manchester's magnificent South Bank

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!

the manchester kiosks - a note on Gilbert Scott.

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

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

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

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

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 problem with writing. episode 2

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!

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...

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!

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....

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…

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....

much ado about nothing

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

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.

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

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...

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

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

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....