating snow storm.

nothing stirred, not even the motorway; now a silent river of white, a natural phenomenon, the urban cacophony of lights, noise, speed, of urban life, extinct, extinguished, bleached out.

only brunswick, my dragon-guarded, moated camelot, frozen and stilled…

24 hours of snow might seem something of a non event to the rest of you but in this city it is momentous, almost unheard of; unnatural. and should snow fall, the perpetual mancunian dampitude (if i might coin a phrase) ensures that it rarely sticks, melting away on impact.

this therefore was an event of magnitude.

narnia had come to brunswick and transformed everything - my neighbourhood, and as it transpired, the whole city, the entire nation.

and with it we too, its citizens, were transformed.

**********************

as the district gradually awoke to this new world, we ventured out, encased in wellies, woolies and waterproofs, to wonder at the strange conditions before embarking on our usual day. but this was no usual day...

before long, gradually accepting that cars were frozen, roads outside inaccessible and that clearing a path through the snow was a losing battle, the entire community gave up and came out to participate in a spontaneous gesture of playfulness and jollity.

...snow was scooped up, snowballs were thrown, snowmen appeared on every corner, and neighbours joined forces in our mini squares to create entire snow-families complete with domestic pets and various dwellings, from tower blocks to giant igloos. even a medieval castle was constructed by a particularly enthusiastic group using summer buckets and spades. brunswick, from being a monotone concrete inner city cliché was now a lively public arena, a convivial space, an outdoor art gallery where everyone was at once artist, curator, audience and spectator. soon cameras and iphones were clicking, ideas, suggestions and assistance offered and accepted, as we all embarked on impromptu walkabouts to examine the fruits of our collective labour - social conventions overturned, shyness overcome, conversations struck up, experiences shared.

intriguing differences could be detected across the assorted corners of our enclave – local chinese families joined together to make snow pigs and gigantic kitties, native mancunians tended towards the 'traditional' snowman (carrots for noses and twigs for arms) complete with woolly hats and scarves, whilst overseas students from nearby umist adorned their creations with jaunty sunglasses and straw hats, as if ready to board a plane for warmer climes. across the flyover all saints art students indulged in fantastical creatures from far off worlds and other dimensions, dragons complete with ridged tails, cherubs and gargoyles with wings and crested plumes; and sackville park sparkled, a vision in fairies, angels and cheeky fig leaved adam & eves, christmas tinsel, baubles and decorations making an earlier than scheduled reappearance.

narnia took us unawares, illuminating traces normally invisible to the naked eye and casual observer, permitting us to be other than our everyday selves, revealing a more lighthearted, creative, mischievous, unselfconscious citizenry than is usually apparent.

going underground

2010-01-05T12:27:00.000Z

adventure, wrote alexandra louise eugenie marie david-neel (24oct 1868-8sept 1969), a habitual peregrinist and determined free spirit who performed for many years with a travelling opera company as 'mademoiselle myrial' before trekking through the tibetan highlands and living as a hermit for 2 years in the himalayas, is my only reason for living…

the sorry disappointment of manchester’s ‘big’ new years eve merely succeeded in cementing my seasonal ennui with a sulk of schoolgirl proportions, so as the world outside seemed to pull itself together and embrace 2010, i simply cocooned myself deeper into old habits wishing, not for the first time since that unexpected release from my 70 year hermitude, that i was back in the rather more exciting past where i belong.

clearly what was needed was a little adventure, bluestocking style, to lift the spirits.

but where to find it? in my day adventure was to be found way across the globe in far flung and ‘exotic’ lands under fiendishly adverse conditions, but as you might recall dear journal, my project since arriving unexpectedly into this decidedly peculiar new century, has been to adapt this tradition into an exploration of the quotidian world around me, to find, as those angels of anarchy so sublimely suggested, the extraordinary in the everyday.

as every flaneur knows, all you need is the imagination to see it, and in manchester something never fails to pop up and rekindle ones jaded affection and inspiration right in the nick of time. adventure it seems can simply drop into your lap - or inbox…

so it was that the 2nd January saw me sloshing my way towards the victoria station map, wrapped up warm, sensibly shod and armed with a sturdy torch as tantalisingly instructed in my invitation to attend an underground expedition. an expedition into the dark, swirling underbelly of the city, courtesy of new manchester walks, one of the plethora of guided walk companies that have recently sprung up all over the city. flaneuring it seems is now quite a la mode!

and despite the inclement weather – damp and drizzly prior to the current ‘big freeze’ of 2010 – there were at least 35 people loitering with intent to ‘urban ex-lite’, excited by the rare opportunity to discover some of the hidden spaces lying beneath our feet, a world of abandoned air raid shelters, cold war nuclear bunkers, unrealised tube systems, forgotten coal mines and renegade priests hidey holes. manchester is a warren of unexplored tunnels, each with a fascinating story to tell and it transpires, given the popularity of this walk and the enthusiastic clamour to attend the periodic talks by underground expert keith warrender, an army of frustrated devotees eager to read more and witness it for themselves.

so we set off, a crocodile of strangers united by a palpable whiff of childlike excitement bordering on giddiness, whipped up expertly by our affable guide, mr glinert of manchester compendium fame.

mr glinert drops arcane facts and tantalizing nuggets aplenty as he leads us pied piper-like from location to location and on to our subterranean goal and this, combined with his years as a london tour guide, creates a peculiar phenomenon, replacing the city we take for granted in our everyday experience of it, with an excursion, an away-day. suddenly we are transformed into tourists of our own city, regarding it as wide eyed and curiously as we might a trip to the roman catacombs or a london underground tube tour, reminding us that the city is a limitless treasure, an endless repository interwoven with thrilling yarns, narratives of lives past and present, great and small; a vernacular bayeux tapestry into which we constantly weave our own stories as we go about our daily existence.

there’s every chance that this will become a regular tour, perhaps with more access to the city beneath our feet gradually becoming available. so i won’t say too much. most of the walk was overground, as entry to many of manchester's tantalizing secret spaces or forgotten places remain prohibited, such as the US commissioned atomic bunkers or the regional government hq visited and slept in by winston churchill.

the access we did get was both reward and enticement for more of the same: the images so familiar from warrender’s books and 'reality hack', the recent urbis exhibition, only the tip of the iceberg to the actuality of clattering down the cold metal rungs of the spiral staircase leading at last into the cavernous gloom of the manchester and salford junction canal.

there, beneath the great northern warehouse, abandoned in 1938 and converted into use as an air raid shelter during ww2, is an engineering feat par excellence, an underground cathedral or manmade blue john mine, complete with impressive stalactites, soaring height competing with lurking, ever present claustrophobia. here, and along its crumbling tunnels and uneven footholds, our torches and lanterns barely illuminate the inky blackness making each twist and turn a lone voyage of discovery despite one’s shadowy companions. it is an exhilarating, all too brief glimpse into a collision of narratives, one of victorian inventiveness, endeavour and splendour; another of a shanty town, a squalid place of resilience, fear and cooped up boredom, the rows of makeshift toilet blocks, wardens lookouts and prohibitive instructions still clinging to damp walls telling an evocative story that could easily transplant to any time and many situations.

what was obvious from the numbers that happily attended a not well advertised event on a dreary day in january and the tangible satisfaction of the group even as we were led from one inaccessible tunnel to another was that there is an appetite for the city beyond what is habitually offered to us, that we crave more from the powers that be than endless shopping facilities, glitzy hotels and windswept glass fronted business graveyards. that the story of architecture and the urban environment is more than grand palaces, wide boulevards and lofty skyscrapers and that what lies beneath us is a revealing, thrilling and often poignant parallel history.

at a fiver a time, commercial guided walks aren’t something i’d usually recommend, preferring to encourage the re/discovery of the city for oneself or by finding a group of like minded loiterers to play with, but given that these delicious and intriguing tales of the city are usually inaccessible i highly recommend you get your torch and sturdy boots ready and make your way to the victoria station map just as soon as a next tour is announced

…..and do watch out for a sprightly 148 year old lurking about at the back.

much ado about nothing

2010-01-01T16:25:00.000Z

it’s the new year and not just any new year, no - it’s a whole new decade, perhaps the real start to the 21st century after the rehearsal ‘noughties’ or whatever we finally decided to call them. so it’s officially a big deal and i can’t shake off the nagging suspicion that i should really have seen it in ‘in style’, in the grand manner with a flourish; on an exotic expedition atop some far flung corner of the world; surrounded by glamorous friends counting down to midnight with champagne and caviar on renard’s daring dirigible; or ensconced in a cosy berth on the orient express, speeding through a succession of windswept lupine steeped vistas, Russian samovar in hand - whimsies i have partaken of aplenty in days now long gone, dear diary believe me, in years with far less portentous baggage attached….

instead, after a week of lounging about in my jimjams happily immersed in the pile of books that santa generously deposited on my balcony (no chimney in niblock towers you see, but he’s a resourceful fellow mr claus...), eating buttery toasted pannetone for breakfast, lunch and supper, i find myself reluctantly shoehorned out of my nest to usher in the new decade with a thousand drunken revelers for a meagre ten minute firework display provided not by the grandees of the city council but (witness a stern dressing down by the manchester evening news in past years!) by the owners of the big wheel. such are the tediously entrepreneurial ways of the twenty-first century commodified city.

and so it was that we gathered somewhat prosaically not in the victorian extravagance of waterhouse’s fine grade I listed civic gesture and the grand sweep of its historic square, ushering in the new year to the sonorous chime of the town hall clock presided over by our cheeky besequined santa and the imperious gaze of old prince albert. no, it remained resolutely darkened and not amused and we were herded unceremoniously into the beleaguered remnants of that oh so nineties experiment, exchange square, heart of the so called millennium quarter, reduced within a few short years from confident public plaza/ cultural space to inglorious cluttered crevice, crushed under the combined weight of endless health and safety obstacles and relentless commercialized encumbrances. where once there was the makings of a cosmopolitan continental square fit for impromptu gatherings, loiterings, picnics, festivals, community displays and temporary exhibitions, markets and seasonal merrymakings, is now a confusion of bollards, instructions, prohibitions and furniture, televisual bombardments and the obligatory big wheel, the waltzer of the 21st century. none of which lends the requisite air of glamour or grandeur to the first day of the future, the start of the new millennium proper, taken for granted in other great cities of the type that manchester believes itself to be, if we are to heed the self important declarations of the ubiquitous cllr pat carney.

in short, whilst grateful to the combined efforts of the lib dems, the m.e.n and the owners of the big wheel for providing some semblance of a convivial open air event, the result was a little desultory. whilst other cities effortlessly and with much panache manage free concerts, cavalcades and carnivals complete with fire eaters, jugglers, lone pipers, brass bands, lantern processions and fire breathing parades, proudly officiated by lord mayor or celebrity, local radio and tv stations providing live satellite link ups on big screens to unlikely twinned towns, we cobbled together a cheap sound system blaring a party-mix tape of old ibiza tunes, culminating in a lacklustre dj-style countdown and roughly 7 minutes of impressive enough but barely coordinated pyrotechnics from the top of the arndale centre. (which with my mms hat on was a noble modernist coming of age for the much despised brutalist landmark..! so thats one accidental point in the events favour...)

meanwhile just around the corner chethams brought some unexpected dignity to the occasion with a roof top midnight bugler regaling a darkened and forlorn urbis with the plaintive strains of auld lang syne. it was lovely and an untapped resource for a proper hogmanay 2011....

then as quickly as it started, it was over; printwork clubbers rushed back to their various shenanigans whilst the rest of us, silver surfers, families, excited toddlers who’d stayed up specially and assorted overseas visitors wandered back to our respective homes slightly bewildered only to switch on the tv and watch other cities do it properly!

it seems to have become something of a niblockian tradition to kick off the new year with a complaint about civic pride, community spirit and lack of public amenities and it gives me no joy to return to this well worn theme as we look the shiny new decade in the eye...

….the future it turns out is threatening to be something of a damp squib.

lonelady - a study in perversity

2009-11-21T19:31:00.000Z

another proud moment for modern bluestockings, as one of our own unleashes her twisted genius on to the world....

lonelady of the brunswick chapter releases the debut album Nerve Up on warp records in february 2010. her first single is available now to buy or download. listen to immaterial here and read paul morley’s reaction....

meanwhile my young assistant maureen ward shares her thoughts on the making of the album and the creation of the studio in ancoats that she helped build for the occasion, a place they habitually referred to as the cell...

lonelady - a study in perversity.

ancoats. a rotting factory on the rochdale canal. winter 2008.

the sickly bouquet of bruised walls, a deep topography of powdery blown paint deposits, decoration transformed into excavation, flemish pieta pantones, air flecked with a million nameless swirling spores, conversation suspended in shards of icicles. rivulets of condensation trickle down a splintered window...

what little view there is through the tiny panes of shattered glass is defiantly none post-bomb manchester; a bricked up council estate awaiting the dubious pleasures of urban renewal, rows of gas canisters stock piled for some unnamed apocryphal horror behind barbed wire, the lurid mural of a ladies wrestling club hovering threateningly above the litter strewn canal, the drifting huddles of swans and geese the only witness to our unremitting foolishness - the gargantuan task of forging a homemade recording studio in a crumbling corner of a dilapidated mill, hewn from the tattered remnants of whatever mangled artefacts were to hand along the canal or dragged from beneath the brooding skeletal hulk of the resident gasometer...

...a perversely self imposed prison cell.

the daily trudge along the tow path, physically, symbolically turning our backs on the spectacle of the glossy cityscape. we ponder the contradictions of a city totally enamoured of its own mythologies yet woefully blind, nonchalant to the vicissitudes of these idealised landscapes - defiant birthplace of industrial and technological revolution, its non conformist radicalism the engine of social change and reform, yet equally home to unbridled entrepreneurialism, ostentation and rampant capitalism; two sides of the same coin perhaps. this schizophrenia, this contradiction is what makes the city what it is, is its maddening, fundamental nature...

like all Mancunians they were in a state of constant irritation that so much went on in the capital, whereas anyone could see that Manchester was in every way superior. george melly

i would like to live in Manchester. the transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable. mark twain

two portraits, two visions; one brash, entrepreneurial, in thrall to bright sparkly distractions - harvey nicks, selfridges, labels, gadgetry, cheryl cole, sky bar, panacea, fuck me heels on deansgate – tawdry symbols of wealth, status and street savvy; the other dark, monochrome, gothic, moody, motorways, satanic mills, cemetery gates and angel meadows, dead pop stars and disappeared night clubs….

brunswick. a north facing tower block window. winter 2009.

LL on my laptop in my high rise crow’s nest, i am teleported back to ancoats in the depths of winter, scrubbed, swabbed down, purple chilblained fingers warmed only by a daily pot noodle or huddled over a meagre flask of coffee; making something out of nothing, not so much searching for the light in the pouring rain as revelling in the perversity of its inhospitable barren beauty.

LL strips back the cheap veneer of glass and tinfoil, of ambition and lies, a self appointed sonic archaeologist digging away, peeling back layer after layer of suppressed topography until she has uncovered, recovered the brittle, workaday ordinariness of a manchester that has been trampled, buried and renovated until it is unrecognisable. a painful vulnerable process more root canal work than excavation, stripping away not only thirty years of expensive cosmetic surgery but exposing raw, ragged memories, ideals and nerves now wriggling, bare, helpless; the dove-grey patina of the old city that lurks beneath. a new kind of beauty is revealed, alive with the rich hues of slate and mauve we’ve been persuaded to outgrow, discouraged from appreciating.

immaterial tingles with the anticipation of youth, harking back to dreamy days when every moment was an adventure, every new dawn a promise; melancholia with a dash of optimism

repulsion jabs through my fingers as i type, its jagged brittleness emphasised by the hopeless inadequacy of what passes for my speakers.

marble twists relentlessly into my wizened heart with the shards of its serrated melancholy, a paean to every pang of suppressed remorse that lies hidden & crusted over after a lifetime of grown up composure.

nerve up is a paradox of hollow sumptuousness, its sparse eerie spaces ringing with a spiky anti-sexiness that’s riddled with erotically charged danger.

music is as personal as a favourite book. it conjures up longings, memories, emotions both welcome and best left alone. it takes us effortlessly to times, people and places we’ve cherished, forgotten or neglected. lonelady pickles out a manchester we seldom choose to revisit. she is harsh, discordant, uncompromising, imperious, unconcerned with approval, a study in perversity - stripped of those endless makeovers and gaudy recladding all that is best about the city is laid bare, if it could only be persuaded to stop dressing up like a whores boudoir, available for hire 24/7 in its desperate need for national and international endorsement.

where once we were first, modern and original, we are now corporate, branded, lapping up those international names that grace our high street, more sheep than shepherd, more herd than innovators.

LL claws at our subconscious, scrapes back our pretentions, the hollow sumptuousness of her prison cell a new route to our lost dignity.

manchester modernist society feature in Urbis Research Forum Review Vol 1!

2009-11-19T20:05:00.000Z

a proud moment for the manchester modernist society....

back in august we collaborated with dr julian holloway and dr steve millington on The Alchemy of Concrete, a walking tour of the mancunian way followed by a public seminar at urbis.
the first issue of the Urbis Research Forum Review is now available to download from the urbis website. the review is the online publication of the Urbis Research Forum and this first issue features articles by julian holloway and our very own maureen ward.

the articles are based on the presentations given during the 'Mancunian Way: The Alchemy of Concrete' panel discussion held on 26 August, 2009. in the review julian and maureen explore the layered experience of the mancunian way – manchester’s elevated post-war motorway – and its impact on the places and people of the city.

Download the Review here for two very different but complimentary ways to rethink and reconsider the urban dragon and brunswick monolith that is the flyover....

No Love Lost - Julie Campbell reflects on Damien Hirst at the Wallace

2009-11-12T18:08:00.000Z

whilst in london for the TINAG festival, we brunswick bluestockings managed to take time out from our urbanist duties to enjoy a mooch out and about in the capital: whilst i went round the corner to the sophie calle exhibition at the whitechapel, julie adventured further afield to the damien hirst exhibition at the wallace.

its rather fashionable to loath hirst, and his foray into 'proper' painting hasn't been without its detractors, as though hirst has either sold out and gone traditionalist or doesnt have the right or qualifications to make a mark on canvas at all. all in all its difficult to get beyond the hype when confronting an artist as infamous as hirst, so when julie agreed to share her thoughts and feelings about her visit, i was eager to read them. and hope that you will be too.....

many thanks julie for this beautiful meditation, reproduced here in full....

No Love Lost

Blue Paintings by Damien Hirst

---------------this is not an art review------------

White lines criss-cross through every painting (bar one).
Lines that denote the parameters & perimeters of reality and perception.

As though Hirst slammed a length of timber onto the canvas surface and scratched hundreds of thin lines in haste, in desperation – or maybe he knew exactly what he was doing, knew what these demarcations were meant to imply.

They striate, radiate and scaffold space like spectral architect’s drawings. They set up a network of spatial territories; boundaries, imagined rooms, antechambers, corridors, and non-spaces.
They unite objects, surfaces and space in a spiderweb geometry draped across the frame that suggests an underlying Matrix-esque logic...a Grand Plan.
They seem somehow both terribly frail, yet as implausibly strong as the cables of a parachute, or the cord of a tightrope.
They are like cordons separating us off from colour, flesh, warmth, life.
They come from nowhere and lead nowhere…

Because, these paintings are a matter of Life and Death: they confront the human journey across the tightrope of existence; our wobbly navigation above the inexorable void.

*
Across and inside the surface are smeary modulations of paint-movement; of application & erasure, second thoughts and losses of heart. Memory tells me inky blacks and oily midnight blues dominate; standing in front of these paintings for long enough, I seem to step into the gloop, and intuit further colours...fleeting purples bulge momentarily…a streak of grey pulses faintly…crimsons swim darkly below the surface like sea-monsters ..Here in the painting I am fathoms down, into the deepest colour of all, that of the void.

This straining and twisting in the mire seemed like something trying to assert itself, something trying to be born: meaning itself.

*
Dots, sharks and butterflies. These Hirst motifs are reiterated here in a new awful truth: the bright ‘butterfly paintings’ are shadows of their former selves, now scraps of wings floating in darkness. The shark in formaldehyde was a majestic presence, even though it was dissected. Now it is reduced to a skeleton fragment, a plaintive jaw weeping and protesting soundlessly to no-one.

In previous work, Hirst’s dots seemed joyful, playful. Dots re-feature in many of these paintings; here their vitality is diminished to pale dabs like the blinking patterns of towerblock lights; perhaps they allude to cities past and future… Atlantis or Bladerunner, gleaming sadly like civilizations swallowed up.

*
Occasionally a seemingly random object appears: a startlingly yellow lemon…the dark leaves of a houseplant…a table…an ashtray. These seem modern emblems of memento mori, of ancient ceremony updated; the wine and bread are now mundane fragments, poignant because of their familiarity.

*
The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth; this large triptych particularly moved me. The right-hand panel features a large set of Jaws-y jaws. Staring into those jaws as they roared their catastrophic Message of Emptiness, I felt my hair blown back as the horror reached shrieking point. ..this void-filled shark jaw is infinitely more violent than the hacked-up shark bodies.

(As I walked through the exhibition, the walls, floor and ceiling began to tremble...a corner of wall peeled back to reveal gaping blackness...the Nothing behind the façade started to become palpable…)

The Wallace Collection, its architecture and furnishings, are all designed to elevate, impress and glorify. Velvet carpets drape marble staircases. Lavish gold frames fill the walls. In the context of these luxurious surroundings, Hirst’s work presents a stern remonstration; all that is now solid shall melt into air. Gold turns to dust. The skulls laugh mockingly, unimpressed by the grandeur.

The skull is present in nearly every painting, chief representative of absence, the calling-card of Death. I think of the charismatic Death from Bergman’s Seventh Seal: he would like this exhibition. The skulls are unbelievable reminders of the immutable Fact. I wiggle my skull around but decide no, that can’t possibly be how I end up. Also, they are vulnerable: is there anything so lonely as a skull? No lips to talks with, it stares out longingly for all time. I used to be alive like you, it wails, trying to be enthusiastic, trying to persuade me its still with it, still got it. But all its ‘got’ is being dead, forever.

These paintings have their genealogy in the old masters and Bacon...but the sumptuousness of these works have been reconfigured to arrive at starker conclusions in Hirst’s vision. The corporeal flabbiness of flesh has been denuded. It melts away. Bacon’s kaleidoscopic palette has been sucked into a black hole, there’s nothing left but varying shades of blackness, which are quite endless. The life element has been emphatically cordoned off; the signage reads ‘you are now entering the waste land’.

*
Bringing your own inner code of associations to an exhibit completes the circuit between artist, gallerist and viewer. I had a good chance of ‘liking’ this exhibition, because Hirst’s new work engenders many ‘things I like’: there’s the Joy Division song title, large black panels carving unknown spaces into the 2D plane, questions about existence and meaning, paint, psychological spaces, more questions, disturbing answers, physics, philosophy, laughing blackly.

A scientist on TV just said; ‘a physicist finds infinity abhorrent’. So do I!

*
This subject never gets boring; it is the story of our annihilation.

*
I am enraged at the prospect of not existing. Tears well impotently in my eyes.
I leave the gallery feeling enervated, shaken, empty, alive; looking forward to the warmth of the company of friends.
Painting couldn’t seem more relevant, more urgent.

Julie Campbell 11/11/09

an evening of modernist delights - wine, films about concrete, iconic postcards...

2009-11-10T21:02:00.000Z

the night before the tinag festival, the manchester modernists had their six month birthday party, their first proper grown up soiree, billed as a celebration of the city, with wine and nibbles, a couple of short films from the north west film archives and the launch of those lovely new postcards....

we were nervous. for the last few months we have held a variety of get togethers and they have all been great fun, we have met lovely people who love the city and have seemed willing to join in our rather peculiar events, but we have never so far held a party. parties are funny things - you invite people, you arrange entertainments, refreshments and distractions and hope that people will come and once there wont be disappointed or bored. we didnt know which would be worse - that no one would come and we would be all alone with our metaphorical party streamers, or that people would come and hate it! as 6.30 drew ever nearer, we distracted ourselves with last minute arrangements and waited with dread for the doors to open and a guest to appear.

by 6.30 the room was looking comfortable enough with about 20 people and we busied ourselves meeting and greeting and rearranging chairs and tables for the screening. then suddenly we were packed to the rafters, tables and chairs filled with expectant faces, whilst the back was a standing room only scrum. maureen gave a short welcome and then handed over to steve millington who had unearthed 2 fabulous short films, one depicting the clearances and rebuilding of hulme, the other being the story of the building of the mancunian way. they were both poignant, sometimes unintentionally hilarious, and evocative.

afterwards milling about and handing out sets of postcards, it seemed that everyone had enjoyed themselves, and we heaved a sigh of relief. as i hurried off to get ready for london next day, i left my little gang of modernists packing away and chatting to stragglers, the sound of good times ringing in my ears.....

thanks to everyone who worked so hard to help make it all come together, who gave their time and sponsorship and goodwill. and thank you for attending and spreading the word - we hope you enjoyed it and come again soon!

and many thanks to steve for his gorgeous films and fantastic introduction, which was described to me by one attendant as passionate and inspiring! brilliant and entirely pertinent as it turned out to much of what was hot on the agenda at tinag....

here's a transcript of his introduction -

Manchester Modernist Society Launch 22nd October 2009
Venue: An Outlet, Dale St Manchester.
Acknowledgments:
Edwin Trout – Concrete Society – for his kind permission to show their film
Manchester City Council – permission to show other film
Marion Hewitt and Geoff Senior – NWFA
Institute of Place Management – sponsoring the event andAn Outlet – for hosting us

Cheers to Maureen Ward and Jack Hale for inviting me to introduce this event

There are two questions I would like to raise – what is the ideal city? And is it worth saving the modern city?

Hopefully in answering these question we can begin to explain exactly why we are here tonight to formally launch the Manchester Modernist Society, why we are about to sit down and watch a film about concrete.

What is the ideal city?

What is the ideal city? It is one of those questions that provokes intense debate about the nature of society, which often says more about the anxieties we share about urban life. What solutions might we pursue to improve the city– to eradicate the blockages that complicate our everyday lives, to improve the look and feel of the city and make living or working in it a more pleasurable experience. But how can we also make the city a more just place? And importantly how can the ideal city also provide a sustainable environment for future generations?

In answering the question – what is the ideal city – we uncover more questions – we start to engage in the big questions about how best to organise our economy and society - in questions about what constitutes social progress or spatial justice.

In Britain, over the last century, several visions of the city have emerged, presenting their Utopian version of what the ideal city might look like. Unsurprisingly earlier visions tackled the big questions of the day - the terrible injustices and squalor which emerged in the Victorian city during a phase of rampant and unregulated industrial capitalism - The Garden City movement, for example, Ebeneezer Howard's symbolic union of town and countryside – which combined the progressive elements of industrialisation with the traditional virtues of rural life.

In post-war period Britain, a radically different paradigm emerged – the Modernist Movement, advocating state-led technocratic fixes to rationalise and order the chaotic legacies of Victorian capitalism, through the construction of a new metropolis amidst the ruins of cities scarred by war.In practice – this reconstruction entailed the clearance of working class communities on a massive scale. The critique of this planning regime is well rehearsed – I don't want to dwell on it tonight, other than to mention Jane Jacobs' attack on modernist planning in the 1960s, and her argument that the messiness and diversity of the city is perhaps is intrinsic to urban life, something to be cherished and not cleansed out of existence. Whereas modernist visionaries such as Le Corbusier talked about the death of the street, Jacobs set out to save it. The spirit of Jacobs' work is still with us, through the growing influence of the New Urbanism movement in the USA and its impact on urban design and architectural practice.

In contemporary Britain state-led urban planning is now an archaic concept. Since the advent of Thatcherism, we have witnessed the rise of the entrepreneurial city, elevating the role of private speculation in driving urban development, placing faith in the market to resolve urban problems, together with an emphasis on personal choice and individual consumption.The aggressive Neoliberal tendencies of the entrepreneurial city, however, were augmented by the optimism underpinning the arrival of New Labour, who appointed Richard Rogers to lead the Urban Task Force and produce a new blueprint for the British city - a particularly Blairite vision – which continued to foreground prviate sector leadership, but offered a vision whereby individuals operated within a framework of civic responsibility or active citizenship. Rogers, amongst others, also established a fascination within professional circles to hold up the mythical European City – as the urban ideal – the city as a 24hr centre of cosmopolitan culture and creativity, a city of boulevards, apartment blocks, museums and street cafes, a cappuccino culture. The thousands who have adopted the city centre as their place of residence – perhaps gives some credence to the realisation of this vision.

It is important that we acknowledge how these visions – are not ideologically neutral. Each comes laden with political or cultural values regarding the relationship between people and place. It is also important that we recognise how these movements have shaped the urban landscape, sometimes producing very successful projects, but also spectacular failures. Importantly we should avoid packaging the history of the city into neat parcels of time. Rather the development of the city is subject to continuities and discontinuities, which allow ideas and practices from one vision to bleed into another, to produce a complex and fractured city. The city is also an unfinished project, and will always be so. That said - undoubtedly we learn lessons along the way – mass clearance, for example, has shown us how communities can be destroyed overnight – but it then take decades to rebuild them.

It is easy to blame planners and architects for their failure to deliver our Utopia – whatever it may be – but you cannot ignore the wider context in which the city operates. The Credit Crunch, for example, alerts us to how powerful global processes push and pull the city in different directions - rendering it in a constant state of flux.

But the Credit Crunch has also lead to us to cross-roads – where do we go next in pursuit of the ideal city?

Half empty apartment blocks, aborted construction sites, the skeletal remains of once exciting new projects - litter the Mancunian landscape – concrete memorials to the failure of market systems to secure the city's immediate future. But a return to the state-led strategic planning of the Fifties and Sixties is out of the question – especially if we anticipate the next General Election result.

But urban living continues to beguile and frustrate us. The cost of housing, congestion, disintegrated public transport, areas of blight and decay, alienated working classes, poorly designed public spaces, poor health, deprivation, the surveillance culture, the ASBO generation – point to a general discontent with urban living in Britain. Our flirtation with city centre loft living – perhaps is just a momentary diversion. Some would accuses the British as being anti-urban – we don't really love our cities, because all the evidence is there that we don't care or tend for them – and at first opportunity - we rather be living out an idyllic existence in the countryside.

Is it worth saving the modern city?

We like to criticise planners and architects – for getting it wrong. Its something of a sport in Britain, like blaming the referee for a heavy home defeat. With hindsight we like to look back and ask - what might have been? If only this flyover had not ploughed this neighbourhood, if only we hadn't knocked down that building because now we would consider it to be an architectural gem.

This logic leads us to an assumption that somehow all heritage and conservation is intrinsically a good thing. But a sentimental obsession with protecting the past - hides an underlying danger of petrifying the city – a city fixed in time - according to a narrowly defined set a conventions about what constitutes esteemed architecture or urban design. Perhaps we should think of heritage as being something which is actively produced and contested. How we construct our common heritage, therefore, is not only about memory, but also forgetting.

The irony is that the 19th century architecture – so highly cherished in Manchester today – was put there mainly by industrialists who cared little for conservation themselves.

And for the planners who reconstructed Manchester after 1945 – the Victorian landscape established by these industrialists were part of the problem – grim reminders of labour exploitation and injustice, obstacles to be removed – to make way for progress and the city of the future.

So it is interesting that we find ourselves here at the launch of the Manchester Modernist Society, because my understanding is that - to be modern - involves a sense of being/self – that is always in movement – to celebrate a city, for example, that is always in a state of progression towards some better future. So there is a certain tension, therefore, in coming together to launch a society dedicated to raising awareness and protecting Manchester's historic modernist architecture. As good modernists shouldn't we just let it all go and embrace the future?

Without doubt the Modernist landscape of Manchester – is slipping away – illustrated by the ensuing battle to save Gateway House, for instance. Mass housing developments, Fort Ardwick, Fort Beswick, the Hulme Crescents – which replaced dense working class neighbourhoods - have themselves become victims of mass clearance and redevelopment. Many would argue that this is good thing – but a symbolical landscape - one defined by the Welfare State and a vision of social unity – has now subject to the logic of market forces. Public spaces and buildings of old are sliding away behind a veil of privatisation.

Manchester is being overlaid with a soft post-modern sheen - the smothering of concrete's hard surfaces, the smoothing of brutal edges – the bending of straight lines – the progressive sanding away of the roughness and brutality of the Modern City. This unique landscape – a product of its time - is melting into the air. We are left with remnants, bits and pieces – legacies of a social democratic state in the making – reminders of a time when a strong political ideology informed an attempt to socially engineer a more equitable society – a better society – solving urban problems through technocratic fixes – a genuine effort to capture the spirit of modernity in built form.

The solidity of modern architecture and its sheer brutalism - unlike Manchester's ornate Victorian gems – represent a challenge to contemporary speculators and urban planners – they are structures which are not easily converted into stylish apartments, or A-grade offices – European café culture sits uncomfortably within a rain-soaked concrete precinct in Collyhurst, for example. Modernist buildings possess an aesthetic that jars against the creation of the entrepreneurial city – as a place to do business, to celebrate individualism, and promote wealth generation over social equity.

The Council Estate for instance – once was a form aspirational living for the working class – but here we start to chart the shift in our collective aspirations. Public housing is now a marker of illegitimate difference, a landscape of blight – a sink hole for failed and washed up citizens. Our attitude towards the council estate and other products of modernist planning - reflects the current disdain for all things public – which began perhaps with reform of the welfare state – and Thatcherite assertions that there is no such thing as society, only individuals and the choices they make.

I would maintain, that these modernist 'carbuncles' – or 'ugly gems' – form an important part of the history of Manchester. These structures continue to exert a looming presence, producing menacing shadows over Manchester's attempt to re brand itself as an open, entrepreneurial and cosmopolitan place. These buildings have a ghostly – spectral presence in the city – haunting us about pre-Thatcherite days – a glimpse through to another world –an upside down place where state planning and collectivism took presidence. It is surprising then - that modernist architecture has become a figure of hate, vilified for its ugliness and alienating properties – a built environment that is simply not worth saving. A place which is best forgotten as Manchester engineers a 'better neoliberal' future. Perhaps then the Manchester Modernist Society might provide us with a way rethinking the city as other or different, perhaps even functioning as a mechanism through which to challenge and resist the pernicious elements private corporate investment and control of urban space.

During the mass clearances of the 1960s - formal and comprehensive archives were constructed by Manchester and Salford Corporations, of working class in areas prior to redevelopment, extensive film and photographic records, oral histories, and other testimonies – prior to the construction of the modernist city.

But as this disappears, there is an absence of systematic documentation of the lives of ordinary people, living and worked within it. For many Mancunians – their experience of the modern city was real and direct – as they encountered a built environment that gave form to the 'cradle to the grave' expectations established through the Welfare State – shaping our experience - from the moment of birth in an NHS hospital, times spent in clinics, dental waiting rooms, the doctor's surgery – educations forged within Secondary Modern schools or comprehensives – lives spent in tower blocks, shopping precincts, public squares, moments spent on concrete benches, in telephone boxes, within municipal buildings – libraries, courts, town-halls, fire-stations, swimming baths. The modern city transformed how we moved across Manchester – through a landscape of flyovers, motorways, bridges, underpasses, bus stations. Perhaps the Modernist can also alert us to the importance of documenting the lives and experiences of the people who lived through it. It is important, therefore, that we understand this disappearing landscape more deeply, acknowledge its richness and diversity, and challenge the common-sense assumption that it blighted the lives of a generation. And with its impending demise, it is essential then we do begin to acknowledge and raise awareness of Manchester Modernist Landscape – and how it has shaped the lives of ordinary people.

We need to be careful though not to over-romanticize – and avoid uncritical appreciation of modernist architecture. I still work in a City Council designed educational block – its not exactly a Workers Utopia. There remains a validity to the criticism targeted at modernist planning by the likes of Jane Jacobs. So we should avoid becoming too maudlin about this lost Utopian landscape. Ultimately the quest for the ideal city – is a dream, a vision – it will always be an unfinished and untenable project. But the Manchester Modernist Society can at least help us appreciate and document a time when politicians were more concerned with ideology than expenses, a time when a cohesive vision of the city as a place of social unity, justice and equity emerged, and provide us with a charter to challenge the dogma and injustices of privatisation and think about the city as a space of collective action.

Steve Millington
22nd October 2009
North West Archive Films:
Film NO. 1282 Hulme Redevelopment
Film No. 1222 The Mancunian Way.

food for the soul - angels of anarchy at manchester city art gallery

2009-11-09T12:13:00.000Z

angels of anarchy opened to national reviews at the city gallery at the end of september. there was a glamorous sounding preview attended by most of manchester (except myself as usual - always the last to know...) plus the irrepressible jeanette winterson for good measure. everyone seemed to have been there or at least be talking about it....

so far so usual. its not too often that a gallery gives its space over to an all female perspective and when it does it can garner as much criticism as praise. so i was intrigued by the premise. but without the invitation to submit a review of the exhibition to a strict deadline, im still not sure i would have attended - partly because of the price tag, partly because of the subject matter and partly i have to confess because im rarely excited by the city art gallery.

but a couple of things drew me there....the opportunity to find out more about the intriguing leonora carrington, a personal favourite of mine, and curiosity to see what this new lens, this new way of looking at an easily stereotyped art movement, might reveal: a counter balance to the whitworth's subversive spaces show earlier in the year, which similarly debunked myths and preconceptions, but from a totally different perspective. unlike angels of anarchy the whitworth show toured and can still be seen at the Sainsbury Centre UEA, Norwich, 29 Sep-13 Dec.

writing for a deadline and with word contraints is rather different than pootling about in a corner of cyberspace, chattering to yourself about whatever arcane topic takes your fancy, and predictably i found the task difficult. im not sure that what eventually emerged was an actual art review - im not an art critic, just a citizen with an interest in piecing together some insight into recent and contemporary culture from the many creative outputs available to me, but together with the other reviews posted up by more experienced art reviewers and bloggers, a peruse of the angels of anarchy website should hopefully inspire you to take a trip over to the city art gallery and make up your own mind...

whatever your perspective, this is a landmark exibition, and together with the whitty's subversive spaces is an unmissable opportunity to catch first hand the results of the usually invisible world of the academic researcher in the fields of visual culture and history of art. their painstaking work, four years or so in the making, has given this old bluestocking, at least, much food for thought.

angels of anarchy is showing at MAG until 10 january 2010. visit their dedicated website for information, a programme of surrealist events and activities, and a whole host of opinions and reviews, including my own...

Bluestocking Salon: Regeneration & The Public Realm

2009-10-27T12:07:00.000Z

so, immediately after thursday’s Evening of Modernist Delights, a mini cavalcade of brunswick bluestockings and i travelled to london to participate in TINAG. my contributionwas billed rather grandly as a

‘Blue Stocking Salon: Regeneration & The Public Realm: an informal tea and conversation on the theme of contemporary urban renewal and its aftermath; introduction to walks and research into the Castlefield Urban Heritage Park and Manchester...’

tinag is a rather marvellous endeavour. a quick peruse of its website rewards with this summary: This Is Not A Gateway {TINAG} is a voluntary organisation that creates arenas/platforms for those whose point of reference is the city. Working across disciplines, TINAG encourages inter-cultural dialogue and rigorous production through four strands...

armed with a sturdy teapot, a 3 tiered cake-stand and my trusty bluestockings, off i set to meet and make friends with an army of international urbanists, activists and dreamers. my afternoon tea was planned for the last afternoon, an attempt to bring something of the informality of the bluestocking circle to the present day, an opportunity to reflect on issues raised during the festival. my hope was that killing castlefield, a project and series of walks along the leeds – liverpool canal for last summer’s artranspennine08, might provide a suitable backdrop and case study for a more general reflection on urban regeneration and its legacies.

and hanbury hall, a disused huguenot church hall in the heart of spitalfields, turned out to be the perfect setting - spruced up and painted by the tinag team it turned into an ideal hub for a thoroughly modern salon, just the place where a likeminded group might meet over tea and cake to chat and exchange ideas and information on a particular topical theme.

the hall was the bustling heart of the festival, filled morning to night with a series of talks, discussions and armchair sessions, whilst the tea shop provided the perfect spot to take in the exhibitions, films and project launches or rest a while and plan what to see next. over the weekend i settled there often to listen, watch, read and make friends. perhaps my favourite encounter was with the bulgarian photographer Nikola Mihov ‘s mother, a poet who last visited Britain in 1973 enjoying the opportunity for a whistlestop tour of the south of England with her coterie of young post-socialist era born urbanistas, the TRACE project team. like her i was captivated by the enthusiasm, energy, insights and perspectives emanating from this veritable hub of global urbanism.

finally the time came for my own session. tea was brewed, cakes and biscuits sliced and my little pamphlets scattered on armchairs and tables. gradually the space filled up and around thirty guests settled in whilst a slideshow of snapshots of castlefield and the surrounding waterfronts was projected on screen to illustrate twenty years of manchesters urban redevelopment.

to kick start proceedings i offered a brief resume of some of the festival themes, ideas and discussions that might resonate around the room and spark off conversation. and the attendees, hailing from birmingham, london, belgium, germany, bulgaria, sweden and far flung perth swiftly set the agenda, with conversation ranging across general and specific experiences of the processes and consequences of social housing renewal projects, how they affect what it means to be community and how we at grass roots level might influence and shape the city as it continues to grow and change. what we all seemed to agree on was that present and past dominant models haven’t proved satisfactory, that the ever growing schism between social and private housing is extremely inadequate and that there is a growing apprehension and tension around the ideal and future of shared public space and the public realm.

and afterwards as i packed away my tea set and said my goodbyes to this inspiring room of urbanists, activists, citizens and residents of the 21st century i was struck by how similar our experiences are no matter where we hail from and despite ostensible differences; that there is an urgency to addressing how we live in cities, who creates them, who they are for and how we can continue to create conversations and grow strength from each other’s experiences, to ensure that our cities are truly spaces for all, not merely a privileged few.

on a personal note, it renewed my faith in face to face conversation and forums for discussion and i am hesitantly looking forward to attempting to create a regular manchester salon or tea group where we too can share thoughts, ideas and concerns and get to know each other ‘off-line’…watch this space!!

Post script: For anyone with the strength to carry on reading, here’s a transcript of my introduction to the session:

the images up on screen are a snap shot, a photo album of a series of journeys exploring castlefield urban heritage park and its surrounding canalways made as a personal response to an article that appeared on Manchester confidential called Killing Castlefield.

A flyer is scattered about which attempts to summarise the histories, decline and renewal of this historic district of Manchester. Do take a look of you want to know more about Castlefield’s story. It was originally presented for artranspennine08 as a series of journeys and walks, of drifts and explorations, documenting its forgotten landscape by the Edwardian flaneuse Miss EP Niblock.

Artranspennine08 was the third incarnation of a 5 yearly art festival which reached out from Manchester and Liverpool across the Pennine region taking in Leeds, Sheffield and Hull. This latest version saw over fifty emerging and established artists placing artworks, staging events, making videos, and hosting exhibitions in cyberspace and in multiple venues and locations throughout the Pennines; responses to the notion of the Transpennine region first mooted back in 1998.

‘Killing Castlefield’ was an examination of an urban success story of the eighties and nineties, interrogating accepted orthodoxies surrounding dominant models of urban renewal, a warning to the relentless redevelopment of our cities, investigating the past, present and future of Castlefield, the granddaddy of a plethora of subsequence schemes across the city and triumphantly designated ‘Britain’s first Urban Heritage Park’. Now as a new breed of developers hover ever closer in an unseemly land grab, the mismanagement and short-termism inherent in the cultural strategy teams responsible for the ‘branding’ of our cities and the profusion of identikit renaissance schemes in other cities, despite increasing recognition of their economic and moral redundancy, has never been clearer.

there have been numerous echoes of the last twenty years of Manchester’s own urban renewal programme this weekend at TINAG. globally it seems we are facing the same challenges and responding in a variety of ways, contesting entrepreneurialism and the erosion of our public spaces. In the exhibition monumental architectural complexes in post socialist Bulgaria, the tension between preserving and regeneration and the contestation of location, memory and space take on a particular political tenor. the emerging case studies from many of our post socialist neighbours such as duopolis aptly capture questions we have not successfully debated in our own experiences of regeneration, that we perhaps have so far swept under the carpet but that post recession we can no longer afford to ignore. Views from above and below, depicting neighbourhoods in Istanbul and London, presented an international perspective on a familiar trend of privatisation of urban land, entrepreneurial governance and aspirations to attain world class status, something Manchester does relentlessly – there is never a time when we aren’t bidding for a games, a super casino, a major football tournament. City change, exploring the urban festival as culturally led regenerational tool in the historic city of Porto, has echoes of the now abandoned Castlefield festival in the specially created amphitheatre, a core element of its roman reconstruction (largely invented or embellished from frugal remains!). How can such initiatives have real legacy and community sustainability once the developers have gone? And whilst such urban transformations continue and gather pace, who benefits, and who loses out?

Questions that rose immediately to mind for me include –

· is the past worth preserving and if so whose history is told?

· What do we want from the contemporary city and how can culture construct a path to this city?
· When major regeneration programmes such as spitalfields in london, new Islington in Manchester and the other millennium projects swing into action, what has it meant to local populations, what is its aftermath? What were the ideas underpinning the projects and who was driving them?

· What is a successful regeneration project and what does it look like?

· What will we take back as urbanists to our respective cities and situations?

Slideshow photo album.

- some of these appear on the flyer and blogsite killing castlefield; more will follow shortly….

Oxford rd to knott mill – exploration of the arterial route in and out of castlefield, still a somewhat neglected way to navigate the city often deserted apart from a few anglers, the odd solitary jogger or dog walker and a large colony of swans, geese and ducks, despite clean up campaigns and clusters of regeneration around its basins,.

Castlefield is the story of movement, trade, travel and commerce, on the intersections of 2 important revolutions, canals then railways, running and forming the leeds / Liverpool canal route. The Castlefield Basin is the original Mamucium, arguably the largest single contributor to the prosperity and growth of Manchester, its influence spanning 2 millennia – home of the Roman fort, the world’s first passenger railway station, the Museum of Science & Industry, as well as epicentre of the legendary Granadaland, the first independent purpose built television studios, designed by Sir Ralph Tubbs, architect of the 1951 Festival of Britain’s centrepiece, the dome of discovery.

Nb – regeneration of the canals is not without contestation, as the cleaning up of the silted up canals accompanies the clearing up of the active gay cruising grounds along its city centre edges, censuring and tidying away these perceived unsavoury aspects of canal life with what many activists have described as the commodification of manchesters gay community, containing it into its own district, reducing it to a mecca for the stag and hen party boom and a presence in the official pink history trail. Manchester has long been quick to seize on the commercial values of many of its unique cultures across the city, the gay village, the northern quarter, the curry mile, the Italian quarter, the birthplace of the industrial revolution, the first urban heritage park, all part of the campaign of the original modern city….

Knott mill to potato wharf – the heart of erstwhile Heritage Park. 2 main narratives, the industrial city of Stephenson bell, railways and the roman city, the fort, the timeline, the vicus, the tower. Alongside are the remnants of the nostalgia museum industrial constructed to support these narratives in an open air museum – the castlefield visitor centre, the amphitheatre, the signs and information points, the trail markers dotted about, barge ring pulls, horse tethers etc.

Granada Land to Albion Wharf - Behind the museum of science and industry is a third abandoned, forgotten and forlorn narrative – that of Granadaland, heart of Granada tv, home of coronation st and Sherlock holmes series; for many years with its own studio tours, Granada Studio Tours, a reinvention of the glory days of northern independent film and television. Now both the tv station and the studio are defunct; their physical remnants an archaeological landscape….

Piccadilly basin to New Islington – redeveloped piece meal in the last 5 years and still unfinished capitalizing on the promise of Ancoats Urban Village and New Islington over the boundary to north and east Manchester. The descendant of the Castlefield HP model , masterplanned by the enfant terrible of private development – its progress, social effects and aftermath are hotly debated and anticipated, especially in the wake of credit crunch and a tangible slow down in the property market. ILVA, the purpose built ikea type warehouse showroom on its edge, proudly heralded as the dawn of the commercial viability of the programme, only lasted a year before closing down for good.

No one wants to buy a used, second hand luxury loft apartment when the incentives, enticements to buy into the latest developments are overwhelming. Does this demonstrate the innate weakness behind this unsustainable model. As each new quarter or development is marketed and revealed, the last one is effectively ‘killed' off. There seems in practice no actual growth of the market, of the citys reach and capacity, simply a constant merry-go-round - instead of the radiant city, we have the rotating city - those pioneers who buy off-plan and move in often are simply not rewarded as a new rival, a new quarter, stalks in and sees it off, attracting grants, investment in a wearying groundhog day of self aggrandizing marketing.

Ancoats to Chips – working mills, community clearance and compulsory purchase, old landmarks, new icons, life disrupted by or as yet ignorant of urban regeneration fever....

celebrate the city!

2009-10-17T18:39:00.000+01:00

an evening of modernist delights

at An Outlet Coffee House, 77 Dale Street

Thurs 22nd of October at 6.30pm

the Manchester Modernist Society is 6 months old already! perfect time for a soiree…

what an exciting 6 months too - we’ve held a rainy picnic under a famous artwork, collaborated on a fabulous walk under the mancunian way, discussed modernism over scones & tea in leeds, ridden on a giant swan on bootle’s canalside, enthused about the magic of concrete with geographers at urbis and made 250 new friends across the city who also share our passion for Manchester’s contemporary and recent past…

so, as the nights draw colder, what better way to mark this mini milestone than with a sophisticated evening at the splendid Outlet Coffee House for an evening of modernist delights.

to coincide with our half birthday we have published the first of a series of postcards celebrating the modern design heritage of the City of Manchester; featuring images sourced from the city archives, over 10,000 of these postcards will be distributed freely to the public, at information points such as the Central Library, Tourist Information Centre, the Manchester Museum, Whitworth Art Gallery, Victoria Baths and the Greater Manchester Transport Museum.

join us at 6.30 for a glass of wine, the launch of our beautiful postcards, a screening of short films from the NW Film Archive and an introduction by Dr. Steve Millington (Senior Lecturer of Human Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University).

hope to see you there,
the manchester modernists

as space is limited please confirm to http://celebratethecity-fbnews.eventbrite.com/

This event is FREE and open to all.

**we are most grateful to An Outlet coffee house for hosting this event and to the Institute of Place Management for their sponsorship

the secret life of the bookstall...

2009-10-06T02:04:00.000+01:00

a bookstall is not simply a row of trestle tables on some windswept verge groaning under the weight of a random selection of tatty books. nor is it merely a second rate bookshop, a substitute for the real deal. in actual fact its a crucial component of any city with a cultural pulse. if there was a rating system for cities with heart, soul and cultural kudos then the presence of a second hand bookstall would surely rank high on its list. a good second hand bookstall is a natural hub, a communal sociable space where individuals can meet, become acquainted, exchange ideas or simply recommend a favourite read to a stranger. in the highly commodified environment of the average british metropolis the bookstall is a practice of everyday life, the last gasp of spontaneous cultural activity, virtually revolutionary...

one of the things that most struck me on my recent mooch through france was the prominence of literature, of books and reading, in the everyday life of the citizenry. bookshops still seem to punctuate the high street on continental europe, as essential to 'ordinary' life as the boulangerie or the tabac. books turn up everywhere - even the smallest town has a book shop or two. to the casual eye the small independent or local second hand store seems to survive happily alongside the fnac and the hypermarche outlets on the edge of town. the village market and weekend puce always has a serious smattering of booksellers nestled cosily in between the vegetables, the charcuterie and the bric a brac, whilst in random squares across town flea markets spontaneously spring up where books invariably take pride of place. the quality is always amazing - not for them a dogeared collection of mouldy mills and boon, but an enviable library where contemporary and classic fiction vie for space with treatises by sartre, derrida, foucault, baudrillard; you name it, they'll have it.

perhaps its the sheer variety or the proliferation of pocket editions, affordably priced but still well designed and a pleasure to own, that around every corner, every shady nook or little cafe, someone can be spotted happily curled up with a book. there is a sense that in france there is a feeling of pride and admiration towards writers and thinkers which is not confined to the ivory tower. where else would a series of university lectures by a cultural philosopher cause so much excitement, filling the largest of lecture rooms, that they had to be broadcast on to the streets at large?

what a disappointment then to return home to find that one of the last remaining book outlets in the city is currently under threat, shattering the fantasy of my neighbourhood as local bohemian enclave, enriching my daily routine and connecting me to other mancunian bluestockings and boffins, past and present. come rain or shine, its alluring vegetable boxes stuffed full of colourful spines and racks of classic vinyl never fails to draw me to it for a quick browse. like a car boot sale or vintage clothes store these encounters are mini adventures where the delight lies in stumbling across a longed for item or the discovery of a brand new author or genre. unpredictable and impetuous, the bookstall makes mavericks of us all, admitting us to whole new worlds of information and knowledge.

the bookstall outside the manchester met student union is not just a veritable treasure trove of literary delights and unexpected pleasures, it is an institution and landmark; an integral part of the landscape alongside the 8th day, have a banana, sandbar, trof, cornerhouse, java bar, kimji's, umami noodle bar. not to mention the bicycle doctor, johhny roadhouse, the barbers shop and upstairs tattoist. this impressive mix of independent businesses complete with its own park and mandatory 24 hour takeways beats anything in the city and is an urban village to rival chorlton, as bustling as portobello, as vibrant and down at heel as brick lane.

this stall with no name but plenty of charisma is an critical if not pivotal element of this idiosyncratic mix of not only oxford road's student campus but of nearby hulme and brunswick, its geographical position a vital bridge between the ivory tower of academia and its neighbouring populations. plus its the meridian line between the nearest bus, tram and train stops for civil servants hotfooting it home, media types fresh from the beeb and creatives spilling out from the nearby galleries and museums. the bookstall is literally and metaphorically the place where everything meets and converges - its probably perched directly on a leyline!

manchester has few enough book shops as it is and few genuinely quirky uncommercialised street activities. lets not sit down and let this disappear - lets sit down and protest in the only way a bookworm can.....by having a good old read! on facebook i recently proposed a mass read - in. bring comfy chairs, tea, biscuits, blankets for the cold, even festoon the stall with fairy lights and lanterns for the evenings. gathered together we could read and swap books, post reviews of favourites on to facebook or create a blog to share new discoveries, a global-local reading group. bibliophile graffiti artists, bookworm guerillas, we could pin reviews onto nearby lamp posts and list impromptu top tens in chalk on the pavements. it would be fun, convivial, effective and thought provoking. quite in the spirit of the street book stall everywhere.

let's rally round our favourite bookstall, this little beacon of european-ness in a grey city.

join the facebook group to show your support or better still pop down to the stall, have a browse, sign the petition, chat to fellow book lovers, and even pick up a treasure to take home…

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=129577013494

print. the final frontier…

2009-10-01T21:58:00.000+01:00

the shrieking violet taking the blog on to the street...

blogging has its fair share of detractors, for whom the continuing explosion of the blogosphere is the final nail in the coffin of our media drenched culture– fuelling a million vanity projects, a tsunami of inanities, yet more evidence of society’s preening narcissism and an unhealthy dependency on self promotion, forever spewing out inconsequential twaddle on facebook, myspace, bebo & twitter. it seems we have never been so opinionated nor so eager to share our every waking moment with strangers…

yet in reality blogging is a predominately private and rather solitary practice, its fantasy landscape a eerily silent cocoon that typically garners few visitors or at best a miniscule passing audience. after a few anxious posts you quickly become accustomed to the callous reality that no-one actually reads your pearls of wisdom, whilst anyone inadvertently stumbling into them doubtless pays them scant attention before backing off to somewhere more enticing. in truth your carefully constructed prose lies suspended, pristine and vacuum wrapped, in a virtual bubble that is rarely inspected or invaded.

your literary struggles, ostensibly connected to a bustling, media savvy global highway of infinite possibility, all too often remain private property. one obvious solution is to regard the project as a work in progress, a hyperstudio to test out half baked notions and experiment with form, structure and subject matter, free from the paralysing self consciousness that comes from nervously anticipating a critical eye. but this studio, this fermenting hotbed of experimentation is, through another lens, merely a prison cell precluding the rough and tumble of healthy dialogue; denied the cut and thrust of peer review all those postings are simply another type of narcissistic self indulgence.

it is therefore a necessary evil to leave the safety net and anonymity of your cosy blog page and submit an occasional piece to the vagaries of a printed publication or magazine, even though such an enterprise is littered with various pitfalls, embarrassments and even derision. what has so far been mutable, improvable, a rehearsal room or practice run for an imagined first night, becomes a static, solidified mausoleum of your words. no amount of blogging can really prepare you for the unforgiving glare of black ink on white paper, a tangible visceral object that the reader can take away to peruse at their leisure, study, pick apart, comment on, challenge or simply dismiss as inadequate or irrelevant.

so it is with genuine trepidation that i draw your attention to a little flurry of print activity on my part recently, in two wonderfully diy manchester based publications. as someone who is passionate about the city and the peculiar, endearing and often frustrating landscape we inhabit, it's a pleasure to see such publications emerge and thrive and a privilege to be offered the opportunity to contribute to them. thank you both ~

the latest issue of the splendid but irregular fanzine belle vue, called simply belle vue2, includes a mini essay on living in a tower block that i originally presented to the tower block tour a couple of years ago, an event organised by cube as part of national architecture week. it can be purchased in cornerhouse and piccadilly records for £2 and has some lovely evocative pieces by the likes of our very own mr barrett.

meanwhile this months edition of the already indepensible shrieking violet magazine contains an article on the many wondrous but endangered murals, mosiacs and vernacular artworks scattered across the city; you can find issue 3 in a host of outlets including piccadilly records or download it via their blogspot. the shrieking violet is a fascinating hybrid, a blog thats also a fanzine, a bold enterprise that puts its money where its mouth is, heralding a new spirit of grassroots creativity taking its ideas directly onto the streets and not being afraid of mixing new media with the more traditional. its free too!

on a slightly different note the manchester modernist society for whom i also write were featured in the manchester evening news recently. the comments section on their online version is well worth a perusal; public opinion ranged from agreement that our architectural treasures are being needlessly eradicated, to accusations that we are deluded crackpots....

what next? a retreat back to the shadows of the internet? no indeed - for my next trick i will be attempting to review angels of anarchy for the Manchester city gallery’s exhibition microsite, a self imposed challenge currently paralysing me with fear and loathing, plus an essay to accompany the totally fabulous lonelady’s imminent single release, the first since her signing to warp. then im off to the capital to lead an informal modern day salon at this years this is not a gateway festival in spitalfields, which will eventually be included in their annual publication.

im sure to stumble and fall along the way but surely flexing ones atrophied cerebral muscles is preferable to doing nothing at all? as is facing the risk of disapproval or dissent from a wider audience? time will tell dear journal, time will tell….

manchester modernist society's feature of the month - all things mural!

2009-09-25T13:10:00.000+01:00

some of you might recall that i am involved with the fledgling manchester modernist society and have been quite busy helping arrange their monthly get togethers and researching and updating their website and facebook page. our recent trip to urbanism09 was inspiring and great fun - i shall report back on this soon, i promise, as it offers many pertinent parallels for our own canalside renewal plans.

but in the meantime here is the latest of the mms website monthly features, a lament for manchester landmarks needlessly lost and much missed. this month we highlight a recently lost doorway.....read all about it below.

then visit the mms website and read more, contact us with your thoughts and ideas - and to join our mailing list! get involved, join in but most of all, love the city warts and all!

manchester modernist society feature of the month:

welcome to our regular rollercoaster rides of emotions, of disappointments, lamentations, rants and despair, of jubilation and over enthusiasm, as we select for your delectation three structures each month, one demolished, one at risk and to lighten the mood, a classic modernist icon, an undisputed favourite like the CIS or the Midland Bank....

this section comes to you straight from the front line of the built environment to report on the ever changing fortunes of the structures and buildings of 20th century manchester great and small, tracing the unpredictable journey from flavour of the month, through passe, unloved and neglected, to the wrath of the bulldozer.

nb - readers of a sensitive nature might wish to look away at explicit scenes of mindless violence against helpless architectural rarities...

RIP - GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN ~

the Barkat sign,
Dale St.

Wait a minute I hear you say? I thought we were talking about post-war murals, ‘street’ art in a sense but still legitimate art by proper reputable artists. So what’s an old battered door sign doing here…?

Well fear not modernistas, there is a connection, I promise, a twisty train of thought linking our three features this month. Here it comes….

Like so many post war muralists Hans Tisdall was a polymath, his work crossing the divide between fine art and commercial art and back again, respected not only for his paintings and public art but also his body of book jackets for JonathanCape and his fonts and lettering. Like his contemporaries this was populist work for a populist era; one that was challenging the role of art and the artist in society. This popularism and everydayness however has since had the effect of being underappreciated from all sides, ignored not only in the academic field but fading in the landscape to a subliminal backdrop - just more background noise in the cityscape.

If our aim at mms is to ‘stimulate debate and gently provoke’ (see our aims…!) then what we have here is the perfect case study. Initiating any discussion of this battered old sign presents us with a long overdue opportunity to broaden the art historical canon. Times change and so should our perception of art….

Our post war murals are in effect treated no differently to the vernacular street signs adorning so much of the city like Barkat Knitwear, perhaps the boldest and most colourful example of the genre which lit up Dale St for god knows how long until being unceremoniously, criminally painted over by its new owner /property developer. Like our commissioned murals it brightened up the daily trudge to work, school or the shops come rain or shine, a landmark, an icon, an everyday fresco for the common man.

A quick perusal of flickr shows that the Barkat sign was until very recently a much loved fixture in the landscape, admired for its colour, exuberance, the rugged textures of its surface; appreciated as an invaluable slice of social and cultural history; as much a historical artefact as anything dug up on an excavation, a window into the day to day life of the twentieth century city, as valuable as a wall of Latin graffiti in Pompeii.

The Barkat sign was situated on the boundary of Ancoats and the outer edge of Northern quarter, once the heart of the textile, food and commercial district, a bustling labyrinth of workshops, showrooms and factories. These buildings – their sides, facades, doorframes - were literally billboards for products, signposts and adverts in an era before PR and marketing departments, television or internet publicity campaigns. Sign writers were skilled artists and their work was detailed, meticulous and in great demand. Though the industries declined and the businesses disappeared their memories remained, faded peeling apparitions, relics and remnants of former glories.

And whilst they share many of the attributes of post war murals, the fragility of their materials, their commercial nature and inherent anonymity renders them even more vulnerable to the threat of regeneration, demolition or eradication. From modest pieces such as the Barkat to lavishly painted adverts promoting everything from universal products to local services and businesses, they are both visual treasures and social/cultural documents, multiple narratives of the city past and present enriching the built environment.

Perhaps the time has come not only to challenge our notions of what art is but to broaden the boundaries of what constitutes the archaeological object. Every time we paint over, dismantle or jet clean one of these images we erase a crucial element of the fabric of the city, a little bit more of our history and yet more of our archaeological record, the story of ourselves. Furthermore, Bristol council’s decision to consult the local population on the fate of graffiti art covering the walls of its city buildings demonstrates the beginnings of a welcome reassessment of the ‘canon’, one that reflects and acknowledges the value and importance of art and design in the public realm, beyond that which is traditional or officially sanctioned. Perhaps it’s also time to include an anonymous oeuvre that paved the way for the banksys of today. These quotidian frescoes embody art, social document and historical artefact. If we can accept graffiti as art then why not sign writing and graphic design?

Reimagined as a vast open air Tate Modern minus the exhibition fee and restrictive opening hours, bursting with paintings, murals, sculpture and pop art from every era, the city becomes a living canvas, a vibrant and thought provoking backdrop to our everyday lives, reflecting like all major collections, media and styles of every period. But this is a collection that boasts artwork from the famous to the unknown, reflecting the times and cultures of the changing city, always thought provoking, visually stimulating and a pleasure to visit and to live in.

RIP - barkat door sign, needlessly erased, 2009....

manchester modernist group outing to Urbanism09!

2009-09-12T15:29:00.000+01:00

the lovely people at the manchester modernist society sent me this invitation yesterday to join them for a jolly trip over to Liverpool for part of the fabulous Urbanism conference.

here are the details, why not come along too?

dear friends and modernists, September day trip revealed....

Propositions for the Happy City,

Thurs 17 Sept,

1pm at St Winnie’s,Merton Rd, Bootle, L20 7AR

After August’s exploration of the concrete jungle of the Mancunian way we couldn’t envisage how we would ever offer you a more exciting trip, so imagine our surprise when an invitation to travel from the Promising Land to Porto Allegro with artists, architects and food activists to examine real case studies of creating positive spaces dropped into our letterbox! The perfect counterbalance to all our usual noise and pollution…

Its all part of Urbanism09, a partnership project with Liverpool Biennial and Places Matter!

and its right up our street so lets all go together!

what's more its free but do book ahead with them.

details here, which has a handy map too! - http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=120789892524&ref=share

see you at St Winnie's or on the 11.01 from Piccadilly Station changing to the 12.08 from Lime St to Bootle Oriel Rd.

ps. details of the manchester modernist society can be found here...or at their facebook page here!

barnacle bill and his pirate ships – marseillans secret harbour

2009-08-14T15:17:00.000+01:00

marseillans tuesday market, food, flowers and general household goods with a little vintage and local ceramics thrown in, is fast winding down as the church clock strikes 12.30. throughout the morning it has taken up the whole of the miniature 17th century colonnaded market place, meandered past the church square and spilled out into the place de republic beyond, up to the busy les marins sailors bar at the roundabout. traders are packing up into battered renaults or dawdling with old friends, sharing a smoke and a café noir before moving off. others shout encouraging cries of tout a cinq euro to stragglers, pleading with passers-by to take the last of the flowers off their hands, even though to do so is blatant daylight robbery...

...within minutes most of the town is staggering under the fragrant burden of bargain bunches of bougainvillea, fat headed sunflowers or overblown blousy dahlias and the square is ankle deep in a scented river as florists swill out empty vases and drag containers away. then as the market recedes the cafes and restaurants pick up the trade and, where bright awnings displayed boxes of vegetables and colossal hams so recently swayed, tables and chairs appear, plat du jour boards are written up and hung on trees and lampposts. waiters scurry back and forth with entrees, café noirs and aperitifs, and lunch is duly served.

we stroll away from the vieux ville past the pretty mairie and its obligatory petanque pitch, noisy with a half dozen devotees passionately squabbling as always over whose boule has actually displaced the cochonnet (victory hanging on curves, angles and geometry), and make for the harbour to eat our market goodies, enjoy the sea breeze and watch the boats bobbing about. of all the ports on the basin de thau, marseillan is probably our favourite – well this week at any rate. last week we were sure that meze was the one…and later in the week revisiting sete down the coast, we’ll remember that in fact sete is definitely the best.

one satisfying side effect of our unhealthy puce habit is that it affords access to a clutch of secluded backwaters along our little coast, a treasure trove for flaneurs, moochers and idlers like ourselves, revealing forgotten hamlets and stranded old ports tucked out of the way of the sun worshippers and beach revellers that flock to the stretches of sandy beach beyond the etangs. overlooked little spots that still have space for the workaday rhythms of quotidian life for its inhabitants, a life that though still acknowledging tourism, isn’t altogether dominated or relinquished to it. in these places can be spotted all sorts of relics, human, artefactual, architectural, all clinging unnoticed like barnacles on the underside of some great tourist steamer, quietly getting on with everyday life in the languedoc.

a spot of coast-hugging along the trusty old d613 in either direction will swiftly reward anyone wishing to observe the janus face of the petite camargue and the shifts in economy brought to bear in a mere generation. whilst one face basks in the sun, sea and parasol revenue, the other trades on the cliché of its traditions and distinctive way of life. whether this delicate balance can survive the rapid development of the latest section of the shiny a75, the toll route currently gobbling up everything in its path on the way to the sea, remains to be seen.

marseillan and marseillan-plage offer a perfect example of this common schizophrenia. whilst marseillan-plage is inundated with holiday makers and weekenders attracted by its sandy beach and plethora of sun loungers, marseillan itself, once a flourishing fishing town with a splendid harbour and fine old market place, is now ignored. it’s a typical tale - marseillan sits amongst a pocket of old fishing ports lining the petite camargue, an evocative string of salty but unfortunate smelling etangs and scrubby flats populated by birds and not much else. some of these lovely old harbours handled trade for the romans, whose great via domitia passes close by, carrying goods from cadiz past gibraltar all the way to rome. indeed, the ruins of ambrussum lie only a few kilometres inland, further evidence of the regions former glories. but time has played a cruel game - in recent generations the petite camargue has become all but forgotten as the old harbours either silted up and faded into obscurity or flourished in the 70’s tourist boom like the modernist resort of le grande motte further up, a planned futurist community that now looks as dated as an episode of thunderbirds. (though secretly im quite smitten with this too….)

yet marseillan has a trick or two up its sleeve - it sits at the extreme end of the camargue on the shallow expanse of the basin de thau, one of the biggest salt lakes in the languedoc and a major centre of shellfish cultivation. along the coast roads are frequent glimpses of wooden oyster racks protruding from the water, cruel rows of torture chambers for marine life. this has brought marseillan both independence and a sense of purpose, its harbour bustling with various old salty sea dogs repairing their vessels, scraping barnacles off the raised flaking hulks of their sturdy little yachts and sailing boats, clambering about the riggings and crows nests or simply huddled in clusters doing routine maintenance or repairs, re-painting a faded eye on a prow, raising a jolly roger (no really! these be actual pirates…); a vision of faded peaked caps, dusty blue shorts, espadrilles, assorted white beards and fancy moustaches. it’s also the home of the famed noilly prat distillery – another plus for both the resident sea captains and vermouth pilgrims who book themselves in for a daily tour and degustion. so as another lazy afternoon beckons and the oppressive heat of an august day takes most residents indoors for lunch, a siesta or an afternoon under canvas, marseillan blatantly ignores its passing tourists.

oh, you’ve found us, marseillan shrugs, so what…? take us as you find us, we wont be putting on any shows or making a particular effort, but you’re welcome to eavesdrop and take a peek at whatever we’re doing today; stay or go, linger or scarper, its all the same to us.

and with that marseillan gets on with patching up its nets, indulging in a spot of fly fishing in the curve of its sheltered horseshoe harbour, or simply padding about weather beaten old vessels - the odyssey, the antigone - all brass portholes and wooden cabins, fiddling over sail cloths and flagpoles, inspecting gang planks, or snoozing in their hammocks, not a care in the world….

sweet mint tea at les puces

2009-08-13T14:50:00.002+01:00

7.30am, two café noirs and a welcome pause from the tousle of the early traders in the vast, dust bowl of a car park, tarmac beginning to shimmer in the heat, a portent of the day to come.

tonton ambles across, all smiles as ever, proffering 2 tiny moroccan glasses of fragrant the a la menthe to our little table in the corner of his café, shady under the canvas awning, generously crammed with the sprigs of the bunches of fresh mint that adorn his counter. ludicrously sweet, hot and deliciously minty, it’s the perfect pick me up. tea for my manchester girls, his usual greeting, chuckling at the memories of his decade of lost youth and adventure in preston and clitheroe. good times, he says, his english a rich lancashire burr, incongruous here in mosson from our french algerian grizzled giant, exciting times, preston north end, he enthuses, and the music, aah the best of times! evidently so, with 3 grown up boys from his adventures who stayed on, doubtless with even broader accents….

mosson, the last stop on ligne 2 of montpelliers tram system, where its outer suburbs run out and collide with the languedoc proper, parched scrubby countryside, dotted with battered old farmhouses, dilapidated cattle sheds, a smattering of vineyards and sunken meadows meandering along the banks of the hérault and its tributaries, inhabited it seems by nothing more than the odd donkey, any number of raucous crickets, and wherever the etang and their attendant oyster beds break through, glimpses of exotic pale pink flamingos, the only significant colonies in europe declares the eager guidebook.

mosson, a gigantic overspill on the arse end of the city, high rise and dilapidated like the notorious hulme estate but twice its size and humanised somewhat with splashes of mediterranean colour; windows, doorways and balconies bedecked with plants, herbs and hammocks, austerity brightened by the simple addition of sunshine, flaky painted shutters and gaudy blinds adorning otherwise plain edifices like glittering jewels in concrete. architecture is so often in the vernacular details, its lived-in clutter creating more beauty than any aesthetic drawn up by the designers.

mosson is plainly out in the sticks and barely mentioned on the tourist maps, hardly picturesque and though certainly 'exotic' with a profusion of cafes and local eateries harbouring old men in fezes or taqiyah and long faded djellabas smoking tiny black cigarettes, halal stores piled high with the rich spices, herbs and olives normally only seen in a north african bazaar, is plainly not awaiting fashionable restoration by the type of English second home owner eager to colonise the next up and coming quartier. yet each sunday from 6am to 12.30, this is the place to be if, like most languedocians, you have the flea market bug. les puces is the regional obsession adopted even in the smallest village alongside the everyday food and general markets with larger all day affairs appearing in various fields and scrubby patches of spare land at the weekends. mosson though is the mother of all flea markets, the biggest, most shambolic and best; boisterous, messy and unpredictable, genuine vintage and antique traders budged up against junk and household bric-a-brac of every description, used battery salesmen, hardware, locksmith and mobile phone (broken and very old, never new ones!) emporiums, 3 for 1 beach towels and african hair care vying with pantalooned crusties selling dusty indonesian knick knacks and home made friendship bands brought back from far off travels. inbetween are stalls who appear to have merely tumbled the contents of their wash bags on to the floor, grubby brassieres and mismatched wellington boots next to washing up bowls filled with marbles, headless barbies missing an arm or a leg and far too many small blue smurfs to satisfy any logical explanation. its an english car boot sale with a surreal twist.

this sunday morning is no exception, the car park already festooned with ancient camper vans, prehistoric renaults, colourful awnings of every hue proclaiming that the market is already bustling and ready for the hunt! those in the know head straight for the right hand corner, beyond the resident café stands and their tantalising petit dejeuners of café noir, pain au chocolat and boisson, competing with fragrant tagines and nan breads stuffed with falafels and hot harissa, (like tono the owners are french north african, with menus a profusion of savoury, spicy delights) an oasis of respite from the harsh sun and ever growing crowds.

...and then, where the car park peters out and meets the hinterland of the olive groves and fig trees of old mosson, nirvana - row upon row of brocantes and antiquities sellers nestled under the pine trees at the far edge. here can be found the weird and the wonderful, the essential and the pointless; rusty sundials and battered weather vanes, faded photograph albums filled with forgotten lives and once-important occasions, enamel signs for long gone businesses and nostalgic brands of cigarettes, brass bed frames, roman amphora and columns, caryatids, gateposts and doorways from ramshackle farm houses, enormous scythes, saws and assorted farm implements, beautiful bed linen and table ware, ancient cooking pots, cafetieres and espresso sets from every era, medicine cabinets and garden furniture, and enough crucifixes, rosary beads, virgin marys, sacred hearts, wooden pews and stained glass windows to tempt the most ardent atheist….

12.30 and its chez tonton for at least the third time. we compare notes as always on landmarks around the north west, tono fearful that the memories of his youth might disappear along with preston bus station, and we show off our finds – an old bronze tap, pleasingly antiquated with a slight green patina around the spout, a clutch of requiem cards, the most intriguing the bespectacled mademoiselle celine robin, who died in 1944, still unmarried at 89 (is that a shy or cheeky smile i spy around her lips?), a faded ballet green fish keep perfect for bringing a little taste of the languedoc to my brunswick balcony, an oblong typographers font tidy, a box of gaily patterned 1950’s gouaches, pristine in their packaging, and perhaps best of all an edwardian fencing foil, pale steel sheathed in its red safely tip, long slim handle wrapped in fine coils of soft leather for gripping. as we finish the last gulp of our the a la menthe, gather our treasures and head for home, tono laughs shaking his head at yet another incomprehensible set of finds from his favourite mancunians.

au revoir, see you next week….you know there’s a lovely flower market here every wednesday, he adds as he always does, so beautiful like you’d never find in england...

a persuasive thought that hangs in the air as we wend our way across the emptying car park. but puce addicts that we are, we know in reality we’ll already be knee deep in agde’s weekly puce, a picturesque affair that winds around its medieval fortifications, eagerly looking out for that elusive vintage fencing mask or 1920’s aviation goggles….

the secret life of a holiday resort

2009-08-06T17:46:00.000+01:00

arriving by night or any weekend in the high season and palavas is a once sleepy fishing port transformed forever into a gaudy french blackpool. thumping music leaks out of every harbour nitespot til the early hours, beachside waiters bustle back and forth with trays of plat du jour, whilst jeeps stuffed full of brash young bucks screech in and out of the portside car park looking for action.

but things are never what they might first seem. wander into palavas on a weekday morning and this seaside resort shows a quite different face…

market day in the vieux ville’s tiny square by the old church spills out on to its surroundings the heart of old palavas, winding into its little maze of streets in a blaze of colour and cacophony of scents on the morning breeze.

it’s 7.30am and everyone’s out already, a population scarcely seen (but occasionally glimpsed from behind shady window sills of faded villas) when joining the evening perambulation on the harbour front, where café bars and souvenir shops vie for the tourist euro. a posse of tiny old ladies are out in force, bent double with arthritis but sprightly nonetheless with baskets at the ready for the scrum for the freshest produce, piled high on trellises and displayed in stacks of luridly labelled boxes, fresh fish laid out on chunks of smashed up ice under stripy nautical awnings, whilst crabs and lobsters skulk from a tumble of nearby buckets and baskets. further along, the charcuterie is setting up shop, chatting neighbourly to the olives and cheese stall next door, enjoying a café noir and a breather before the crowds turn up. here from the safety of the local café tucked under the arm of the old church, is the perfect spot to observe the ordinary hustle and bustle of this parallel palavas.

the vegetable stall is where the drama is this morning, teeming with ladies clutching their bright baskets, laden with the rich pickings of so many plump red tomatoes, insurgence of herbs, outsize peaches and juicy nectarines, intoxicating bunches of ripe-indigo grapes, snappy crisp peas ready to pod, gnarly courgettes and fat pale onions, enveloped in layer after layer of fragile, papery skin. the ladies, gaudy in their button through tabards, clashing with the vivid reds, purples and greens of natures best, gather in the never diminishing queue at the counter, sharing a natter whilst expertly squeezing, sniffing and generally scrutinizing the various delights on offer. yet others pass by carrying fresh warm bread, the ubiquitous baguette wrapped in jolly twists of paper, stopping for a ‘bon matin’ before hurrying to church for morning mass or benediction. all the while the local cats and their endless broods of kittens are lazily winding in and out of the throng, accepting titbits and the odd scratch of the forehead or occasionally goading the inevitable army of jack russells out and about for their morning stroll or lolling under café tables with their partners in crime, palavas’ old chaps, dapper in pressed shirts, belted pants and wide braces or jaunty in well worn sailor shorts, v-necked tees and faded sea caps. then baskets and trolleys bursting with tonight’s dinner, they move conspiratorially in twos and threes towards the enticements of the charcuterie, rotisserie at last wafting about the hot meaty juices of slowly roasting chicken and pork. meats procured, olives sampled and a cheese or two tested, a nearby display of nylon tabards beckons and the flock of blue rinses, tight perms, sensible sandals and colourful frocks moves on. essentials taken care of, they can finally afford to browse and indulge in a new pinny, carefully assessing the sartorial delights from behind tortoiseshell spectacles, wisely secured on long cord around necks.

meanwhile on the main drag, shops are opening and tourists are stirring, pottering about in their sarongs, flipflops and designer shorts. the café starts to fill up with mums and restless enfants, a sack of mussels arrives for the plat du jour, and like our flock of elderly ladies, strays and salty sea dogs, its suddenly time to move on.

as the church bells strike 9am, the secret and humdrum life of palavas fades away for another day of business in holiday town…

off the beaten track - hilaire le grand, a Russian detour:

2009-08-05T22:09:00.000+01:00

night time, st hilaire le grande or thereabouts, and the skies burst their banks, rain bouncing off the dark, uneven camber of the old n6 so furiously that our only option is to take shelter by an unused railway track, occasional flashes of lightning our only guide. a bucolic storm ensues, a torrent rarely seen in the city.

taking to the road again after a night squished in the car dozing dismally, the roar of the deluge an impossible lullaby, we are met with the unlikely glint of what appears to be the dome of an archaic orthodox church, miniscule but pristine, a chapel really, a gold Faberge egg shining in the pale morning light. yesterdays mysterious road diversions have it seems not only led us deeper and deeper into unmarked ‘yellow’ roads, cutting through dense woods whose velvety blackness the forked flashes had barely illuminated, but into another time and place altogether, an unscheduled detour into nineteenth century imperial russia.

blinking groggily at this little pre-soviet island (whose dates intriguingly overlap between the end of one empire and the birth of another) on the d21 to mourmelon le grand – only a few miles from rheims but a whole century away – we amble towards the apparition to investigate. sure enough the mirage doesn’t evaporate as we approach, it simply reveals 3 lines of plain gold font which reads,

aux soldats russes, morts au champ d'honneur, en france, 1916-1918

to the side of the chapel behind a wrought iron fence and laid out on an immaculate lawn are row upon row of neat white crosses with in its centre a cenotaph dedicated to the memory of a russian expeditionary force that fought in several decisive battles between 1916 –18. beyond, two ossuaries bear the remains of over 1000 compatriots who died in these now silent fields so far from home, never identified, the inconnu. we gaze for a while at the names on the crosses painfully outnumbered by those still unknown, unnamed, but commemorated with equal care and compassion in this corner of northern france, like so many other young men in so many other flanders fields.

the scale of these fields and their endless graves, the frequency of their occurrence and military precision creating a sobering optical illusion, makes for a disquieting experience the first time one takes to the roads here. the facts of the ‘great’ war are so well known, so much the dry stuff of the school syllabus or sunday night documentary that it is a shock to find the simple white crosses so affecting, so heart-rending; a jolt to remember that many grandfathers fought in these trenches, many grandmothers lost brothers, lovers and sons, an entire generation laid out in stark rows on eternal parade.

but what of this field? what brings an orthodox chapel and its retinue of monks here, to this tiny corner of france? what is the tale behind the discreet brass sign bearing the words russe ermitage orthodox, the turquoise of its domes nestled behind shady pine trees, an anachronism, an exile of revolution?

a small signpost beyond the hermitage walls offers this scrap of information –

the cimitière militaire russe de saint-hilaire le grand contains the graves of over 1000 russian officers and men. in 1937 a chapel, 16th century in design, was built to commemorate all of the russians who died on the Western Front, tended to this day by the monks of the adjacent orthodox hermitage.

further enquiry reveals that the russian expeditionary force was sent to france by the then russian empire, initially made up of 2 battalions, the first russian special brigade which landed in marseille in april 1916, and the 2nd special brigade which served alongside other allies in northern greece. the first brigade served with distinction until the outbreak of the revolution in 1917, when the entire force was disbanded, interred in alien camps or returned home. however some stayed and formed the legion russe (or Russian Legion) joining up with the elite french moroccan infantry division. the combined units then took part in the fighting around amiens in march 1918, with severe losses to the moroccan division and the russian legion, its captain even being decorated with the medal of the legion of honour. in may, the moroccan division took part in the fierce fighting on the road from soissons to paris, with losses accounting for nearly 85% of the russian legion's forces, but despite this continued to preserve a significant russian presence in the west and, indeed, in the great war itself, right up until the armistice, attracting volunteers to the very end. after the german withdrawal to the border the moroccan division, including our russian regiment, advanced upon moyeuvre but the operation was halted by the signing of the armistice treaty in november 1918. after armistice the entire russian regiment was recalled and demobilised, and while some chose to remain in france, others returned to revolutionary russia. among the latter was rodion malinovsky, the future soviet minister of defence.

this stirring and rather romantic account can be easily found online, for those requiring more detail. or wiki gives a more dispassionate outline of events.

as we drive off and out of the little copse, absorbed, a little sombre, leaving the fallen russians far from home in the care of their monastic sentinel, life resumes its usual rhythms, a hare lolloping exuberantly in the bright morning sun, whilst nearby a fox exposed momentarily from its early morning ablutions misses a sure chance. and in the meadow beyond, a lone falcon perches atop a hay bale, contemplating breakfast.

and before we know it we too are breakfasting on buttery brioche and bitter café noir in a roadside café once more en route to rheims, our sunrise detour a flight of fancy, a mere whimsy in the morning mists….

diary of a French odyssey…postcards from the route nationale

2009-07-30T16:36:00.000+01:00

...the next few posts will appear haphazardly and from a variety of locations…we are motoring through france en route to the languedoc to stay on the edge of montpellier on bertie’s old boat.

forgive me then if they are more sporadic even than usual, being hasty reflections, vignettes and sketches of the journey and places spied along the way….

here's the first offering:

rough common: gothic splendour in the mundane~

driving through the side roads of the English countryside, revelling in the verdant verges of its many motorways and b roads en route, i caught myself thinking how much lovelier are these patches of wildscape, how much more vibrant with their cornflowers and poppies, bulrushes and wild roses, dragonflies and butterflies darting here and there, than the tarted up landscaping and flowerbeds adorning so many city and suburban roundabouts. perhaps it’s the startling contrast, the show of nature’s resilience even in the least likely of spots, bright and defiant amidst the worst that we can throw at it, the grubby concrete, the fumes, blown tyres and dented bumpers. but i’m being sentimental again, romantic even. a dark gothic romance for sure, finding beauty and wonder in a few weeds on a scrubby graffitied roadside….

how appropriate then to discover that we were driving through the inauspiciously named hamlet of 'rough common'. just how did a town decide to call itself such a prosaic and seemingly down trodden name as rough common?

and then i was reminded of owen hatherley’s theory, put forward in militant modernism, of the underlying English preference, elevation even, of plainness and austerity, of ugliness over the classic and the pretty; a rejoinder to European modernism in the same vein as that earlier romantic reaction to the enlightenment expressed in the gothic tragedy of frankenstein, the tainted morality of dr jeckyll and the dark excesses personified in the lives of Byron and Shelley, a preference for the corrosive glamour of heathcliffe or maximillian de winter over some handsome pallid hero played out a century later in the emergence of punk and continued today in the squalid dramas of pete doherty and la winehouse.

and i wonder if here is a link to the urbanists, loiterers and various flaneurs championing of the failures of modernism and its much maligned material of choice, the ubiquitous concrete, a substance which given more than a cursory glance is simply waiting appreciation of its subtle shades and textures, of the sheen of its burnished corners, of the unlikely alchemy of its mauves, aubergines and royal purples, brilliant after a rainstorm, tantalisingly brief as any rainbow. perhaps it’s the climate, a difference in hues, where the sun drenched European palette of pinks, terracotta and aquamarine is sadly wasted on grey skies and cold light: only in this god forsaken corner of the world could we, must we, make a virtue out of the drab clouds and rain sodden skies; discern a vibrant palette from such an uncompromising end of the colour spectrum. necessity clearly is the mother of invention.

this then is the veiled allure of the humble hamlet of rough common, the unexpected reward for a small effort, a closer look, a second glance...

as a friend recently advised me, there is no room in the modernist's vocabulary for the term ugly, merely the embracing of that juste mot - a challenge!

the perilous life of a public artwork…

2009-07-29T08:47:00.000+01:00

for the 21 days of the recent manchester festival, two specific art commissions have loomed ever larger in my minds eye; two visions of manchester, one bold and exuberant, bursting with civic pride and ambition at the dawn of the millennium, the other modest and self effacing, delicate and already overwhelmed by the paradox of its concrete plinth, both prison and home. two of the city’s most prominent works of art whose respective rise and fall have dominated not just the news but my personal horizon; every where i turn from dawn til dusk, there they are.

one waxing, the other waning, the emerging newborn might even appear to be feeding off the rotting cadaver of its beleaguered older sister. each morning my kitchen window has borne witness to the slow torture that is the daily dismantling of the b of the bang, whilst at work my window overlooks the rapid installation of the city’s newest commission - flailing trees, created for the manchester international festival, crept up virtually unannounced, peeping shyly from behind its makeshift fencing in st peter’s square nervously awaiting its unveiling.

and i confess i don’t quite know how to handle the birth of this young upstart competing for my affections whilst i’m still mourning the cruel demise of my old friend out in the suburbs. the b of the bang has been a constant companion at my window ever since it burst extravagantly on to the skyline four years ago, twinkling and winking at me cheerily in the moonlight as i tidy away the dishes or glinting gaudily at first light as i make my morning cuppa, its starburst of huge metal prongs never failing to capture my gaze, my own private artwork, a reliable friend in an ever changing city.

the story of the b of the bang is a typical mancunian cocktail of ambition, swagger and self belief with a generous dash of provincial inferiority complex thrown in for good measure; a heady cocktail that has always lent the city a palpable air of ‘fur coat and no knickers’ but has spiralled out of control since the 96 bomb. it’s a story that has taken our desire to join the global ‘big league’ of capital cities to quite absurd proportions. the commonwealth games, the failed olympics bid, the mega casino debacle, the £600 million super-campus race, the spinningfields business district, it has to be the biggest, the tallest, the glitziest, the loudest. no room here for the graceful charms of an casually elegant city – no it has to be nothing less than dubai, singapore, las vegas. yet in reality this exhausting spiral of self aggrandisement merely reeks of desperation, of a brash provincial town punching well above its weight and falling flat on its jutting chin.

the contrast between this sorry tale on the edge of the city, of a promotional tool turned genuine icon and the newly emerging highlight of the manchester festival couldn’t be greater if it tried. one was loud, brash and technologically advanced, the other small scale, modest and technically simple. one needed an army of welders, riggers, engineers and architects to create and install, the other required nothing more complicated than an artist, a couple of tree surgeons and a concrete mixer. one was a bold proclamation of the city’s civic and global ambitions, the other more a sobering reflection on waste, greed and environmental catastrophe.

contemporary practice and public art in particular are invariably imbued with layers of meaning beyond those envisaged by their corporate commissioners. in time they inevitably become unwitting symbols of their day with a whole world of difference between the original message and the ones subsequently ascribed to posterity.

these 2 installations are no exception, the poor old b of the bang an unwitting metaphor of an unprecedented era of civic hubris, corporate greed and the spectacularisation of the public domain, its current death throes the last gasp of over a decade of puff and swagger, an uncomfortable window on to our collective selves and our unsustainable aspirations. so as i gaze at the delicate construction of our newest piece of public commissioning, my hope is that it bears witness to our belated growing up, to the rise of a new era for the city – one of reflection and purposeful contemplation, where restraint and chic restoration carries more weight than the quick fix of demolition and the continual reinvention we have grown used to.

here’s the press release from mif~

Renowned artist and political activist Gustav Metzger has joined forces with the Manchester International Festival to create Flailing Trees, a sculpture to be situated in the Manchester Peace Garden. As the trees dry out, the sculpture will transform - making Flailing Trees a perfect metaphor for what Metzger sees as the urgent need for debate about the increasing brutalization of the world. Metzger says: "When we now reflect on nature, it is with considerable doubt and uncertainty. A good deal of fear is involved. We constantly ask: what will happen next?" Born in Germany, Metzger became stateless in 1948. His work and lectures are renowned for pushing boundaries of the avant-garde, and he is widely considered to have had one of the most uncompromising artistic careers of the century. The sculpture will move to the Whitworth Gallery after the festival.

the choice of Metzger is in itself interesting and promising– a leading exponent of the 60’s Auto-destructive art movement, he made work by spraying acid onto sheets of nylon as a protest against nuclear weapons, a procedure that produced rapidly changing shapes before the nylon was all consumed, so the work was simultaneously auto-creative and auto-destructive. he was also involved in the Destruction in Art Symposium in London and later in New York, which was accompanied by the public demonstration of Auto-destructive art including the burning of Skoob Towers by John Latham - towers of books (skoob is books in reverse) to demonstrate directly his view that Western culture was burned out. hardly an orthodox view for the usually hard headed Manchester city council one would think and yet this latest artwork is directly related to the Manchester Report, commissioned especially for the festival, which -

plans to recommend and communicate a series of innovative solutions to combat the environmental crisis, prior to the UN Climate Change Conference scheduled to take place in November.

if contemporary art practice makes work that both challenges and reflects on pertinent issues of the day, then the art it creates is also a social document, a record if our times. our task as self appointed ‘archaeologists of the contemporary’ is to recognise, examine and disseminate this document, this record, lest it disappear without trace.

and so my plea to the city is to articulate this burgeoning maturity by leaving the bloody, wounded stump of heatherwick’s truly iconic sculpture for all to see, its flawed beauty a constant reminder of our collective conceit, our foolish pomposity, rather than shuffled off to some giant aircraft hanger, raiders of the lost ark-style.

and there on the horizon it could simply linger, a beacon to follies past, a warning for the future and a modern day 'ruin', a more appropriate monument to the spirit of manchester than was ever envisioned in its commissioning.

metzger himself would surely approve…

an invitation to a manchester modernist society tea party!

2009-07-06T08:49:00.000+01:00

Sunday 19 July
An Invitation to the first Manchester modernist society tea party!

~being a most cordial invitation to a luncheon in the grass,

in the shadow of Gustav Metzger’s Flailing Trees,

Manchester Peace Gardens,
St Peter’s Square, Sunday 19 July from 2pm, and then on to Procession:
An exhibition at Cornerhouse, 4pm- 6pm.

Manchester is currently in festival fever with music, exhibitions and activities literally spilling out of the buildings and into the streets. It’s the perfect opportunity for even the most jaded of city dwellers to re-invigorate those humdrum routines, find new nooks and crannies lurking in the familiar and examine the everyday landscape we all too often take for granted with a more curious eye…

One of our personal favourite commissions is temporarily installed right here in the city centre. Here's the press release statement ~

‘Flailing trees is an arresting new piece of public art that will stand in the Manchester Peace Garden for the duration of the Festival. It comprises 21 inverted willows, a subversion of the natural order that brings nature and the environment into sharp focus. With flourishing branches replaced by dying roots, the sculpture is both a plea for reflection and a plaintive cry for change, and is sure to provide a catalyst for debate.’

What better way we thought to enjoy the dying embers of the festival and reflect on the installation’s poignant message before its removal to the Whitworth Art Gallery than with a spot of afternoon tea under its temporary shade; our own modest celebration echoing the doubtless more lavish Festival Feast taking place round the corner in the Albert Square pavilion!

Replete with tea, cake and conversation, we then propose a short meander to view the splendid Procession: An Exhibition, at Cornerhouse on Oxford Rd, which brings together a collection of objects from last Sunday’s Deansgate parade and attempts to contextualise the event within a local historical vernacular.

As the brochure says - Contemporary and old-fashioned, popular and obscure; don’t let Procession: An Exhibition pass you by…

So, do join us in our little celebration and reflections of the end of a magnificent festival in the space created between two remarkable public artworks that seem to us at mms to articulate the common links between much contemporary art practice and an emerging archaeology of the contemporary past.

RSVP….Parasols or umbrellas, deckchairs or plaid blankets, picnic paraphernalia and contributions of delicacies, sweet or savoury, most welcome…..

the manchester modernist society is born!

2009-06-01T19:23:00.000+01:00

dear friends, bluestockings, urbanists, boffins, flaneurs, loiterers, idlers and dandies,

it was a great privilege to be asked to write a welcome note to the brand new manchester modernist society, set up by my young friends and colleagues miss ward and mr hale for the promotion and enjoyment of 20th century manchester, in the manner of an informal friendly society or club. i do hope you will find it of interest and perhaps even join in some of its coming activities....

here is a transcript of my thoughts about this promising new endeavour. see you at a get together soon...

A welcome from EP Niblock-

Manchester prides itself on being the Original Modern City...

And as the 21st century gains pace and we leave the awkward noughties behind, the cityscape, more than a decade on from the almost mythical ‘96 bomb blast that kick-started its rapid reinvention, continues its incredible transformation, rapidly shedding its famous industrial skin, the patina of its 20th century incarnation, for a shiny new one. The perfect opportunity then as we hurtle excitedly into this uncharted imminent future to examine the almost ‘archaeological’ landscape of the century we have only just left behind, itself a hundred years of massive social, physical and cultural change.

This is a century that practically all of us have witnessed, influenced and survived, yet ironically from the point of view of the built environment one that threatens to disappear quite unceremoniously from our shared consciousness, like so much discarded rubbish. and whilst we recognise that the city by its very nature erases itself as it expands through history, we enjoy the untidy relics of past lives it leaves in its wake.

Why another organisation dedicated to the city I hear you ask - we already have Urbis and CUBE, both doing a splendid job of showcasing its delights to visitors and Mancunians alike? And do we really need another society – surely there’s enough with the Civic Society, the Twentieth Century Society, the Manchester Geographical Society? Each of these special interest groups do a marvellous job within their specific remits, but their very formality, so crucial to their campaigning aims and ambitions may well have prevented all but the self confident activist from joining up and getting involved with their worthy work.

Here at the nascent Manchester Modernist Society we love the city past, present and future. We are keen to document, investigate and celebrate the city in the broadest sense, in the spirit of the amateur and the enthusiast. On the street, at ground level, inscribed in the footprint of the city, in the gnarly carbuncle of the careworn, the overlooked, the neglected and forgotten fabric of the city, not simply it’s tarted up million dollar revamps or its grand municipal giants.

We want to explore the extraordinary story of the 20th century in the broadest possible sense, especially its everyday vernacular landscape, start conversations, bring people together, raise awareness and perhaps even make the occasional difference – but most of all to get out there and enjoy ourselves in it.

This is a small group with a big idea - to create a friendly and accessible old fashioned club for understanding, celebrating and involving us all in the ongoing story of our daily lives in this infuriating, fascinating and fabulous city – by and with the people who make it alive – YOU!!

manchester modernist society can be found here...

just who are the mms...?

2009-06-01T19:17:00.000+01:00

the manchester modernist society manifesto:

We are not architects, preservationists or activists, though we do know a number of each of these.

We are not radicals, Situationists, academics or psychogeographers, though we are lucky to count a few of these mythical creatures as our friends.

We do share their passion that the city continues to be a place for poetry and dreaming as well as business and commerce, where its citizens are more than machines for living and consuming.

We are merely a small band of urban enthusiasts, amateurs and latter day dandies, passionate observers of the city and its social cultural and built environment. We believe that none of these phenomena exist in isolation but rely on each other to flourish and foster and create the living tangle of the throbbing metropolis that we call home.

We believe that the recent past and its rich variety of grand and ordinary, cherished and neglected buildings continue to play a part in our shared consciousness and sense of identity, continue to influence who we are and remind us of how we worked, rested and played.

We are keen to foster and help develop a greater public awareness of the rich and complex relationship between architecture, art and design and public space, and draw attention to the precarious nature of much of the 20th century backdrop that we often mistakenly take for granted.

We aim to create a real space for discussing, engaging and enjoying perhaps occasionally even campaigning for the multilayered complexities of a city that is comfortable to wear its carbuncled heart on its sleeve. Not for us the smooth uniformity of a relentlessly brand new city that is too intimidating to use.

We will meet and gather, mooch, amble, collaborate, make connections, gently protest and point things out where we see fit. We will speculate, agitate, cogitate, publicise, dream and philosophise over afternoon tea, on walks, talks and various outings. All we need is for you to join in, keep us informed of your events and activities across and around the city and create some of our own for your delectation.

Watch this space, join in, get involved…

manchester modernist society

melancholia, madness and modernity

2009-05-31T11:57:00.000+01:00

reader, too long have i tarried in the shadows with those grinning ossified corpses….

after a month of melancholia brought upon by a combination of time travel jetlag and an assortment of the debilitating and unpredictable side effects that only being dropped unceremoniously into a urine tinged red phone box can induce, i seem to have finally emerged with not a little relief into the bright and sweet smelling present of a lethargic, sunkissed manchester.

the past few weeks have been a bewildering grind of confusing and conflicting ideas and information, converging and conflating to produce a space – time vortex through which this poor old edwardian bluestocking has been forced to hurtle back and forth, force fed a virtual tangle of disheartening data on the precarious state of the public realm and the peculiarities of a property developing autocracy as it continues to gobble up the cityscape. truly, as alice herself hinted, nothing makes sense in the contemporary world…

my research-in-progress into the present day, its quotidian practices and its impact on the archaeology of the recent past is becoming distinctly discouraging, downright depressing in fact, and for the first time since my unexpected emergence from my dusty duties deep in the bowels of the museum archives, artefacts all safely wrapped, labelled and preserved, the realities of being a student of now, custodian at large of the contemporaneous, has hit home. this overpowering revelation has of late deepened despite the many inspiring and inventive projects of the friends and acquaintances i have made since delving into the beautiful palimpsest of this city, walking the streets through the eyes of its myriad dandies, flaneuses, mischief makers, artists and activists, i confess to being at a loss to find a place for myself here in the 21st century that doesn’t seem an arcane and fanciful indulgence, a precious waste in a time when every minute counts.

it seems to me that whilst an interest in contemporary everyday practices in the context of the built environment has much in common with the study of the prehistoric archaeological landscape, it is not enough to merely theorize, document and postulate. a more productive, down to earth practice is called for…and urgently. but i am simply not equipped for the pressing and political aspects of this new endeavour and the temptation to retreat to the reassuring realm of the long and desiccated dead has never been greater. never has the trench and trowel of the neolithic seemed so cosy in the face of the careless and wanton destruction of the recent past, the cultural and architectural vandalism perpetually leering from every street corner like a grinning cadaver from each mediocre new property development, or worse still the wilful bulldozing of the rich vernacular of our cityscape even as the effects of the so called credit crunch stymie any actual construction.

old habits die hard and after much grappling with a sorry combination of writing-and-thinking block i finally succumbed to the familiarity and reassuring permanence of the edwardian world of the boffin and bluestocking, of the polymath and the amateur, for some much needed respite in former haunts of londinium – the glory of the bm, the modernist magnificence of the riba headquarters and the fabulous wellcome collection, 'a free destination for the incurably curious'. here amidst the curiosities, shrunken heads and implacable medical implements i eventually found a kind of sanity, in the aptly titled madness and modernity exhibition, and the promise of a possible route through the emerging 20th century and its uncertain journey towards modernity and ultimately to where we are right now.

madness and modernity identifies fin de siecle vienna, the avant garde centre of modernity, as a tumultuous period of transition in which the arts, literature, architecture and philosophy blossomed but also as a city obsessed with the mind. political unrest had left the viennese with an overwhelming sense that they were living in 'nervous times' where anxieties about mental health were allied to fears about the modern city. and here amidst the tower of fools, the madhouses and maladies of the dawn of our own era, the grotesquely distorted limbs and ghoulish pallor of schiele and kokoscha’s withered portraiture, were parallels aplenty to our own distinctly twitchy, pathological neuroses as we enter the 21st.

certainly the unmistakable parallels to my own nervous state of mind were lit up like an electrical circuit, as i try to adjust my own peculiar situation, an edwardian spinster trapped in a tiny red tardis on the edges of a somewhat forlorn conservation area, or living in the mundane landscape of an ‘at risk’ council estate, symbols of an outdated present that we have barely begun to evaluate or make sense of - of a present that, as it hurtles into an uncharted future, threatens to fade away in the face of global transformations that are still unfolding.

returning to manchester in a torrent of unrelenting rain was only too predictable but perhaps in hindsight a hiatus of sorts, a space to absorb these new revelations and bridge a personal time-space compression of nearly one hundred years into six eventful ones that would surely impress even virilio! so it was timely then that a number of invitations plopped into my inbox this thursday, just in time for the meteorological and metaphorical clouds to break in my own private horizon.

first off was a spot of tea with the ever soothing mr barratt who has a flurry of publications due out soon. he was en route to performing at the farewell gig of the manchester poetry magazine the ugly tree at central library and was 'quietly chuffed' (as he put it) at his other well deserved literary recognition by arthur shilling press. i left him to triumph in his lucky shirt for a leisurely walk along the railway arches towards castlefield gallery for the preview of the social lives of others.

against such a balmy setting manchester positively reeked of urban cool, warm sunlit night, clean white cultural space bursting with arty types spilling decadently out into the cobbled glow of the railway arches, under the lego phallic excess of beetham tower. and the show was right up my cobbled alley too - all dead animals, totemic fetishes, elongated antlers, reclaimed tattered penguin paperbacks - and tres busy with all the great and the good out in force for this manchester / london exploration of our contemporary obsession with novelty, production and consumption against the schizophrenia of its inbuilt decay and obsolescence. lurking amidst the assembled detritus of our collective excesses i bumped into the lovely kate feld of manchizzle fame, blogger extraordinaire and 'hub of blogging goodness' (the guardian!), as well as a rare reunion with the erudite dave haslam fresh from bbc breakfast where his vox pop assessment of the city skyline was apparently edited to exclude any mention of phalluses from the delicate sensibilities of early morning viewers...

hilary jack herself, woman of the hour, was a glamorous vision as ever but feeling the strain perhaps in her central role of artist as opposed to curator of the already sadly missed apartment, whilst mr harfleet was clearly reveling in the novelty of a busy gallery opening that for once wasn’t in his own home…

later ambling homeward in the company of the razor tongued lonelady, herself in reflexive mood, following the mammoth task of forging her first album from a homemade studio in a rotting segment of a dilapidated ancoats mill, hewn (to the casual observer) from the tattered remnants of whatever mangled artefacts were to hand along the canal or under the brooding gasometer, we pondered the pros and cons of living in a city at once in love with its many mythologies yet woefully blind or at least nonchalant to the vicissitudes of its ritualised landscape -at once defiant city of industrial and technological revolution, social change and non conformism and yet home to unbridled entrepreneurialism, gaudy spectacle and rampant capitalism. two sides of the same coin perhaps this schizophrenia, this modernist madness is what makes the city what it is, is its distinctive usp…

and today as i wandered into the anarchic bustle of the city centre, down oxford rd, through china town, past the brutalist edifices of piccadilly tower and the former bank of England, once home to so much bullion, out into the maelstrom of piccadilly gardens, i was struck with these manifestations of the real life and soul of the metropolis.

piccadilly in all its grimy un self-conscious pandemonium, is the spiritual home of the city, in fact any city. site of the old infirmary and asylum, hub of our transport systems, hemmed in with monuments to every significant era of our civic history from georgian splendour, victorian warehouses, 60’s sci-fi, to post bomb regeneration centrepiece, it’s our largest open green space. here the entire citizenry it seemed thronged together in the first heat wave of the summer, transforming what is ostensibly one of the least attractive spaces in the city, its already grubby tadao ando artwork, its patchy, parched grass and inelegant display of foul plastic urinals into a place of genuine beauty. here in the blazing sun was a cosmopolitan scene as old as time, transporting us back to ancient rome, carthage, mesopotamia, to the kasbahs and markets of all the great civilisations past and present, where people do what they have always done best - make music, sun worship, sit together and relax, chat, picnic, eat ice cream or idly play ball, rollerblade, skateboard, dance, flirt or a heady combination of all of the above…..

in short the city is alive, is transformed by how we use it. let’s use it well and wisely, lets enliven it with our shared encounters, with the untidiness of the lived experience, in the unruly and unauthorized colonised spaces we still have left in the urban landscape.

the city is ours, we only have to claim it….

on the everyday, the banal and other important matters

2009-04-27T16:35:00.000+01:00

today i tumbled windswept and dishevelled from a time warping trip through a vurt-ual rabbit hole and back…

my automated alice swept me on a rollercoaster ride through a thousand neglected, abandoned and half forgotten projects, span me around a tangle of fantastical coincidences and deposited me right back where i started, squashed in a burnt out pissed-stained red telephone box, tiptoeing uneasily amongst a jumble of disconnected data on manchester, urbanism, dis/utopias, public space, listing, delisting and a plethora of bluestockings. in the words of our intrepid heroine, it would be so nice if something made sense for a change.

we’ve all been there. one minute you’re diligently researching a specific topic then quite unexpectedly you run across a reference to someone whose words and ideas you have long admired. whilst it might not seem particularly pertinent to your current task it cant hurt just to peruse it quickly for future reference, so you click on it out of curiosity...

before you know it you’re hurtling deep into cyberspace, sucked inexorably into a dizzying vortex of world wide signposts, where one link leads seductively to another and another, until a lifetime later you emerge blinking, cobwebby and bewildered, all original intentions irretrievably awry.

safely returned to some notion of the present, a quick shake of the tail and a nosy around your trusty search engine reveals the labyrinthine silken threads of your adventure; a trail of clues into the darkest recesses of your laptop files, and if you’re lucky, a glimmer of insight or new lead to continue this peculiar endeavour, this mountain of ossified data.

all that remains is to thank my guides alice, carroll, noon and moran for leading me along a hallucinogenic journey from listed building procedures, urban regeneration, the demise of the red telephone box, our very own lrm, the society for unread authors and surprisingly yet inevitably to another archaeology of the present.

p.s ~ the moral of the story, if there has to be one, would appear to be always follow the rabbit, never once considering how in the world you might get out again...

manchester suffragette city!

2009-03-31T00:21:00.000+01:00

so, inspired by all that mancunian heritage and an invitation by miss anne malone, a young bluestocking about town, we promptly nipped off to the suffragette city tour the very next week. we have been meaning to go on one of these Urbis Wednesday walks for ages but prior commitments have so far prevented it. not this time though - arrangements were confirmed and a whole morning of howling wind and rain wasn’t going to put us off. after all, women had chained themselves to railings, been carted off to prison and force fed with tubes so that we could take an unfettered hour and a half stroll around town, so brave the uncertain weather we must. undaunted we booked our places, met our guide in the foyer of urbis and set out to discover a century of everyday stories of the radical women of manchester, women just like you and me.

the most enjoyable aspect of the whole experience was the informality of it all. maybe it was the fact that we were the only 2 people to take the tour that afternoon, maybe it was the enthusiasm of our guide but what most struck me was that this was not so much an account of the pankhursts and their epoch changing campaigns but more a commemoration of the legions of less socially prominent women toiling away behind the scenes who nurtured and sustained the movement; everyday heroines and activists every one. as ever it seems that behind the headlines and illustrious figures of any story there lie fascinating tales of everyday people achieving extraordinary things…

our guide led us all the way to kendals before beginning the ‘official’ trail, perhaps a deliberate ploy to foster the bond and camaraderie that can result from the simple but unusual act of strolling about, making small talk with strangers – itself a quietly revolutionary act, given that urban life is by and large characterised by a studious avoidance of other people’s existence! whatever the reason, by the time we had reached our first stop on the tour, the ice had been broken and we had each shared anecdotes on the subject of the city as it is and has been experienced for women past and present.

i don’t want to spoil suffragette city for those of you planning to attend it – and I know all you bluestockings both male and female are eager to – so im not going to transcribe it here. besides, depending on who turns up on the day and their unique input, its likely to become a subtly different version every time, each recollection and personal experience adding to the depth and power of this never ending tale of the city.

still I cant resist piquing your appetite with one or two fascinating snippets, such as:

back pool fold off cross street and next to sams chop house was for a long time the site of the town’s ducking stool. this murky pond and its notorious stool was reserved for the regular punishment of ‘lewd women and scolds’, the latter a common term in the 17th and 18th century for noisy and troublesome women!

in 1845 frederick engels was guided around manchester by mary burns who lived in the slum district around deansgate. this young textile worker was to introduce engels and the entire marx family to a side of the city they would never have gained access to by themselves. one could argue that this working class chartist kick started the whole socialist manifesto and revolution…

3 unrepentant suffragettes were arrested in 1913 following repeated attacks on 13 paintings in the city art gallery with hammers.

in the mid 1990’s 'reclaim the night' campaigners created a literal sit-in outside the town hall, gloriously subverting the institutional municipal space of albert square into a giant living room with an array of domestic props such as arm chairs and settees!

suffragette city is a beautiful idea, based on the premise that woven into the pavements, bricks, mortar, perhaps the very air of manchester, is a tradition of activism and desire for social change that has repercussions for us all today. it reveals the city as a springboard for the women’s suffrage movement, a location ripe for the single mindedness of the pankhurst family, but offers this not as the end of the story but merely the start of a journey through more than a hundred years of female radicalism, great and small, historical and contemporary….

highly recommended! offer open to gents too of course...

manchester histories festival, a celebration of a thousand stories...

2009-03-26T14:45:00.000Z

saturday was manchester histories festival, a day of walks, talks and displays about the city's multiple pasts, or as the organisers put it 'a one day spectacular celebrating the history of our vibrant city. Discover exhibits, talks, films, tours and music, all inspired by the stories of Manchester's incredible past'.

intrigued by this bold claim and the opportunity to wander about in the grandeur of the town hall, i went along bright and early to book myself in to one or two of the events, watch some film footage from the north west film archive and simply meander about aimlessly in search of a society or group that might take my fancy...

there are already several superb reviews of the festival and accounts of its many highlights on some of my favourite blogs, so i wont bore you with my own day, rather refer you to richard barrett and the shrieking violet for their interesting and pertinent tales of a day in the company of dave haslem, keith warrender, clare hartwell, sheila rowbotham and jonathan schofield, not to mention engels, the scuttlers, the chartists, suffragettes, cholera and the evening news intrepid carrier pigeons!

if i havent already pointed you in the direction of these two excellent bloggers, then shame on me, they both regularly inform and delight me on their fabulous pages! between them their accounts perfectly capture the sheer chaos and delight of a day choc a bloc with mancunians eager to share their knowledge, research, enthusiasm and insights about the city. besides, as i opted for the walks i missed all of the brilliant talks, not least my all time history hero michael wood, of 'in search of...' fame. trojan war, domeday book, alexander the great, he's done them all. not bad for a boy from salford...

after my walks, castlefield in the morning and architecture in the afternoon, i indulged in the simple pleasure of mooching about the lord mayors parlour and banqueting hall, taking in the many stalls, local groups and history clubs assembled to meet and talk to. here was rare and wonderful chance to get a real flavour of the countless projects currently going on across the city that generally stay under the radar. if you have ever had a question about just about anything really, here all under one roof was probably the answer...personal favourites include victoria baths, ruinous recollections, dig manchester, friends of platt fields, memories of belle vue zoo, and granadaland television, now sadly plain old itv....

on a micro-local note, a special mention should also go to a beautiful project i spotted amongst the displays from various manchester educational departments on chorlton on medlock (my very own brunswick!) by miriad masters student elizabeth kealy-morris called mapping memory which evocatively records

the memories former residents have of Chorlton-on-Medlock before being cleared. These maps directly represent memory maps drawn by participants in this project and articulate the everyday knowledge of life lived in their pre-clearance neighbourhoods. The style is appropriated from travel maps that offer official views of the explored tourist city; my visual strategy has been to elevate former residents' memories to the level of official recorded memory and encourage engagement with their stories.

do check out her website, its fabulous!

in short, like everyone else who attended the histories day or has since written about it, i was initially dismayed at the crowds, queues and general clamour but perhaps this simply reflects a dirth of such cultural open days to enjoy, and is proof if anyone should need it that mancunians are crying out for more to do on a saturday than go to harvey nicks!!

here's to a regular manchester histories festival, not just annual but perhaps monthly. given the jam packed programme, it seems obvious that there's already enough on offer to fill a dozen such evenings or sunday afternoons - imagine the glamour of a monthly bluestocking type salon in the glorious setting of the town hall, dedicated to diverse walks, talks and conversations on all things mancunian.

now thats what i'd call a cultural city...

an urban fairy story - the new gothic?

2009-03-24T11:57:00.000Z

never the most prolific of bloggers, february saw the diary reduced to a solitary post rather than the usual four or six. seasoned bloggers normally pop something up to reassure any readers that its soon to be business as usual and to keep tuning in in the meantime. reasons are usually books being edited or fine tuned, art projects and exhibitions being installed, or travels abroad, research for forthcoming projects, books, exhibitions.... all very productive and intimidating!

what was my reason? nothing so glamourous. my life outside of this diary is rather prosaic and not worth the column inch, so its with some apology and sense of absurdity that ive drawn attention to my recent blogging absence at all! february simply saw me attempting to write a fairy story for a magazine whose theme for submissions was fantasy. an unlikely arena for this old flaneur you might think but no. au contraire...

it occured to me that my habit (bordering on obsession) of regaling you dear reader with my romantic reveries of neglected social housing estates such as brunswick, my moated kingdom and home to my coterie of bluestockings, and other modern day ruins and icons such as the mancunian way, the tinsley towers, the umist campus and the holloway wall, is a reimagining or repositioning of the late 20th century as a new gothic, as darkly romantic as the victorian gothic of aubrey beardsley, edgar allen poe, m r james, et al.

and im not alone in this new urban gothic, there's something in the air - as my good friend mr hale recently said, concrete and cooling towers are the lost content of a generation. the new cube exhibition, the british landscape, showcases the work of john davies whose large format black and white photographs, taken between 1979 and 2005 show the vast, complex and majestic scenery of industrial and post industrial britain. its not on for long, just until 18 april, so dont miss it, its beautiful.

spurred on by the exhibition, mr hales comment, a rewriting of rapunzel for our times by the ever enticing shrieking violet, and a child's intuitive likening of a tower block to a castle, i am posting my own humble attempt at evoking a moment in the collective imagination before the mood passes...

it didnt make it into the magazine by the way, so dont expect too much of it!

Once upon a time there lived a solitary little girl.

She lived in the high peaks of the eerie Troglodyte mountains, an abandoned world of soaring stalagmites whose weather beaten towers lay beyond the remotest hamlets and villages at the farthest edge of the Far Northern Territory; a forgotten realm, glowering mysteriously from behind the misty White Moss and the wild Clough End, a dark and dangerous wilderness traversed by few and survived by fewer - a gnarly woodland of tangled groves, knotted vines and hazy hollows inhabited by tribes of bloodthirsty trolls, mischievous boggarts and platoons of nameless beasts who lurked behind each tree and roamed every corner of the twisted undergrowth. Few in the outlying valleys ever ventured into these woods, let alone the White Moss in the vale below. These swirling treacherous bogs enveloped the woodlands with unimaginable terrors; a nether world twixt land and water, twixt living and dead, its swamps and marshes haunted by wraiths, spectres and ghostly apparitions, the melancholic spirits of those foolhardy and unwary souls who had lost their footing on its perilous paths. Only the truly god forsaken journeyed into the White Moss, making the Troglodyte Mountains virtually impregnable.

It was said that no-one had lived in these strange desolate mountains, their tall towers huddled atop their colossal peaks like a ganglion of petrified gargoyles, for nigh on a hundred years. But countless fireside storytellers had woven a thick tapestry of dreams around those mysterious inhabitants of yesteryear. Some spun tales of a giant race of fierce and warlike ogres who had dwelled there long ago, chiselling deep into the mountains and hauling endless rocks and boulders to create their lofty fortresses from where they unleashed a reign of terror on the peaceable villages below until at last they were punished and turned to stone. Others swore they were inhabited even today by a ragtag colony of crones and witches, hags and banshees whose calls might just be heard above the plaintive cries of the night, scratching a squalid living amidst the ruined palaces of a vanished race of heroes. Whatever the truth, there was little to draw anyone to such a remote and impenetrable spot and so the white giants in the north remained derelict and unloved, a vague memory, a folk tale, a bedtime story to frighten the little ones, the legend of the Nine ladies who turned to stone for a forgotten transgression.

But this desolate spot, so feared and foreboding, was in fact still occupied by one little girl, the last of her kind. She lived at the top of a perpendicular stalagmite, a towering column of crumbling concrete as high as the clouds in the sky, with views as far as the eye could see. From here she commanded a panoramic view across its four corners and the lands beyond. On a clear day she could even make out the great Metropolis to the south, a kingdom she had read was crafted entirely from a million glittering shards of glass, a translucent spectacle that was the new wonder of the civilised world, a world away from her gnarly, carbuncled mountains, with sturdy rock pigeons the only neighbours of her craggy roost, resplendent in their iridescent blue and purple coats. Together she and they nestled snugly in the windswept crevices and hollows that she called home. Their morning cooing and cawing was her very own alarm call and together girl and feathered friends would stretch and yawn bleary eyed at each dewy dawn and gaze ahead, at a gigantic adventure playground to explore every day. To her eyes this was no failed idyll or forbidden territory but a magical enchanted place, home of her ancestors and she its last guardian.

If the little girl was solitary she certainly wasn’t lonely, or at least didn’t know it, scarcely remembering human company enough to tell if she missed it. Besides she had the woods, fields, trees and neighbouring towers to clamber, and the company of the foxes, rabbits, birds, bees, butterflies and dragonflies that shared her beautiful wildscape. Gazing out from her bedroom in the clouds she could just make out the vaguest outline of the great highways circling its borders, and nearer, the many winding paths linking the towers to their garden plots and wide lawns with their overgrown flowerbeds. She often whiled away the nights imagining what life had been like once upon a time when the towers had been the heart of a great vision, a utopian dream, a bold rebirth after the devastations of the Great wars. Her bird’s eye view was a living, moving map of the tumbledown geography beneath, the grand creations and perambulations so hidden at street level unexpectedly clear, the familiar routes and daily strolls trodden long ago by her ancestors perfectly revealed.

Back on the ground those paths and flowerbeds reverted to a dense tangle of thorns, bushes and giant weeds as Nature had gradually reclaimed its own. Without constant maintenance the pleasure gardens, spacious dwellings and wide boulevards, once a source of such civic pride, had all too soon returned to bog and marsh, the ramshackle paths, mysterious black circles and thin barren maypoles choking with creeping vines and verdant ivy all that remained of the dreams and aspirations of the vanished empire, its proud ambitions and ideals reduced to pitted potholes and blank eyed citadels. Once upon a time this had been the wonder of the modern world, a dream for a bright new future, its lavish landscape and spacious dwellings heralding a new way of living, a radiant city in which to work, rest and play. The little girl knew nothing of this – it was simply her tangled playground and she alone now inhabited its vast empty spaces knowing its overrun paths, nooks and crannies by heart. And although no-one seemed able to penetrate the obstacles barring the way to the Troglodyte Mountains she had become quite adept at avoiding the many perils, monsters and terrors to enter the world beyond. She had memorized every track and path through the woods and marshlands to the outlying villages – those swirling mosses and fearful forests proved effortless, nimble and fleet of foot as she was, whilst the trolls, wolves and apparitions lurking within them appeared quite tame to her. Eventually she had created her own personal atlas of this deserted realm, a chronicle of her journeys etched into her heart around its edges and boundaries and the routes to the Outer Lands, a personal topography of the terrain that was part cartography, part experience, part identity; an A to Z of her memories, her history, her sense of self.

So the girl lived there, quite at home in the solitude, taking pleasure in its wildness. The Nine ladies, far from being the dark dread of the outside world, were her guardian angels, silent sentinels and keepers of her ancestors’ wisdom. The heart of her universe, a source of never-ending adventure, they fanned the visions of the far beyond that she read about in the books she would pluck from the mantelpieces, bookshelves and libraries gathering dust in her neighbouring cobwebby buildings and apartments. A haven of words and pictures, a vast repository of ideas, thoughts and philosophies, books were her dreaming, where she could hover above the clouds and fly beyond her own horizons. Devouring everything she came across, she would conjure up images of the curious places and strange worlds they described. Books were her friends and confidantes, their absent authors her first brush with human companionship, whose words pierced her heart with linguistic riches, and the legendary Bibliotheca, custodian it was said of all the books ever written, was to become her life’s Quest, her Holy Grail. By day she would forage for new titles, replacing finished reads to their rightful shelves; she was always most careful to keep the books in the same order that she found them! Then in the long summer afternoons when it was just too hot to explore she would settle into a shady nook in one of her favourite wild flower meadows and read in the dappled sunlight. By night she would continue at the top of her turret, her pages illuminated by the immense night skies, the twinkling stars or pale smiling moon….she would gaze out at the distant lights and imagine the adventures awaiting the brave and bold explorer.

Then one day she noticed a small and faded stamp in the corner of a well worn book. She pored over it, curious as to its meaning. It wasn’t part of the title and it definitely wasn’t part of the original print of the book. It was truly a mystery. There was a crest, a heraldic device of some kind and an inscription which read ‘Return to Reading Room, Property of the University Library’. Looking out from her little crow’s nest she was reminded of the legends of the illustrious Libraries of the Ancient Cities of Alexandria and Constantinople and wondered if the magnificent City of Glass to the south might also contain such a treasure. Could this be the location of the University Library embossed into the flyleaf of her book? There was only one way to find out. She determined to set out the very next day on the longest journey she had ever made. It would mean leaving her enchanted home, crossing the White Moss and traversing the whole of Clough End, passing the hamlets and villages beyond to the farthest reaches of the Outer Lands before reaching the mythical City of Glass at the very end of the world, an adventure to match any she had read of, to be sure. She packed only the barest necessities for the harsh journey ahead and most carefully of all the book with the precious inscription in its flyleaf, key to the kingdom of knowledge ahead. As each day passed she looked back encouraged that her gentle guardian angels the Nine Towers were still visible and pressed ever onwards, the pages of all the books still to read urging her on in search of the Great Library.

Eventually the solitary girl from the desolate mountains entered the City walls and the magical realm of Knowledge and Learning enclosed under the grand dome of its celebrated library. Bewitched in the endless walkways and colossal stacks of books and journals, many years were to pass before she emerged from her travels in the scriptorium. But subtle signs of her childhood years persisted. She was never able to sleep amidst the everyday noises of the metropolis in their normal two storey houses but instead made for turrets or the highest attics, craving her remote battlements and the plaintive cries of the wolves, boggarts and shadowy spectres that dwelled in the treacherous swamps and misty plains of her homelands. Her peculiar affinity for the urban pigeons always confounded the city dwellers, their grimy blue – grey feathers reminding her of the resplendent coats of the rock pigeons she had long shared her crows nest perch with, whilst her unfathomable affection for neglected concrete architecture in unloved corners of a city in awe of glass and brightly coloured plastic never failed to raise eyebrows. In short, despite all the treasures of the great library, she never felt quite as at home as she once had, alone in her deserted, enchanted towers.

And so at last she began the long journey back to the Troglodyte Mountains. As she drew nearer, it seemed to her that the peaks had diminished and its tall towers looked smaller than she recalled. She wasn’t even sure she was in the vicinity for try as she might she couldn’t count her Nine Ladies on the horizon. In confusion, she stopped at the nearest hamlet, now a busy plaza and shopping centre, to ask what had become of her guardian angels, totems of her ancestors, and learned that most of the ugly old gargoyles had finally been demolished, just one or two allowed to remain, fashionably renovated in bright and cheery facia and fancy plastic fittings. Soon she could see for herself that the entire area had been given a makeover, the tangled forests and knotted paths tidied up and smart new bijoux houses with tiny back yards replacing those wide expanses of unused real estate.

Her brooding mountains, those remote and desolate stalagmites whose tall towers perched atop enormous peaks were gone, their fierce, forbidding architecture, wild tangled gardens, potholed streets and boulevards now vanquished. There would be no more tales on dark nights by the fireside of a giant race of fierce and warlike ogres who had dwelled there long ago, no more nursery fears of swamps and marshes haunted by wraiths, spectres and ghostly apparitions, no lost souls haunting the ancient paths and tracks across the mosses, not in Fresh Fields, the bright, clean and clinical kingdom of the new all conquering Lego people.

Her enchanted realm has a different name and another life now, its wild places, wolves, foxes, dragonflies, birds, bees and butterflies displaced with the clearances and like them she is banished, all that remains an atlas inscribed in her heart - a map of a life lived in the ruins of her ancestors, a personal geography of faded glories, wide boulevards, lofty ideals, a wonder of the modern world, a vision for a bright new future, a radiant city: an A to Z of her identity, her history, her sense of self.

No, this tame new world can never be her home...

brutal is beautiful!

2009-03-19T10:18:00.000Z

one of my esteemed boffin friends, mr hale, has drawn my attention to an interesting article in the always 'on the button' manchester confidential.

in Lumpy Concrete Art jonathon schofield defends three controversial 60's concrete horrors, including our very own hollaway wall, which i drew your attention to at the beginning of the year, the 20th century society's january building of the month. like me he is keen for the city to take stock of its recent heritage and appreciate the grandeur of a period more maligned than appreciated:

Get up close to the wall and its impressive, ten times better than Tadao Ando’s concrete thingy in Piccadilly Gardens. It’s full of solemn power, and bashed about grandeur. But above all it's simply weird, drawing you in with its stop you in the street, ‘you-what?’ magnetism...

his other two featured highlights are also worth a mention and a visit - the first living right in the city centre near the gorgeous cis building, a modest but attractive screen wall fronting miller street creating a processional way of the entrance to new century hall; the other a series of bizarre totems on the salford campus. here's his piece in full with great pictures. have a quick read, feast your eyes and please support the petition to list the holloway wall from current development proposals.

because, as schofield ends in his homage to the beauty of brutal architecture -

All cities need context. As we walk through them we need to feel the layers of the city’s history under our feet. It’s best if a city provides a visual reminder in odd tucked away corners – Holloway’s Wall – or right in your face – Mitchell’s three giants - of what it was before and how it then looked on the world and itself. These concrete features do this, they’re not only a physical reminder of the time in which they were built, but also of the mood of that period in our history.

i couldnt have put it better myself...

in praise of contemporary bluestockings...

2009-03-10T23:35:00.000Z

it seems that my recent homage to forgotten females struck a chord with many friends and acquaintances, some of whom have subsequently suggested their own icons, including louise bourgeoise, charlotte perriand, vivienne westwood, marie du plessis, edie bouvier beale, bette davis, virginia woolf, marlene dietrich, coco chanel, elizabeth 1, angela carter, angela davis, martha gelthorn, alice b toklas. thank you lisa, anne, hilary and mysty mary!

meanwhile over at the bluestocking, that veritable headquarters of female erudition and scholarliness, international womens day has also led to a little list making and contemplation of heroines who deserve our admiration. this is a splendid resource for all budding spinsters and learned ladies with links to journals, archives, worldwide sisterly bloggings and is in short a jolly good read - do visit them for a total immersion into the history and future of the bluestocking and her postmodern offspring, the geekgirl and feminista. there’s even a name generator to play with, though they rather gave up on me, naming me a somewhat disappointing euphemia p baptista!?

of course bluestockings don’t only exist in the past nor are they merely consigned to the pages of history; women continue to inspire in the contemporary and everyday world invariably under our very noses. it’s just that now as then these thoroughly modern heroines tend to remain unidentified, their achievements and stories overwhelmed by the sheer clamour of the wags, it-girls and reality stars vying for our attention. so to complete this celebratory theme of female endeavour, adventure, notoriety and achievement, here's my humble offering of a few of today’s femaletastic endeavours, all within hailing distance!

where better to start than right here in brunswick? i have sung the praises of my small coterie of bluestockings elsewhere in these pages but i can surely be forgiven for reiterating them here…

the gorgeous and rather terrifying lonelady - just signed to warp records, her first album is being recorded at a secret location in the northern wastelands right now….listen to nerve up here, for a flavour of what’s to come.

artist, urbanist and cube (centre for the urban and built environment on portland st, manchester) open winner andrea booker should be revealing more of her haunting urban rescue work during her residency at cube this summer. i've long been a fan of this brunswick belle - read and see more about her work here.

apartment in the heart of brunswick will be sorely missed when it closes its doors for good at the end of its current show, not only for its support of hundreds of international artists and innovative curatorial projects such as artranspennine08, but also for the dazzling presence of artist, curator and co-founder hilary jack. some consolation however might be found at her blog , where we can keep up to date with her future projects, or at axis where she regularly contributes articles on pertinent issues in the contemporary artworld.

of course, no review of brunswick or indeed manchester would be complete without a mention of the legend and megastar that is the ‘acid tongued glamazon’ coco laverne. her astute cultural commentary, film reviews and all round fabulousness can be found on her blogsite, ms coco la verne, including todays sharply written assessment of women, domestic violence and spinsterhood.

widening the scope outwards slightly from my own enchanted corner of the city, i have been most privileged since my emergence into the 21st century to be befriended by an extraordinary array of artists, activists, loiterers, drifters and dreamers - magnificent women writing, exploring and creating their own city, situationists and flaneuses all.

morag rose and jane samuels. where to start? these two urban loiterers, flaneuses and adventurers really are the epitome of iconic. i’ve enthused about them both many times before but really one cant praise them enough – for more about the lrm in manchester and the abandoned buildings project visit this inspiring blogsite. better still join in; you'd be most welcome!

an intriguing message popped into my inbox on facebook recently and got me hooked immediately, drawing on the history of cycling clubs, female emancipation, but bringing it right up to date. here's what it said. ride like a girl;

Wednesday 8th April (and monthly on 2nd Wednesday of the month). Meet at 6:30pm outside the Pankhurst Centre. We shall ride, mostly off road routes for about an hour. (the ride will be lead by a qualified cycling instructor who can give advice on assertive/ confident cycling during the ride). After the ride we shall go to The Deaf Institute where we can celebrate the first of the new monthly women's rides with female DJ's playing ace music all night!!!!Boys welcome to the afterparty…

look out for me on mabel, my trusty penny farthing!

if green issues, allotments or community activities are your thing, then look no further than latterday land army girls, odette o’reilly and louise allen, project co-ordinators of GROWTH, a “grow your own scheme” that will meet every two weeks in whalley range to share skills and enable people to grow their own vegetables in an urban plot. find out more at the lovely shrieking violet blogsite, a mine of mancunian activity and information.

ArtYarn is a collaborative fibre arts project coordinated by visual artists Rachael Elwell and Sarah Hardacre, who use traditional knitting and crochet techniques in contemporary visual arts projects. its part activism, part socially engaged art - crafty, subversive and fabulous. catch them at the kings arms in salford on mondays to get involved, find out all about yarn bombing or just knit a scarf!

this mini review is clearly only the tip of the iceberg, dear reader. it doesnt pretend to be definitive or exhaustive. as you know, part of my self appointed mission in this brave new world is to uncover practices of everyday life, celebrate stories of quotidien adventure and investigate tactics of resistance to the often stifling narrative of the corporate cityscape, surviving and even thriving in the cracks and gaps of the mainstream. all we have to do is look...and join in with some mischief of our own, however small!

this little homage is proof indeed, dear reader, that you really don’t have to travel very far to find the modern day bluestocking out and about in all her glory. vive la postmodern femme!!!

in praise of bluestockings past and present...

2009-03-08T14:06:00.000Z

joan of arc, made gorgeous by jean seberg in her 1957 portrayal...

8 march has long been celebrated throughout the world as international womens day so it seems fitting that today i should continue this mini theme of ambivalent attitudes to women with a personal homage to just some of the inspiring, fearless, daring, brilliant and notorious females that have stalked the edges of the history books.

the names most familiar to us now are almost more myth than reality as if their activities so disturb the expectations of what should be achieved by women that they have become caricatured as witches, savages or lunatics.

boudicca, portrayed here by alex kingston, leader of the infamous rebellion by the iceni against the romans in 61AD, defeated the Roman 9th legion and destroyed the capital of Roman Britain, then at Colchester, as well as london and Verulamium.

but all too often they have simply slipped from the public consciousness, relegated to footnotes in obscure theses or so-called feminist book shelves in libraries and bookstores that doubtless marginalise them further. nothing the matter with feminism you understand - i rather regard myself as one - but i do wonder how many people wander into such sections unless they are already converts to the cause.

instead, i'd quite like their heroic, literary or scientific adventures to be the stuff of genderless interest, alongside the well known and well loved figures that school children read about and hold in high esteem and which invariably tend to be male.

so forgive meif today i rather shamelessly promote the daring deeds, exploits and inventions of the female of the species - take it good naturedly in the spirit of modernity, equality and egalitarianism with which it is intended.

vive la femme....!!

isabella eberhardt, writer, traveller, orientalist, she lived much of her short life posing as a man in the Algerian desert as a nomad and disciple of Sufism.

simone weil, sister of the better known andre, philosopher, ascetic, mystic, social and political activist. precocious student, she learned greek and sanskrit before her teens, and despite her pacifism fought in the spanish civil war and later joined the french resistance.

gertrude bell, archaeologist, linguist, cartographer, arabist and the greatest mountaineer of her age. the only female political officer in the british forces during ww1, her work in the middle east alongside laurence of arabia led to the formation of present day iran and iraq from the borders of ancient mesopotamia. no stranger to controversy or contradiction, she was also a member of the anti-suffrage league!

katherine stinson, dubbed the flying schoolgirl by the press, was the 4th female in the usa to receive a pilots licence in 1912 and the first woman to perform a loop. she flew a Curtiss JN-4D "Jenny" for fundraising tours for the Red Cross during World War I & was an ambulance driver at the front!

olympic fencer and pilot, joanna de tuscan was the first woman to fence sabre, the first female fencer to compete in pants, was captain of the 1936 US olympic team, AND fought as a WW2 pilot!

katherine hepburn, elegant, androgynous, effortlessly portraying the modern woman, she is most definitely a classic bluestockings style icon...

...alongside that other glorious example of non-conformist female of the silver screen, less graceful perhaps but every bit as beautiful to me at any rate.

margaret rutherford, comic actress and national treasure, her joi de vivre and exhuberant performances in blithe spirit, the importance of being earnest, passport to pimlico & her classic miss marple, belie much sadness in her personal life.

lets end this little homage with forgotten surrealist painter and novelist leonora carrington, rebel, maverick, author of the fabulous 'the hearing trumpet', and last i heard, still alive well into her 90's!!

leonora was a british debutante who ran off with max ernst, hung out with picasso, fled the nazis and escaped from a psychiatric hospital via a submarine rescue by her nanny.

an inspiration to us all....

in defence of the bluestocking...

2009-03-01T22:47:00.000Z

as some of you might recall, i've been a little out of the social loop for the last 70 years or so, locked inadvertently into the basement of the manchester museum whilst archiving my excavation reports. and whilst so much about the world has changed beyond recognition during this long absence, it seems that one thing that has not diminished in this country is a distinct suspicion around intellectual aspiration or attainment. britain it seems has never had much time for a 'clever clogs', the rampant anti intellectualism long discernible in the popular press slipping dangerously over to loathing when it is attributed to women. when i was a girl the term bluestocking was a universal pejorative with women not allowed to graduate from universities until early in the 20th century. such women were unnatural, a disgrace to their sex, scorned, unmarriagable and doomed to spinsterdom as a result, and whilst the term itself might be less prevalent in common parlance, the idea that a woman should be strive only to be decorative to the eye sadly is not…

so just what is it about a display of intelligence by a female of the species that still manages to provoke such apoplexy?

i must admit to being caught completely off guard by the recent furore surrounding university challenge, that old war horse of a programme tucked away innocuously on bbc2 alongside other gloriously unfashionable dinosaurs such as sky at night and the now sadly departed open university late night geek fest (bring it back - it's a national treasure!). almost part of the wallpaper, uc is something of a broadcasting relic, an outmoded survivor of a long departed era - watched by insomniacs and retired classics teachers, it's occasionally wheeled out for gentle nostalgic mockery but rarely makes the national news or provokes the venom of the tabloids.

and whilst the latest revelation that one of the contestants was no longer a student by the semi-final recordings, but had graduated and already secured a job, might currently be overshadowing the original story, trimblegate, as its hilariously being dubbed, disturbs and dismays for a raft of all too predictable reasons. as becomes patently clear with a quick peruse of the newspaper coverage surrounding the high scoring performance of the mighty corpus christi team, most of the media attention has focused rather heavily on the capacity of the team captain, one ms gail trimble, to know so many answers. (such timerity - am i alone in supposing knowledgeability to be the foremost task of a team captain?)

here are just a few of her detractors foaming at the mouth on the web this week:

"hate her hate her hate her!! what a smug b*tch. i found myself willing her to lose! i don't get how anyone didn't feel the same rise of boiling angry hate"

"this horse-toothed snob ruins university challenge every time she is on it with her 'better than thou' attitude"

"...a display of self appreciating arrogance in intelligence"

"i became completely enveloped by my hatred for the captain of Corpus Christi"

broadsheets, tabloids, cyber space and the blogosphere alike have been drowning under the sheer weight of this unseemly invective, with inevitably rather too much made of poor miss trimble's appearance, in particular an unfortunate hair tossing habit which seems to have provoked column miles of boiling rage, leaving her defenders feeling forced to resort to sadly more sexist cliches such as those weary old librarian chestnuts,

“attractive in a blue-stocking sort of way" or "beautiful in a scholarly sort of way",

all of which are not only rather back-handed compliments bordering on apologies but are noticeable in their absence regarding the physical attributes of the hundreds of unkempt, disshevelled and otherwise sartorially inept and cosmetically challenged young men who routinely appear on the programme. as one lone voice timidly piped up,

"it makes me sad how much attention here is focused on how sexy she is or isn't. God forbid a woman be allowed to just be clever"

the whole episode has certainly provoked strong reactions all across the board and political spectrum. an unlikely defence comes from the daily mail via melanie phillips who offers this revealing, bitter assessment;

People would rather see someone who is broken, flawed, a wreck, one of life’s victims. That’s because they themselves feel like that....anyone who embodies demureness and orderliness is jeered at as either frigid or stuck-up. With self-restraint and decorum now a distant memory, what has been unleashed is a culture of bullying, the baying of a mob which will turn not just upon middle-class victims but also upon on its own when offered the opportunity to mock and jeer.

It is the pathological reaction of a crude, vulgar, de-educated and debauched nation, which has so badly lost its own self-respect and sense of itself that it viciously lashes out from the anonymous safety of its collective sofa in order to feel better about itself. It tells us that Britain - that once lion-hearted nation for which humiliation has become its national pastime - is now in trouble.

yet others have noted that there is rarely such sniping at the achievements of an athlete or footballer, excellence in these fields being a source of national pride and much handing wringing whenever we collectively fail to attain such olympian heights at international events and championships. the mantra of successive governments might well be education, education, education, but woe betide anyone who commits the sin of pride that is answering a random collection of arcane questions correctly - and as for women, we appear to be right back where i started, in the 19th century....

cultural contemplation or art and the new monasticism...

2009-02-07T11:06:00.000Z

whether its abbeys offering Monastic Taster Weekends or museums advertising for live-in hermits, its seems the whole country is in contemplative mood.

perhaps its the effects of blizzard britain with the heaviest snowfalls since 1991 paralysing much of the country this week, the transport system and road networks grinding to a halt and whole counties north and south snowed in and cut off in whats being called The Whiteout.

but for some of us (call us foolish romantics if you must) bemoaning the distinct lack of fluffy white stuff in our perpetually damp city, at least there are plenty of openings, exhibitions, events and cultural activities finally auguring in the new year. if we cant join the rest of the nation in frolicking about in cath kidston wellies building snowmen and sledging down hillsides on old teatrays then we can at least gather together in warm art galleries to admire the latest shows....and after the doldrums of january, god knows we need it. there's so much happening the next few weeks i can barely keep track of it all so here's a little overview for our calendars so none of us miss out. and who knows maybe i'll see you at some of them!

we are spoilt for choice this weekend with three big shows currently dominating the city – interspecies at cornerhouse explores the relationship between humans and animals and challenges the authority of the human species over all other animal species. promoted by the arts catalyst as part of the 200th anniversary of darwins birth interspecies is peculiar, unsettling and instructive. dont miss it...

castlefield gallery launched Private Party. Keep Out on thursday evening, a solo show of new and existing work by Manuel Saiz. his work addresses the identity of the artist and the way in which they interact with the institution, the audience and society at large, a subject that constantly puzzles and intrigues me. there's an interesting programme of screenings and events supporting this exhibition which definitely warrant closer inspection. private party can be seen from 06 February 2009 to 22 March 2009.

subversive spaces previewed last night at the always wonderful whitworth art gallery and what a glamorous night it was too, stuffed to the rafters with art types, bigwigs and hangers on of every description. viewing a labyrinthine show of this kind is nigh on impossible at a preview but the show continues to May 4 so you might well spot this sprightly spinster lurking around its many nooks and crannies over the coming weeks.

if a brisk walk sounds just the ticket then tomorrow’s ‘ardwick heritage trail’ might be up your street. organised by the ardwick history project it echoes my own recent tour of brunswick but with the added attraction of a fully trained official blue plaque guide. it is sadly already fully booked. if anyone managed to get a place on this do report back, as i’m disappointed to have missed out…more are promised so i shall keep you posted.

or if you are looking for some urban contemplation and hauntingly beautiful modern gothic with your sunday brunch there is still time to catch two exhibitions at either end of northern quarter, with reality hack hidden manchester showing at urbis, and jane samuels beautiful abandoned buildings project at nexus arts on dale st, just off Oldham st. it has a great cafe too, welcoming and independent...

i don’t often do theatre but im plugging two upcoming events at the contact. Song of Songs by sonia hughes opens on wed 11 Feb at 8pm, showing until Sat 21 Feb. if my personal recommendation does not tempt you (and if not, why not!?) then take lyn gardner’s word for it in the guardian;

"this is not so much a performance as a gift - one that comes straight from the heart. It is not often, at the end of a show, that you long to rush up and hug the performers, but I had to resist the urge after this piece… beautiful, fragile and authentic work, which finds the extraordinary in the ordinary lives of real people"

and contact later in the week hosts a wickedly counter revolutionary valentine day special by the daunting and demonically delicious in David Hoyle: Love For All: 'Truly. Madly. Deeply. A night of unconventional love...'

in fact february 14 is an essential date for your diaries, and not for the tediously predictable clinton cards industry. celebrate your personal love affair with the city starting at 2pm at pavement gallery, in the old drapers window of manchester mets righton building, for the launch of kamera kinetics, 3 short films by william raban. follow this with kiss of a lifetime at 7pm at rogue gallery, giving you enough time to pop over the mancunian way to delight in the aforementioned truly madly deeply with the divine david hoyle at the contact at 9pm!

finally don’t think of missing the preview of Giorgio Sadotti at apartment, 6pm- 9pm on thursday, 19 february. this is apartments final show so its bound to be extra special and just a little bit emotional. details of subsequent viewings on their blogsite as usual.

happy contemplative february...

the birth of the timid modernist...?

2009-01-31T23:24:00.000Z

though it's traditional to regard december as the period of reflection and self assessment, it occurs to me, as this first month of 2009 draws to a very rapid close, that in reality january is when all the navel gazing actually happens. because january is the time when we re-read those crumpled lists and resolutions hastily made in the dazzling glow of new years brilliant and deafening fireworks, fooling us into temporary aberrations of unfounded optimism or sheer foolhardiness...

like the two faced janus it is named after, this first month looks as much at the retreating year as the coming one. it is a metaphorical bridge between the past and the future, the year we have lived and our aspirations for whats to come. it is in effect a rehearsal, a trial period for the rest of the year...a sort of introductory offer. january is for many somewhat bleak, stark and joyless after all that festive fun and frivolity and not for nothing has it been dubbed the most depressing month of the year. we have just these four weeks to try out, refine or abandon all those crazy dreams for self improvement, reinvention, flagellation, before the year starts in earnest. by february gym memberships drop, attendance at weight watchers crashes and the long dark nights can seem interminable.

as for me, i too have looked back at 2008, assessed my failures and achievements and made a long list of 'to does' in an effort to focus my attention for the coming year. i've also attempted to identify just what it is that im trying to do, or in contemporary parlance, understand and articulate my 'practice'.

the problem with being what often feels like a lone visual culturist in a city of poets, artists, playwrights, actors and novelists, is the sense of isolation, of not having the camaraderie of one's peers. and crucially unlike them, i simply dont have a practice, a title or definition to guide my progress. without this sense of self awareness or identity, my gaze tends to range far and wide, encompassing too many interests, and i am always in danger of floundering ineffectively in the backwaters of the cultural zeitgeist, a mere dilettante in a world of solid practitioners, all creating artefacts or making work within definite boundaries or disciplines.

last year i was writer in residence at apartment and i came to enjoy hiding behind that handy title, though i was ever uncertain as to my function amongst the artists and curators, an imposter in the world of art. i have also been made welcome amongst loiterers, flaneurs and urbanists, but again have no real purpose in their midst, a mere voyeur in a world of activity, agency and creativity. i have been shortlisted in the writing category of the manchester blog community, but turned out to be a fish out of water amongst the other worthy shortlisters, with no actual writing under my belt, no manuscripts, recitals or readings to my credit. i have a keen interest in the built environment and the metropolis, but am not an architect or landscape designer. i have presented papers about the way we live now and how we navigate space in todays city, but am hardly a social anthropologist or cultural geographer.

so this january i have been pitifully attempting to pinpoint just what it is i am, what is it i do and how i can do it better and more effectively, find an audience, fellow enthusiasts, some of my own kind to play with and find my own path amongst. and as we progress to february its surely time to get down to business, face the coming year, embrace it and do something useful with it...

looking back at my past ruminatings whilst preparing the Reading Room section of the recent apartment show i realise how much of my output has been a defence of modernism in general and especially what is all too often dismissed as 'grim' or 'utopian' but always misguided and failed post-war social housing. my new year list of urgent things to write about in the diary reiterates this, comprising as it does the umist hollaway wall, the threats to the umist campus, and the 20th century society's murals campaign.

owen hatherley in his brilliant blog 'sit down man you're a bloody tragedy' has as his visual motif the beautiful tag 'militant modernist', the title of his forthcoming book, described on the ballardian as

'a call to have the courage to be modern against all the current postmodern pieties of exhaustion and fragmentation' and 'a revolutionary modernism against its absorption into the heritage industry and the aesthetics of the luxury flat'.

it is also a call to arms to this humble scribbler to get off the fence and come out as at the very least a timid but determined modernist. perhaps this is my new title and aspiration for 2009:

EP Niblock, diarist, bluestocking and modernist, defender of the brutalist aesthetic!

Au Revoir Apartment....

2009-01-23T19:17:00.000Z

i dont often fiddle around with the look and layout of the diary mainly because i have no idea how to change my wallpaper, insert my widgets or upload my flickr books so it was with some ceremony and much reluctance that today i clicked on layout and deleted one of the most significant sidebars of my vita nuova...

yes the observant among you might have noticed that the link to Apartment, my alma mater and kindly mentors for far longer than my actual residency, has finally disappeared. the recent events and installation at the gallery were a retrospective of sorts, a celebration of my year holed up in the cosy domestic space that is the cheeky nerve centre of creative brunswick. the show was extended 'by popular demand' (just who were you, i wonder...thanks for visiting, hope it was worth the trek!!) to 16 january but a lady never outstays her welcome and its already the 23rd with a new and exciting show in the pipeline so today i did the decent thing, packed up and metaphorically said ta-ta.

this deletion of course might mark the end of my official association with Apartment but not of our beautiful friendship or my abiding interest in their practice and i look forward to the unveiling of their new show with much anticipation.

so, like some tearful but not too gushing bafta winner, i should like to take this opportunity to say a few words to mark the occasion:

thank you Apartment for harbouring this peculiar experiment in creative/ theoretical /cultural writing and for guiding me safely through the choppy seas of the contemporary art world. at the moment it feels rather as if i have been left to drift on a flimsy raft of my own inadequacies or a child attempting those first difficult wobbles on a bicycle without the stabilisers, but soon i hope i shall sail triumphantly towards new horizons and adventures, all the better for the lessons learned at apartments little desk and in the company of such inspired and inspiring souls as hilary and paul and all the coterie of the brunswick collective!

its been a pleasure and a privilege but lest we forget, its not goodbye its only au revoir...

dawn chorus now available to read in skookum boom

2009-01-22T12:37:00.000Z

so just the other day i was surprised and really delighted to find that my summer holiday musing dawn chorus has been published in Skookum Boom, an independent non-profit zine/magazine based in London, which i had come across on facebook months and months ago. issue 7, priced just 80p and packed with a smorgasbord of interviews, essays, satire, poetry and prose, is a psychogeographical trip across, through and beneath the city. it is probably not stocked here in manchestershire but copies can be sent direct to you for a most modest outlay....

here they are in their own words, a self managed creative collective with a wide range of pursuits, dedicated to encouraging free platforms for groups, artists and ideas of all kinds...

sb welcomes submissions of poetry/artwork, short stories and debate. direct your own submissions to skookumboom @ hotmail.co.uk and editors teddy and niall, to whom i owe a big thank you and much admiration for their wide ranging enthusiams, diy attitude and support of multidisciplinary creativity and outputs...and an anachronism like myself!

new year resolutions...umists hollaway wall

2009-01-09T08:45:00.000Z

just when it seems there simply cant be any sections of the city left to regenerate, that the looming recession might just be the accidental saving of the few remaining post-war architectural gems happily minding their own business and bringing harmless joy to some of us, worrying news pops up to the contrary...

anthony hollaway's 1968 sculptural wall is practically invisible and entirely neglected. chances are you've passed it on the way from piccadilly station to the umist campus or to stockport road and barely noticed this overlooked treasure. or perhaps you have noticed it subliminally and dismissed it as merely a graffitied eyesore.

but this is no ordinary wall, as anyone who looks at it more closely and gives it a second chance will discover. even moss covered, lichen ridden, strewn with discarded takeaways, assorted rubbish and bird droppings, the hollaway wall is a delight, its sturdy exuberance a testimony to the hardy optimism of a small band of utopian modernists of post-war britain, a lovely and elegant length of concrete sculpture. it is as architecturally significant as the piccadilly pavilion, centrepiece to the renovated piccadilly gardens by signatect tadao ando, commissioned at enormous expense for the 2002 commonwealth games, the obligatory 'iconic gateway to the city'.

a deceptively simple curved concrete wall with a covered space on its concave side providing yet more coffee chains and a modicum of shelter, the pavilion has hardly faired much better than the hollaway and is already looking a little shabby, sandwiched inelegantly between rows of plastic urinals and tram machinery. nonetheless this concrete structure, part buffer, part artwork, is a significant coup for the city - ando's first ever british project. to fully appreciate just why this self taught superstar is regarded as one of the world's greatest architects, read benjamin secher in the telegraph. in truth, though ando's reputation is well deserved, the piccadilly pavilion, commissioned as a prestigious kick start to the regeneration of a shabby section of central manchester, now seems hardly the serene japanese garden he aspired to and it has as many detractors as admirers.

in sharp contrast to this and other contemporary iconotastic commissions, the hollaway wall which made no such bold claims and sits unobtrusively in a quiet corner of the city, finds itself in suddenly in the limelight, its future uncertain. in short, it seems that not satisfied with wreaking havoc on the owens campus the powers that be have turned their pitiless gaze towards the splendid umist, with plans apparently afoot to sell off much of the site which includes some of the city's finest and sadly increasingly rare 1960s buildings and structures.

the 20th century society is currently featuring the wall in its building of the month section and is supporting a well deserved submission for listing status. richard brook, senior lecturer at manchester school of architecture, waxes lyrical about the wall, its significance and context within umist as part of a broader 60's utopian vision -

The masterplan for the campus was developed in 1960 by W.A. Gibbon of Cruickshank and Seward and it is Gibbon’s legacy that presides over the stepped site as it descends toward the Medlock Valley. Chandos Hall, the Renold Building, the Barnes-Wallis building and the Ferranti Building are all by Gibbon and all feature his trademark white concrete. He is known to have visited Brazil prior to this commission and was influenced by the work of Niemeyer, though the only real flourishing gesture is the curved stair that elegantly sweeps into the courtyard between the Renold and Barnes-Wallis buildings. The Renold Building was unsuccessfully proposed for listing in November 2005. A further two of the group are currently under threat from the sale and redevelopment of the site as the University of Manchester seeks to consolidate its estate. Also under threat is the innovative Chemical Engineering Pilot Plant by H.S. Fairhurst; originally the service runs were all defined in their own specific colours, predating Pompidou by five years.

This building is flanked by a sculptural wall, similarly at risk, about which little has been written or researched. The wall was built in 1968 to designs prepared by artist Anthony Hollaway, commissioned by the University of Manchester Institute of Science + Technology (UMIST). The artist was working in collaboration with architect Harry M. Fairhurst; they also worked together to design the concrete relief panels of the Chemistry building on the same campus and, much later, the windows at Manchester Cathedral.

Many of the structures similar to this, by artists, were retaining walls. This was designed as a sound buffer. As such, this particular wall has more ‘object’ status as it stands upon its field rather than embedded within. The work was designed to ‘enhance weathering and texture’ by the use of ‘rough sawn formwork’.

modernists, urbanists, mancunians - don't let this careworn creature disappear. please don't take for granted that this and other post war icons will survive the tail end of the noughties building boom or the current recession. visit the wall, get close up and take in its battered beauty, love and cherish it. stroll around the resplendant umist campus with its concrete flourishes, its cornucopia of public artworks, murals and secluded gardens, its harmonious marriage of victorian splendour and 60's optimism. then show your support and demand its listing and appreciation. and do it now, before its too late...

as for me, the holloway wall is as much a part of my life and my quirky corner of manchester, my personal m1, as the mancunian way and its neighbouring tower blocks, so 2009 might just be the year this sprightly bluestocking turns activist and chains herself to it....

More Life of a Bluestocking...

2009-01-08T15:20:00.000Z

it seems that there are still a few souls hoping for a chance to see the life of a bluestocking timeline and show at Apartment, so hilary and paul have been kind enough to extend the installation until Friday 16 January!

do come along.

details of viewings informal appointments and how to find us are on apartment's site here.

new year blues...

2009-01-05T22:04:00.000Z

2009 is a few days old now and already my attempts at looking the new year straight in the eye and tackling it head on with vigour, optimism and a long list of 'to does..' has fallen by the wayside or at least hit the doldrums.

it started so well.

i have a brand new burnished leather year planner, a birthday gift that ive been itching to start popping into my bag for jotting down notes whilst enjoying tea and scones in boffin hq (museum cafe) or cappucino and norlander toast in boffin central (oklahoma), and plenty of christmas books to read in cosy corners of the city, warming hot chocolate in hand, such as cornerhouse, waterstones or blackwells. plenty in short to while away the cold snap of winter in style and offer inspiration for my own humble ambitions...

but instead books lie neglected, new journal remains untouched, favourite haunts unvisited, as i mope and grumble into the new year. even the flurry of snow last night failed to thrill me, as i ran onto the landing and leaned onto the motorway parapet, the better to immerse myself in the brief midnight snowglobe effect. all these things merely heighten my new year blues.

the observant among you might recall in past postings mention of my oldest friend, dearest confidente, and comrade in books and outings, bibliophile and assyrian scholar mister benjamin horatio stillingfleet. a few of you may even remember his part in my edwardian adventures. it was he, dear reader, who came to my rescue in the case of the cult of the assassins, bundling me homeward in a packing case bound for the british museum, it was he who gave his expertise and assistance in my postgraduate studies at girton, it was he who accompanied me in my archaeological campaigns and adventures and yes, it was he who was the alleged ferguson in the ferguson gang's legendary exploits. in short he has been my right arm, my trusty sidekick and stalwart companion in countless adventures these past 100 years or more and 2008 has been no different.

new years eve we spent as always with a short meander through brunswick to boffin hq for coffee and a peruse of the morning papers in companionable silence, occasionally pointing out the odd snippet of news or comparing some nonsense or other, before deciding on the days itinerary and planning future expeditions. later on we met up with bertie for tea, the two of them enjoying their perennial squabble over the crossword.

midnight found us sharing a balcony view over the city as firework displays illuminated the skies into a urban meteorite storm as grand as any aurora borealis. only then did the blasted stillingfleet unveil his plans for 2009.

so here i am 5 days into this fledgling year and 5 long days without my stillingfleet who true to his word has retreated deep into the diaries and itinerary of Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece by Patrick Leigh Fermor. i wish him well on his voyage of discovery and intellectual retreat but am somewhat at a loss without him and feel his absence acutely. my travels across the city will be the duller without him and so i fear will be the pages of this diary.

au revoir mon ami. a bientot...

postscript. this evening a mysterious package arrived at the door. it contained a rare and handbound copy of dust, a treasure of historigraphy that i have been pursuing eagerly for some time, with a familiar inscription from my old friend; plus a handbook of paper aviation for bertie! my spirits revived, i determine not to let him down in his absence. i open the flyleaf and begin....

on procrastination...

2008-12-31T09:47:00.000Z

well its that time of year again, new years eve - the time of year for self improvement campaigns, unfeasible strategies for giving up, cutting back, making progress - general all round reflection and self evaluation...

it’s a funny time of year all in all; ordinary day to day business suspended and shrouded in a misty haze whilst the annual audit and account keeping cranks into gear, a universal totting up of the great balance sheet in the sky, when everything takes on a hazy ‘matter of life and death’ quality. newspapers are littered with reviews of the year, best and worst lists - tv programmes, films, books, music, whats hot and whats not and all kinds of tedious predictions for the year ahead. even for those of us not naturally self reflective, this universal peer pressure can prove overwhelming. one way or another, it seems to bring out the list maker in us all.

this year in particular with recession biting, high street chains falling by the wayside, doom and gloom forecast for the next twelve months, there is much talk of pulling in our belts, reappraising our lifestyles and failsafe resolutions for facing the future. for me this cosmic book keeping has coincided with a natural conclusion to certain projects and activities, a tying up of loose or untidy ends that cant help but raise the knotty problem of what next? for a natural procrastinator like me, a tortoise rather than a hare, this brings with it more than a touch of unease. i hate working out what to do next. in fact ive never really got round to it, never really planned my life, never really had a set of ambitions or goals to mark my progression against. ive never had one of those interviews where they apparently ask what you think you’ll be doing in 5 years time (that clearly in itself demonstrates my woeful inadequacy and lack of ambition…) which is just as well as i simply don’t know.

now don’t mistake this for an indication that im some kind of groovy free spirit, a devil may care, spur of the moment, don’t tie me down man i want to be free type…heaven forbid. i perversely pride myself on how uptight and repressed i am. no, im simply one of life’s dawdlers, a plodder, more stamina than inspiration. so it is with immense trepidation that i find myself facing the new year with a notebook and pen planning my next move.

my recent open house at apartment was in reality a sort of goodbye party for the end of a whole year in residency. i cant stay there forever clutching their apron strings like an overgrown baby, tempting as it is and welcoming though hilary and paul are. time to grow up and leave home….

goodbye 2008, ill miss you, you've been good to me. and ive only just got you sorted out, too! so, with fear and trembling, here's to another year. just what does a 147 year old spinster do with her future? watch this space as i sink or swim with my burden of half baked ideas and belated ambitions for 2009.

as for you dear reader, much love, peace, goodwill and best of luck whatever your dreams or flights of fancy might be for the coming year!

xx epn

the return of the familiar essay

2008-12-28T15:20:00.000Z

the belle vue is enjoyable for its passion and enthusiasm and for someone like myself its format: essays, yes good old fashioned essays, not short stories, not poetry, not critical texts in the academic style but personal essays, conversational writings of a type that seem thin on the ground nowadays. writing, like any other creative medium, is no stranger to the vagaries of fashion and movements of the day. where once there was the salon and the bluestocking circle there is now the creative writing course and the live mike night, whilst the explosion of collaborative blogs is surely just a variation on the serial newspaper ‘cliffhangers’ of dickens and conan doyle; the frequency with which manchester blog award winners have secured mainstream publishing deals bearing ample testimony to this.

but what of those of us who fall outside of this literary zeitgeist? as someone who is not a writer but uses the written word to communicate somewhat miscellaneous observations and ruminations it is easy to become intimidated by the cultural benchmark or yardstick. my intention is not so bold or brave as the novel or the poem but simply a desire to articulate a curiosity about the world, initiate a dialogue or conversation in order to understand more about these strange and often bewildering times.

the publication of the belle vue pamphlet coincided with a little book that i have recently been dipping into. at large and at small is anne fadimans 'confessions of a literary hedonist' and the heart of this little treasure is the familiar essay – ‘the perfect balance between personal anecdote and intellectual curiosity’ – whose heyday was the 19th century. like the belle vue it presumes and recreates a conversation with just one reader, you, the two of you sitting side by side in front of a crackling fire, favourite tipple in hand and an evening of cosy conversation to look forward to. the interest of the familiar essayist was always presbyopic (at large) but its focus myopic (at small):

his viewpoint was subjective, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous and his laughter usually at his own expense.

to this i have to confess a rush of recognition and affection, my occasional revelations being invariably the result of an exchange of ideas in the flesh rather than the result of solitary isolation in the garret. this natural loquaciousness, a tendency which has always plagued me as a frailty or fault, could in fact legitimately be interpreted as part of a noble tradition or literary form! as usual for a chronic anachronism like myself i find i am merely a century overdue. like fadiman my inclination is to embrace and celebrate this predilection rather than dismiss and constrain it like a recalcitrant child. as she notes rather sadly the preference nowadays leans either to the (very) critical or the (very) personal with the old familiar essay sadly neglected.

intriguingly she adds that this form had tended to be very much the preserve of the gentleman – so its adoption by a female and a bluestocking at that is perhaps timely, its absurd inappropriateness just the ticket!

so i hereby reclaim the familiar essay for our own times and shall endeavour from this day forward to do it justice and revive it for a new era….

manchester confidential give belle vue a plug

2008-12-24T19:22:00.000Z

it appears i'm not the only one singing the praises of the splendid belle vue magazine - phil griffin waxes lyrical about it in manchester confidential, linking its literary form to a venerable tradition of independently published ephemera, starting he explains with:

'Seventeenth century London coffee houses produced quires and quires of the stuff. Rants mainly, and one-legged proclamations that brook no argument. Belle Vue is an authentic folksy thing, like dominoes and pickled eggs'.

fine praise from a great online publication that i always forget to follow which either aptly illustrates how woefully inept i am or that there is still a real need for the tangibility and immediacy of a local cultural magazine that tackles the great and the small, the everyday and the extraordinary happenings in our city. without it we remain condemned to a plethora of quite dismal coverage from men and the metro (apologies to both for any offence caused)...

how better than to finish this little post in the reviews own closing words:

Two quid buys your copy of Belle Vue in Cask, Briton’s Protection and Corner House. All of which, you will notice, are licensed premises. It is a good thing that will get better. Good, because it is heart felt and honestly expressed by people who love this city.

go on buy it, read it, pass it on to friends, contribute to it.
manchester deserves it!

belle vue fanzine issue 1 hits the streets

2008-12-23T14:49:00.000Z

hot off the press for christmas!
including a little contribution called the sleeping giant from yours truly, made more palatable and visually appealing by gorgeous illustrations from sam gieben...

belle vue fanzine is a brilliant new publication which has just this week hit the streets of manchester. its the inaugural issue of an occasional and potentially regular series of guides to everyday vernacular manchester - a celebration of the city's nooks and crannies and idiosyncrasies beloved by so many of us yet neglected by the mainstream press that covers the city.

i got my mits on a copy of this pocket sized venus today in cornerhouse bookshop, nestled unobtrusively amongst the other local offerings. like them its lovingly created with a diy, hand-made aesthetic including a healthy sprinkling of pen and ink drawings and line illustrations, its cover a detailed and evocative view through the enormous voyeurs paradise that is cornerhouse cafe. unlike the others, it isnt dedicated to short stories, poetry or haiku. it isnt the product of a writers collective, the brainchild and springboard for this years crop of notables from manchester university's ma in creative writing, or the cunning marketing ploy of a corporate development agency.

no, this is the squinty eyed bastard offspring of a latterday band of vagabonds, modern pirates every one of em, a loose collective, anti-collective even, of bar flies, couriers, graphic designers, graffiti artists, and the odd architect or two. its a miracle that this crime of passion, this long talked of antidote to the cool, slick, commercially savvy magazine such as flux or rant, ever made it to print. but this motley crew of upstarts, ne'er-do-wells and romantics dreamed it, mulled on it and midwifed it through gestation and the result is a thing of genuine beauty and a joy to read.

included in its pages are homages to favourite haunts and hangouts, mentions of bugbears, paeans to lost youth and times past, plus lip smacking lists of tasty caffs beloved by those kings of the road, the bicycle courier. in fact places to eat and drink or even - gasp in disbelief - enjoy a fag without standing on the roadside - feature heavily and not one of them involves a nero, eat, wetherspoons or other corporate chain. nor are they that other extreme, the exclusive gourmet eatery. and there are long overdue glimpses outside the city centre and the usual southerly based alternatives - the north of the city as far as blackley and moston gets at least two mentions. last but not least there's a 'running feature of discontent', the curmudgeonly entitled Hell is a City section, with an open invitation to send in your own contribution!

available in all good city centre independent cinemas/gallery bookshop - and in their own words 'proper boozers' across the city!

celebrate independent manchester and buy one pronto....if you cant find a copy or want to join their mailing list, offer suggestions, encouragement or improvements do contact belle vue at manchesterguide@gmail.com.

you might even spot them in the koffee pot or sandbar or cask, plotting and brewing up issue number 2...

the medium is the message

2008-12-21T19:37:00.000Z

or how i became confused with the unassuming clark kent…

intrigued? not half as much as my own consternation at being the object of such close scrutiny!

last week i fell victim to my very own lois lane, in the form of a review of Life of a Bluestocking in the metro's arts section, my so-called ‘mysterious’ identity the centre of an unlikely expose...!
it all started on tuesday with a flurry of phone calls between apartment, my mild mannered assistant miss ward and an intrepid journalist.

our hardnosed reporter rang to enquire about the event curious to know more about this ‘self styled’ spinster and shocked at her unusual longevity. 146 is quite old i grant you, but i come from a long line of valiant decrepitudes, with great aunt queenie still gamely quaffing gin from her hip flask at way past 9o…the men i fear didn’t fare so well age wise, but greatgrandpa jonty managed to pack many an adventure into his short 27 years, juggler and acrobat with pt barnums travelling museum and menagerie, until that lethal tumble whilst performing his world famous sword swallowing trick….

anyway, the inquisitive hack was sent links to my diary, posted the apartment press release, and dispatched sufficient photo footage of the first night to furnish all their writerly requirements but still the phone would ring and the same question rear its antiquated head. could miss niblock actually be real, or just a pseudonym for someone younger, perhaps she is completely imaginary? the readers deserved to know the TRUTH…

a bizarre and surreal experience, to find myself thus dissected and digested, discussed and deconstructed like a flight of fancy or an unlikely specimen. not a real person at all but an event or a conceptual artwork. it seems i have spent so long amongst the artists and their artworks that i’ve eventually blended in and become one myself. it’s a funny feeling of déjà vu, and perhaps that was my fate long ago in the museum stores – i simply got subsumed into the artefactiness of my surroundings, was classified, preserved and forgotten.

we reiterated the facts – miss niblock is quite real, a quirk of fate, a miracle, a quaint survivor from another era, coping as best she can in these peculiar times. the calls continued – they had unearthed the shadowy assistant miss ward who had discovered me lurking in the depths of the museum. what was her story then? where did she fit into this suspicious tale?

finally we revealed an indisputable truth, a suitable resolution for the reader, and offered it up to our lois. but it seems journalism doesn’t like this interpretation, preferring to issue a more prosaic version where unfeasibly robust bluestockings dont roam the earth, encouraging female escape, learning and adventure, inspiring new generations to carry on in their sensibly clad footsteps.

to this i duly retort -

dear lois,

today might have been the start of a beautiful relationship. together we could have righted wrongs and saved the city. the world simply doesn’t need a maureen ward, a well meaning but unremarkable and unexciting clark kent. no, what times like these really need is a fabulous creation, a daring and indefatigable flaneuse, adventurer and intrepid explorer of worlds old and new, an irrepressible, fabulous miss euphemia pubert niblock…

snaps from tea and tour

2008-12-20T17:59:00.000Z

a walk through brunswick, heart of the city...

2008-12-19T14:21:00.000Z

…being a geographical and metaphorical ramble into the life and times of Miss Niblock, tracing her emergence from the bowels of the Manchester Museum to her new life in Apartment, unearthing along the way the forgotten histories and topographies that connect brunswick to the cultural and academic institutions dominating this invisible moated kingdom...

last thursday was the second part of the activities planned to mark the end of my tenure as writer in residence at Apartment, an informal at home with afternoon tea and tour of the gallery, followed by a shortish spot of twilight flaneurie from brunswick to the manchester museum, ending with a well earned hot chocolate and chat in the cafe. thank you to sarah, morag, gavin, julie, aaran, maureen and hilary for being patient and honoured guests and for making it happen. i had a lot of fun showing you around apartment and the neighbourhood of brunswick that its a part of, and i hope that you did too. impromptu conversation and encounter is at the heart of apartment's curatorial remit and once again this proved to be the most fruitful element of the afternoon, and something that is hard to recreate here. i shall be watching the new plans for the proposed MMU supercampus with great interest and some trepidation, as its effects ripple into adjoining neighbourhoods. let's keep each other updated!

for those of you who missed it and might wish to relive the experience from the cosiness of your screens, here are some images from the tea and tour and a transcript of the route we took. as we discovered on our walk, appearances can be deceptive, and there's more to our forgotten kingdom than some patchy looking houses on the way to piccadilly or oxford road. life in brunswick is thriving and full of surprises! just sorry it was so cold...

brunswick: here be dragons - an introduction:

Sometimes referred to as Chorlton on Medlock, it is the bottom end of the larger district of Ardwick, a distinct and physically separate neighbourhood nestled in between the Mancunian Way, Ardwick Green’s faded Georgian grandeur and Upper Brook St’s campus redevelopments, a veritable Bermuda Triangle. Historically infamous for its slum housing, it was also home to numerous theatres, cinemas and even an ice rink. (taken from the Ardwick Local History Project 2006) The Ardwick community and history is one bound up with the changing fortunes of the city, its ambitious plans in the post war era, namely the 1945 City of Manchester Plan, and the economic decline endemic across the country from the 1970’s onwards. Much of the original community has been dispersed during successive regeneration schemes with many local shops, factories and recreational facilities lost over the last 30 years and piecemeal improvements hacked on haphazardly ever since. Whilst other large scale regeneration schemes have been dominating the headlines for the last few years Ardwick has lagged behind with Brunswick becoming virtually forgotten in the latest vision of the city's future.

At the heart of Brunswick is the Mancunian Way – constructed in the early 60’s – proud winner of the concrete awards in 1968! This elevated superhighway was to be the first of a new inner city network that would solve the city’s traffic problems. Typically the money ran out and one of the slip roads literally ‘runs out’ in mid air, a frozen testament to a failed utopian moment. The University Precinct centre is another example of this attempt to create an elevated city in the sky resulting in a similar abrupt end at the RNCM, where the super street in the sky should have continued across Oxford Rd. Sadly the new extensions to the Music school have erased all evidence of this and to my mind we are a little the poorer for having this quirk, this imperfection removed.

Crucially these failed utopian experiments are at the very heart of this little kingdom. The Mancunian way, a brutalist ‘60’s concrete flyover fundamental to the flow of the city, its urban ebb and tide, is a incessant / protective presence in Brunswick life; built on the ruins of old Chorlton on Medlock, it destroyed the neighbourhood that was, and created the present incarnation – a hinterland and quiet backwater that’s home to a largely settled community, in the main the first residents of the brand new 70's estate of maisonettes and its towering trio of Silkin, Lockton, and Lamport Court, now a network of extended families, friends and neighbours spread around the streets, squares and maisonettes, from the flyover up to the Ardwick Apollo.

Like most social housing the council long ago deemed this little enclave ‘hard to let’ territory, and over the last decade it has welcomed a small community of writers, musicians and artists moved around by the regenerations of nearby Hulme and Moss Side, the ever diminishing Northern Quarter estate, as well as the rise of the over priced private sector. Brunswick has lately become something of a creative hot-spot bursting with lo-fly magazines, micro recording companies, djs, a rash of new music and a gaggle of artists from the nearby Art school fermenting and incubating in the towers tiny flats. All this plus the thriving skater community who gather most evenings and weekends under the Mancunian Way itself, seemingly oblivious to the roar of the traffic rocketing above and around them 24/7.

START:

Leave Lockton Close and cross over Grosvenor St down the little alleyway past the Salvation Army and Wai Yin elderly centre which on sunny afternoons is usually chock a block with people happily weeding and planting in their community garden, or simply sitting around in deck chairs taking tea and enjoying a chat.

Enter Gartside Gardens, filled with unexpected delights – first light sees the park busy with dads and sons starting the day with tai chi, alongside joggers, dog walkers and assorted martial artists as the day progresses; afternoon sees mums and toddlers dawdling in the mini playground before ambling home for tea; for nature lovers there's always the random sightings of the local flock of brightly plumed parrots to look forward to, as well as for the eagle eyed a fierce and imperious falcon swooping and circling for likely prey! evenings see the local basketball teams come out for practice and whilst night time can seem less salubrious, as is true of much of the city, the lucky few are often rewarded with a close encounter of the urban fox kind! Point out my favourite guerrilla garden at the edge of the park and the newish solar lamplights, which i haven’t yet seen elsewhere.

Walk along Kincardine Rd passing our own urban ruin, protracted demolition exposing the fragile skeleton of this former church and mosque, its shattered rose window still casting shards of multi-coloured light across the park. Opposite are newish halls of residence on the left, a continuation of the long relationship with the so-called knowledge quarter or university district. Manchester has the largest urban higher education precinct in Europe and Chorlton on Medlock is the see of the majority of the institutions, bounded by Manchester University, MMU and the former UMIST. The City of Manchester Plan of 1945 envisaged expanding the educational centre from the site of the University on Oxford Rd and integrating it into a new road system. Existing poor quality housing was to be cleared and academic, cultural and residential areas promoted. In the event clearances didn’t happen until the 60’s and 70’s and the idea of giving the site cohesion by closing off Oxford Rd never came off. A plan for a student village was commissioned in 1962 but by the next year that had already been superseded by another joint venture to create a development plan for a whole education precinct, incorporating the RNCM and the hospital. Produced in 1967 it proposed a campus on the scale of Berkeley in California and several buildings constructed in the next few years incorporated the vertical segregating of pedestrians and traffic by including linking upper walkways.

Carry on and cross Brunswick Street. Here we are walking deep into the social and radical heart of Manchester; a mere stones throw from the grandiose City Centre and its endless self publicising to the rear and the bustling university district to the right. Cross the road and straight ahead to the upper edge of the estate, exposing layer upon layer of regeneration, from the city of Manchester 1945 plan, through fort Ardwick of 70’s to new houses of 80’s and the current PPI scheme bordering Plymouth Grove at the top. Notice the echo of a church and its forlorn overgrown cemetery fronting Upper Brook St, a significant address for Manchester’s radical history and HQ for chartists, Peterloo Massacre, the Suffrage Movement: eg, the original committee for the promotion of women’s suffrage met in 1865 in Rev Stendhal’s home on Upper Brook St.

Pass the open ground that divides Brunswick to the edge of Plymouth Grove – the new Grove Village. The latest incarnation for the way forward for Brunswick, will it see similar transformation or will it be doomed to be forgotten or abandoned like so many schemes before it? Notice the boarded up Plymouth pub, a silent sentinel to the faded architectural history of the area and its lovely turret and clock tower. Let’s hope it survives…

Cross over to Elizabeth Gaskell House, open 1st Sunday of every month to the public, the home of Elizabeth Gaskell, born 29 September 1810 – 12 November 1865. Whilst she is best known for her biography of Charlotte Bronte, her novels including Cranford and North and South are the stuff of BBC drama, offering a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society, including the very poor. Her father was a Unitarian minister in Failsworth but resigned his orders on conscientious grounds and moved to London, leaving Elizabeth with an aunt in Cheshire. She married William Gaskell, a minister at Cross St chapel and set up home in Plymouth Grove in 1850, living there until her death 15 years later, becoming open house to assorted literary greats, religious dissenters and social reformers such as Dickens, Ruskin, Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Bronte and Charles Halle, who lived close by.

Walk to end of the street emerging at Upper Brook St, opposite the hospital and proceed to The Pankhurst Centre, Nelson Street, open Mon to Thursdays as a drop in and resource centre for women and as a historical centre. Men are welcome to the exhibition and library and on 1st Sunday Open Days. This was the home of Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Sylvia, Christabel and Adela who founded the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union) in Manchester in October 1903. At this time Manchester already had an established women’s suffrage movement, the Manchester Women’s Suffrage Committee, but the Pankhurst's group had more political and militant ambitions, causing regular disturbances in Manchester and disrupting speeches made by Winston Churchill and Sir Edward Grey. After the uproar this created, the campaign moved to London to concentrate on lobbying parliament directly, burning down churches and MPs homes, smashing all the windows in Oxford Street and even bombing Birmingham Station. By 1914 over 1,000 suffragettes were either in prison or in very poor health but the start of the First World War was a turning point with an unlikely truce between the government and movement. By 1918 women over 30 gained the right to vote in parliamentary elections, though it was to be another 10 years before women in Britain were granted complete equality with men and were allowed to vote at the age of 21.

Walk to the end of Nelson St, emerging at Oxford Rd, an unlikely umbilical chord to Brunswick, the fortunes of one always dependent on the city’s plans for the other. This is the flip side to Brunswick, a temple to orthodoxy, classification and taxonomy, stuffed to bursting with architectural landmarks, historic buildings, grand ideas and inventions past and present. It could be said that Oxford Rd marks the symbolic division between the histories of radical, social Manchester from civic, institutional Manchester. But in truth that's too simplistic a version - radicalism and conservatism exist hand in hand, and no-where is this more clearly demonstrated than Brunswick and the university. Like Brunswick, this is home to a transient community, its streets and buildings a palimpsest of civic and individual aspirations. It is a complicated place, at once the stern face of Victorian ambition and pride, home to the liberal and radicalising ideas of the city's history of social reform, and a symbolic container and producer of knowledge, culture and economic success, but it's a district which cannot be separated from the little known and forgotten sibling on the other side of the road.

For us, this is the home stretch, the path leading us from what might be seen as the dark heart of the cultural quarter to its dreaming spires of the Owens campus, a mix of grand Victorian quadrangle and 1960's planning, its holy grail that magnificent Waterhouse temple to learning, classification and order, the Manchester Museum. En route we pass a host of fascinating buildings including the grade 1 listed Holy Name Church, founded by Jesuits between 1869 and 1871 and designed by Joseph Aloysius Hanson, with its tower added in 1928, in memory of its famous rector, Father Bernard Vaughan. Kro bar nestles regally in one half of 325 Oxford Rd, a grade 11 listed regency survival from 1813, somewhat ironically occupying the former home of the Manchester Temperance Society, and still owned by them until 1997. Curiously it then became an Okasional Cafe, a typically 90's phenomena which squatted empty buildings and reopened them as makeshift, illegal cafes for tea and friendly subversion. The appeal and the concept was simple - take a disused space somewhere with a fair number of passers-by and open it to the public, offering them tea and anarchy. Where are they now? Answers welcome....

Continue along road to the Manchester museum, Brunswick just visible at the junction of the imposing Waterhouse buildings. The origins of the Manchester Museum lie in the collection of the Manchester manufacturer and collector John Leigh Philips (1761-1814). After his death, a small group of wealthy men banded together to buy his 'cabinet', and in 1821 they set up the Manchester Natural History Society, with grand premises on Peter St, where it continued to attract the bequests and collections of various cotton kings and the vast collections of the Manchester Geological Society in 1850. The museum was transferred in 1868 to Owens College, which later became the University of Manchester. The College asked famous architect Alfred Waterhouse to design a museum building, which was opened to the public in 1890. Waterhouse also designed Manchester's Town Hall and the Natural History Museum in London. Now known as the 'Manchester Museum', the collections were used by many people, from Owens College professors to schoolchildren. Many more objects were donated and the Museum was extended in 1912-1913 and again in 1927. These new buildings, designed by Waterhouse's son and grandson, displayed new ethnographic and Egyptology collections. They were funded largely by Jesse Haworth, a local textile merchant and keen Egyptologist. During the First World War, many local schools were used as military hospitals. In cooperation with the local education authorities, the Manchester Museum gave classes to the displaced school children. This system, which continued for 80 years, was one of the first of its kind in the country.

Today, the Museum is open virtually 365 days of the year, and is still updating and refurbishing – the latest plans include revamped Egyptian galleries and the Manchester Gallery, due to open next year, which aims to explore the connections between the people of Manchester, the city's history and the Museum's collection.

EP Niblock's links to the museum are by now well told, but suffice to say, the cafe is the perfect place to end our little walk through both her and the city's history.

END…

'Life of a Bluestocking' now showing at Apartment

2008-12-08T23:45:00.000Z

Preview ~ 6-9pm
Thursday December 4th 2008
Afternoon tea and guided tour of Brunswick ~ 3-5pm Thursday December 11th 2008
subsequently view by appointment

last thursday was a celebration of the splendid time and help i've had as writer in residence at apartment, the gallery - cum - art-space - cum ideas laboratory based in the heart of brunswick that has lately become my home and constant inspiration. it was attended by plenty of friends, fellow flaneurs and loitererers and a great time seemed to be had by all. thank you if you were able to make it and i hope it was a fun and festive evening for you.

'Life of a Bluestocking' consists of a detailed time-line of my 146 years, whilst a 'Reading Room' is dedicated to a series of texts from my diary. 'Scenes from a Life' accompanies the texts - a slideshow of snapshots from the journey of my life and times, a journey echoing our changing gaze from the grand to the vernacular.

visitors and groups are more than welcome to informal private views, by appointment. we'd love to see you and show you round with a cuppa and some cake...for more information go to apartment's blog, and to make an appointment to see the show please e-mail apartment or call on 07870 244 153.

below is a transcript of the text that my faithful assistant Maureen Ward wrote for the preview night. perhaps it will help bring something of the spirit of the show to you -

“The flaneur, though grounded in everyday life is an analytical form, a narrative device, an attitude towards knowledge and its social context. It is an image of movement through the social space of modernity. The flaneur is a multilayered palimpsest that allows us to move from real products of modernity to a critical appreciation of the state of modernity and its erosion into the past.”

Charles Jencks.

The flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure and knowledge. The flaneur has stalked the literature, art movements and philosophies of the 20th century, an intellectual chameleon, adapting perfectly to his times and surroundings, an archetype that to successive generations of artists, urbanists and writers is the metaphor for the century, the poster boy for modernity. More than anything he is inevitably a male figure, an intellectual voyeur always distanced from the crowd that he is so keen to observe.

However for cultural theorists such as Jencks the flaneur is essentially an analytical device or contrivance to explore the project of modernity itself and its legacy in the emerging 21st century. Euphemia P Niblock is a response to this contrivance - a playful embodiment of the history of the flaneur and the modernist gaze - whilst her Diary of a Bluestocking is an experiment in examining this critical discourse in the context of what might be termed the current post post-modern turn. Life of a Bluestocking charts Modernisms own journey - her disappearance at the height of the period (its optimism untested and universal narrative unchallenged) and re-appearance as the 21st century tracing a route through the intervening years, our own century.

Spinster and bluestocking, Niblock is also something of an outsider, an emancipated transgressor in polite Edwardian society, recalling the unsung role of the female intellectual, adventurer and agent in the birth of the modernist period; a mischievous subversion of the Victorian upper class male. On first inspection an unlikely anachronism and almost comic figure, Niblock is in reality an ongoing research project, a call to arms for the forgotten legacy of the polymath and amateur enthusiast in our prevailing predilection for the specialist and the professional; a more 'curious' gaze than the convention of the dandified flaneur.

Life of a Bluestocking is not only a celebration of Niblock’s tenure as writer in residence at Apartment but a gentle interrogation of the recent historic or ‘museological’ turn in the contemporary art scene and the ‘Mark Dion’ effect in archaeological and natural history museums across the globe, typified by the successful Alchemy programmes at the Manchester Museum, and an interesting response to the ubiquity of the ‘cabinet of curiosity’ in the Gallery.

The history of Apartment is one that knowingly straddles the peripheries and cut and thrust of knowledge production and critical discourse, a space that reflects an ongoing conversation on the intersections of art, urban and cultural studies on social relations and everyday life. It is surely no coincidence that Apartment has embraced the opportunity to comment on the prevailing trend of sending the artist into the museum by bringing the museologist into the art space, inviting a historian and archaeologist to explore and examine the role of the artist in the documenting of an ‘archaeology of now’, our defining quotidian moment.

there is also tea and a tour taking place this thursday, from 3 - 5pm - do come along!

places are limited so please book so we can make enough tea!

scenes from the show!

2008-12-07T00:42:00.000Z

Life of a Bluestocking

2008-12-04T10:06:00.000Z

you might have noticed that the good people of Apartment, my intellectual home and heart of the brunswick set, are holding an end of residency party and retrospective of sorts for me at the gallery tonight. it marks the end of a whirlwind year for me (bear in mind 'whirlwind' is quite possibly ever so slightly slower for a lady of my years than of yours, so do make allowances!) and i shall miss it and all the friends i have made along the way.

looking around apartment today as the cosy flat becomes transformed into a gallery, a gallery that is describing and deconstructing the story of my life and times, i am suddenly acutely aware of the enormity of the last 150 years, my small part in it, and its sometimes terrible legacy still being played out today. as i sift through the archives and snapshots of my youth and listen to the reaction of my young friends i see only a cartoon not a real figure, and as i gaze upon the my old correspondence and pictures of friends long departed i feel hardly solid, a mere shadow, a relic, a curiosity or novelty for amusement or entertainment. i have become a voyeur on my own life and am temporarily confused - am i still real? or a mere cypher for my times?

inevitably there are a hundred and one last minute things still to do and as hilary and paul bustle about making things happen, calm and confident in their world and their place in it, i am once again grateful to my gorgeous brunswick set for taking me to their busom as i try to make sense of my survival, my existence and the new role i might play in this strange new century

i do hope you can pop along for sherry and a chat tonight, or for afternoon tea next thursday...all welcome, see you there.

liverpool's long night of the biennial

2008-11-05T19:27:00.000Z

last thursday off i trotted to liverpool from manchester oxford rd armed with a hot chocolate to warm my hands and innards on what seemed the first proper winter day! after a drizzly start to the day, mercifully the evening transformed into a dry, sharp and decidedly cold night, perfect for a purposeful mooch about the city...

the long night of the biennial has been much advertised and to a latter day flaneuse or urban explorer promised a harmonious marriage of art in multiple for the promiscuous art goer with the nocturnal excitement of the city as backdrop. here's how it described itself:

WELCOME TO THE LIVERPOOL GALLERIES’ FIRST LONG NIGHT
The Long Night of the Biennial
Thursday 30 October 2008
Liverpool will be transformed as an unprecedented number of the city’s galleries will keep their doors open to the public, some until 11.00pm. A nocturnal feast of art, events, music, film and performance will give visitors a very special experience of the visual arts in Liverpool. Come straight from work, join in the debate, do the tours, wear the glowstick, eat & meet, watch it all happen, and enjoy Liverpool’s favourite and up and coming studios and galleries.

hard to resist such a seductive invitation - an abridged version of the entire art biennial! like a bag of revels without the coffee ones or the pick and mix counter at the cinema where you can simply leave out any sweeties not to your liking, guilt free...

the biennial this year is big, more so than i recall from other years, and though i've nipped across more than once i still havent seen even half the festival, made my way to all the venues that have something on offer, visited all the must-see exhibits - but that's the beauty of it, that's the nature of art as it encounters the city and the realm beyond the traditions of the gallery format, and the long night is yet another way of dipping into the events and activities, one offs, walks and talks, in something of the spirit of the derive.

of course not everyone finds this enjoyable - for a very different view of a biennial encounter, do read this account in the guardian recently.

in it alfred, our not so intrepid explorer, states in a curmudgeonly rage -

for the sake of brevity, and in the interest of saving shoe leather, guardian.co.uk/culture intends to make it round the entire exhibition in an afternoon: pointing out the highlights and issuing warnings about horrors to avoid. You don't want to spend hours trawling through Liverpool's industrial wilderness only to be rewarded with an origami orange. I did, and I can tell you, it wasn't worth it.

perhaps a meander on the long night instead would have helped. or made it worse...there seems to be no pleasing some people. the end of his trek through the city finds alfred 'headed back to Lime Street, finding it hard not to conclude that an arduous trek around the biggest Biennial so far had ended fruitless.'

but for me an occasion such as this is just the ticket for re-engaging with a city you might simply be overly familiar with, those regular favourite haunts limiting your exposure to new treats or experiences. despite our best intentions we do tend to fall into patterns of behaviour in life, which spacially can be seen in the personal maps or routes we each carve across the places and landscapes we come to know intimately.

my evening began like alfred's at lime st station, where i headed straight to the former abc cinema, the visitor hub for the biennial. previously i havent bothered to pop in, preferring to find my own way round the festival but, determined to move out of my comfort zone, i step inside and ask fearlessly about the hourly torch lit guided tours. a perky young thing tells me that the 7pm tour is fully booked and to take a later one. i pop my name on a list and venture onwards to the bluecoat for a hot drink and a nosy at the musical offerings promised.

the bluecoat is busy and the bright new atrium is stuffed full of musicians making a noise, whilst across the way the cafe is doing stirling work keeping us all fed and watered. i listen to the band whilst nursing my hot drink, read my long night brochure and wonder where to start - well i have started but you know what i mean! i decide to take a mini route up to the hope st sound and light project, taking in whatever i might accidentally encounter along the way and end with my 9pm tour, which should deposit me handily at lime st for the train ride home...

warmed up, i head towards open eye gallery where my own contribution is part of a series of one day only events, and im curious to see how my essay works in the context of the newspaper and what the other video, film and photographic projects will be. i'm rarely disappointed with open eye so i walk along with renewed vigour!

inside, the compact little gallery has been transformed from its current installation into a one-off series of videos and short films, whilst near the counter and bar (handily set up with snacks and drinks and welcome hot toddies) stands a tower of newspapers and a cosy chill out zone for taking it all in and resting awhile.

the blurb on open eye's webpage describes the work - the Memory Conspiracy is an installation exploring the relationships between stillness and movement, loops and progress, climax and repetition. Still Cinema 6: Light-speed travel - a series of short artists' films that explore physical movement and the recording of journeys. it also features Claude Lelouch's cult film C'etait un rendez-vous (1976), an eight-minute drive through Paris in the early morning at breakneck speeds (and inspiration for Nancy Davenport's Liverpool Biennial commission at Open Eye Gallery). and Future Visions of History -throughout the day a specially-commissioned free newspaper will be distributed on a series of mapped routes in the city. In it, artists and writers offer an alternative view of Liverpool’s past and its future - collect your copy on the night. Co-ordinated by Liverpool-based artists Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins.

my personal favourites include a gorgeous, moving 'still life' of a vase of flowers which slowly explodes leaving shards of glass, petals and pollen cascading to the floor in an endless moment of stillness, a patagonian journey viewed through the tiny porthole of a little boat, and the painting and repainting of the side of a battered block of flats by an optimist with a long handled paint brush...

reluctantly dragging myself away i nip over to fact for fiction@fact, a night of poets and performances in the cafe. the foyer is predictably crowded mainly it seems with young film makers for fact.tv, so i make my way up to the cathedrals for the launch of the hope st project, a light and sound installation, two lasers linking those giants of the liverpool landscape, one visibly cutting a beam of light into the night skies whilst the other transports a stream of voices and conversations high into the air. walking around hope st is always a highlight of any trip to liverpool - its a beautiful route, endlessly fascinating, and this project is a veritable ariadne's thread drawing you in and onwards into a symbolic journey across the hearts and hopes of the city.

after this dazzling diversion i stop at the everyman for some soup and spend an interesting half hour reading the future histories newspaper for some welcome critical centent, made sharper with the knowledge that the shadowy company who now seem to own the newly regenerated public realm of the city centre, have forbidden the distribution of all flyers and papers in their new kingdom. aah, the never ending democracy of urban renewal...

eager to take to the streets and join in public activities whilst they are still allowed in this newly privatised liverpool, i hurry on to my torch lit tour, suddenly aware that my evening is fast drawing to a close.

the tour starts at 9pm, taking in as many of the artworks along roscoe st as possible. beginning with the macabre yet comic annette messager's la derniere seance in the derelict auditorium of the old abc cinema, mesmeric and strangely fitting for a night fast filling up with halloween-goers, we forge onwards crocodile style up the road. a friendly camaraderie develops amongst us as we weave our way from one location to the next, sharing a sneaky giddiness that we are doing something rather foolish on such a freezing cold night instead of being clever grown ups at one of the grand previews currently in full swing across the city. after a stop at a forlorn paint shop for floor upon floor of gaudy artworks ending with a claustrophobically voyeuristic but beautifully shot video in tryptych, we peer nervously through a series of suggestive slits cut in the street hoardings at manfredi beninati’s empty apartment, a modern day marie celeste of aspirational urban life - a newly invented liverpool.

the final stop is the auditorium 'rockscape' created by atelier bow-wow, which seems more in its element that i've witnessed before, awash with sound from the dj set, its multi level seating transformed into a urban crow's nest for looking out over the noctural life of the city, lit up, floodlit and thronged with people. cold, tired and filled with the sights and sounds of liverpool embarking on a typical weekend, i wander back to lime st for the journey home...

my long night was acually not long enough - unlike alfred i had an enjoyable romp using the structure of the activities on offer to mooch around the city to my hearts content, observe and participate in some harmless group voyeurism and indulge in a little flaneurie.

undoubtedly the biennial, like all before it and those to come, is fraught with contradictions and difficulties. the year of culture and the festival is fast drawing to a close and with it will follow the usual post mortems and debates about what if anything can really be achieved by these cynical marketing ploys masquerading as culture...

but for one night only i indulged in suspending my disbelief to take pleasure in a city that i love and admire for its faded beauty, architectural grandeur and indomitable character. no matter what happens i'll return, hoping that despite the many changes still in the pipeline, the charm, gnarls and bunions of this lovely city survives to tell its everyday stories.

on language and owning ones voice...

2008-11-04T20:56:00.000Z

i am not a writer. i'm an antiquarian, an archaeologist with a classical background and a trowel in my back pocket who seems to have moved inadvertently into the realm of the contemporary and find myself trying to make sense of the civilisation of today with the tools of my archaic trade - the theories and methodologies of archaeological theory and practice. archaeologists work with the physical, material remains of human culture and where better to find this than in the modern landscape - the built environment and surroundings of my everyday life. the advantage of this present day archaeological enquiry is that the clues, the traces are in the main still extant and the protagonists, the producers and consumers, are all around us, are in fact us. its just a matter of deciphering this wealth of materiality, this profusion of stuff.

archaeologists deal with material and visual media as their primary source rather than the written word, usually the preserve of the historian, though obviously there are many instances of overlap. my instinct therefore has been to make straight for the source of the material culture i am so familiar with when excavating the past, to help answer tricky questions about the present. and so increasingly i find myself in the company of those crazy, free thinking mavericks and rebels (or so they and we who stand in galleries puzzling at their output like to pretend) the contemporary art practitioner. it is unknown territory and i often feel out of my depth and unqualified to be in their company, slightly apart from their caste and alien to their specialised metalanguage.

i am not an artist either then, rather an undercover agent or some sort of cultural voyeur, an intruder if you like. i'm operating on the peripheries of several disciplines and modus operandi, trying to find my own little path, create a dialogue with others who might want to respond to or collaborate in this undertaking, this uncovering or delving into the 'now', this labyrinth of the present. archaeologists and historians try to make sense of things in the material or written record by examining all the sources at their disposal and presenting their findings in reports, articles, exhibitions or weighty tomes destined for the library or an obscure shelf in waterstones. but for this new territory, a junction between the destinations of art, archaeology, even perhaps anthropology or cultural geography, i find myself with something of a dilemma....how to communicate with others in this emerging field or praxis in an accessible, immediate and relevant manner?

writing this diary then is an experiment, a tentative way of resolving this challenge in a new medium; a cusp, a gulf between recognised forms.

with it comes inevitable risks and miscalculations - not least that of ridicule, misunderstandings or rejection by any potential audience. after all, i am not a writer, artist or creator but am presuming to create a voice or methodology somewhere on the edge of these established discourses. just what is the purpose or aim of this journal, this diary of inanities and who on earth is it for? i ask myself this and similar questions on a daily basis...

my recent forays into the public eye, both at the manchester blog awards recently, an interloper in the company of real writers, and again in the liverpool biennial writing for an artwork in the form of a newspaper, an imposter in the real artworld, only heightened this uncertainty.

then along came stephen fry. by now something of a national treasure, he is a modernist in a cosy wrapping of anachronism. his addiction to technology is well known and this veritable encyclopaedia of arcane knowledge and voracious reader of wodehouse, waugh and wilde, almost subversive in his wilful unfashionableness, loves nothing more than to play with the latest gadgets and communicate to the world on his very own blog, the new adventures of mr stephen fry

todays posting provided solace just at the most opportune time, a guardian angel to the beleaguered wordsmith. of course i am in no way using the erudite mr fry to endorse my clumsy journey into the tangle of language, but his words were soothing and offered temporary respite. its a long article but worth a look if you have an interest in language and the debate about the evolution of english and how we find our own way with words, our own style or brand of communication. that we are inevitably in our 'parole', our particular brand or utterance of the vernacular, the sum total of our lives, our past, our journeys and interests. we are an archaeology, a stratigraphy of our lingual influences...

this excerpt resonated particularly for me and i offer it to you here to enjoy. perhaps consider me more kindly when happening across this little journal of a bluestocking;

I can attempt to disguise my language, I can dress it up into even more elaborate and grandiose orotundity, prolixity and self-consciousness, Will Self-consciousness you might say, or I could dress it down into something stripped. Stark. Bare. Simple. It would be hard to dress it down into something raggedly demotic without it being a patronising pastiche of a street argot to which I quite evidently have no access and in whose mazy slang avenues I would soon get lost, innit? In a sense I am typecast linguistically and although I can for fun try on all kinds of brogues and dialect clothes, my voice, my style, my language is as distinctive as my fingerprints.

My language (as the sum of my discourses, as linguistic strata that betray my history, as geology or archaeology betrays history) is my language and it is a piece of who I am, perhaps even the defining piece. In my case it is in part a classical ruin, inherited boulders of Tacitus and Cicero bleaching in the sun along with grass-overrun elements of Thucydides and Aeschylus … not because I was a classical scholar, but because I was taught by classical scholars and grew up on poets, dramatists and novelists who knew the classics as intimately as most people of my generation know the Beatles and the Stones. Without knowing it therefore, heroic Ciceronian clausulae and elaborate Tacitan litotes can always be found in the English of people like me. In part classical ruin, then, my language in particular has also mixed in it elements of my three Ws, my particular world wide web, my w.w.w, Wodehouse, Waugh and Wilde, three writers who greatly excited my imagination and stimulated my language glands like no other.

friendly faces

2008-11-03T20:11:00.000Z

today i opened my diary to find a couple of pleasant surprises!

a widget has appeared proclaiming that a kind soul has 'followed' my ramblings on these pages...how lovely!

of course they may simply have looked at it and moved away quickly in horror or boredom but some trace of them has survived to which the lovely people at blogger have alerted me, so i have added this new fangled device in an effort to keep up with the times and improvements in technology.

anyhoo the beautifully entitled is there anything wrong with plastic rosaries is the kind inquisitive soul in question - so hello out there bethan and thank you for reading even once...

peculiarly its not a blog i have come across so far so this is a splendid and exciting bonus. theres the piquancy of eavesdropping, the thrill of pseudo-voyeurism, the pretence of opening a private journal or manuscript. i now know that bethan loves jonathan creek, catholic iconography, lives in manchester and attends university whilst writing her blogs and for various publications. i already want to read more about her views and the manchester she inhabits and i suppose mentally i have added her to a growing coterie of marvellous females that i consider to be modern bluestockings and for whom i feel a cyber fondness....find out more about her at is there anything wrong with plastic rosaries.

sometimes i feel as if i come from another planet when trying to navigate my way across blogworld and facebook, meeting kindred spirits and gaining access to fresh ideas and new perspectives from the comfort of my laptop...and then i remember that its just that i come from another century!!!!

2008-11-03T19:16:00.000Z

oh yes, here's that second welcome surprise...

one of my last entries was a curious and poignant story of an urban wildscape, repository of literary bones and treasure trove of victorian social mores and architectural vernacular - the english cemetary in florence. it's a tale dear to my heart and should be for any urbanist, since an analysis of the city which ignores the disposal and status of the dead does so at its peril.

cemetaries are central to an understanding of the values and preoccupations of successive generations. in previous times and perhaps still in many countries apart from our own, the dead have always left an indelible trace in the living landscape as well as the metaphysical one. for me a visit to any new place includes a trip to the local cemetary. here the city reveals far more about itself, its past glories and aspirations, its darkest deeds, its ups and downs more fluently than a perusal of newspaper archives or grandiose civic totems.

but lately they have moved ever outwards into the hinterland of our social landscape, become peripheral, invisible almost. there is both pleasure and regret for an old archaeologist like myself in this current state of affairs. sadness that we live in a society busy denying its own mortality and that the everyday insights and beauty that can be afforded by a daily walk through the neighbourhood cemetary have been marginalised into a morbid or fanciful affectation. happiness that they offer seclusion and almost rural escapism for city dwellers like myself and a place to spend a sunny afternoon with a book and a picnic in blissful tranquility...

anyway back to my real point - the florentine cemetary in question faces desperate uncertainty despite the dedication of a small band of devotees, gardeners and scholars, led by the remarkable latterday bluestocking julia bolton holloway, whose blog and efforts i referred to about the dangers facing this little guerilla gardening project. imagine my delight to find a reply and update in my comments box by the lady herself! here is what she said -

Thanks from another bluestocking!But I'd rather you be in the library than in the cemetery! Am dreading the loculi to be installed in January. At least they are in the ground. And I've won the battle to keep them away from the centre aisle and all its wild irises, Florence's lilies.

the internet, it seems, once again reigns supreme and brings people a little closer together than would otherwise be possible. and once again i would ask you, dear reader, to visit her blogsite and perhaps add your name to its petition to secure the treasures of the little cemetery and the ongoing work to restore and reclaim it for the benefit of many.

and that reminds me - i really must nip to ardwick cemetery and do something about the terrible state its in...