Skyliner

A small article originally published in Manchester Art Gallery’s Dreams Without Frontiers publication, curated by Dave Haslam. The theme is Sixties Utopia and my article is about the Piccadilly Hotel (now the Mercure)

What does Piccadilly Hotel mean to you? To George Best it’s hiding in a cleaner’s cupboard from Matt Busby. To the ears of the city its cantilevered form straddles the headquarters of Piccadilly Radio. It’s a hotel built only for cars. It’s the future suspended in the 60s.

Piccadilly Hotel (to eventually become the Mercure) has no ground floor pedestrian entrance - because this is the future and why walk when you have a car. A vast William Mitchell mural made of broken pianos spans four whole floors of the stairwell because art and architecture go hand-in-hand in the future.

One face of the decade’s utopia is Simon Dee who filmed the end credits of his talk show Dee Time on the concrete car ramp of the hotel. In his convertible Jaguar, with a model on his arm, Dee spins down the concentrically-looping concrete ramp with the insouciance of a man with no troubles. And in the 60s he had none. Dee’s 60s were his dreams; no frontiers. From his beginnings in pirate radio his career spiralled ever onwards and his lifestyle became one of a playboy. His 60s are forever captured in a bell jar of parody by way of the film Austin Powers, based on Dee himself.

And as he hits the road and waves goodbye to the crowd at the foot of the ramp, upstairs Albert Finney (Charlie Bubbles, 1967) lays supine on a bed, outside Julie Christie strolls across the concrete mega-structure (Billy Liar, 1963), and everybody else? They turn a blind eye to the fact that the ceiling collapsed twice during the opening ceremony because this place, this hotel, is promised to be the greatest hotel in all of Europe.

Manchester Art Gallery and Dave Haslam present Dreams Without Frontiers; a publication to accompany the current exhibition.

Skyliner contributed an article under the themes Sixties Utopia, focussing on Piccadilly Hotel. There are contributions from a range of wonderful people including Maureen Ward, Julie Campbell, Dan Russell, and Greg Thorpe. Greg is responsible for one of my favourite regular columns: Manchester in Residents, over on his blog Manhattanchester.

Apr 05

Mar 22

In 2012 the CIS tower celebrated it’s 50th year (as well as it being the international year of the Co-Op) and this year the new headquarters at Angel Place will open. In tribute and celebration Skyliner presents an exclusive look at the 1962 commemorative brochure.

Thank you to S.L. Scott for the beautiful artwork in the image above and to the Co-Operative for allowing reproduction of the brochure.

“The Directors of the C.I.S have pleasure in enclosing Commemorative Booklet of that great occasion on 22nd October, 1962, when H.R.H. The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, K.G., K.T., so graciously opened the new building in the presence of a large number of guests from Home and Overseas.

It is hoped much pleasure will be derived from the contents of this souvenir booklet and that the typescript of what was said on that notable occasion will recall many happy memories.”

“New Head Office premises of the Co-operative Insurance Society Ltd, Miller Street, Manchester, England”

“To the applause of a large crowd that had gathered in Miller Street, Prince Philip, accompanied by Rt. Hon. The Earl of Derby, M.C., Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire, walks to entrance where he was greeted by Messrs. Wild and Dinnage, who accompanied him on his tour of the building.”

Feb 21

City Tower

It’s hard to place City Tower, formerly Sunley Tower, in the brutalist pigeonhole these days. It’s a white beacon of modernism guiding you across China Town, a siren of the 60s beckoning you towards it from its podium behind the classical architecture of King Street. It’s the third tallest building in the city, and remains the highest commercial office space.

And set within its facade is a concrete tribute to the scientific achievements of the city, because look closely - those gable walls are a giant circuit board.

Feb 16

Streetview - Road Sign Language

My latest article for the wonderful Now Then - the layout and naming convention of streets. Featuring a housing estate in Chorlton and a series of American grid-style streets in Trafford Park…

There’s a long-vacated wine shop in Chorlton, the exterior of which is flanked by two huge bay windows and the blue frames are that kind of salt-eroded, windswept pastel found only on British waterfronts and in polaroids. Traversing the suburban landscape that surrounds the wine shop the houses begin to take on the same seaside form, it’s subtle and difficult to pinpoint the exact similarities but they’re definitely there and that’s when you notice the street signs: Fairhaven, St Annes, Lytham, Cleveleys, and it’s quite serendipitous but there’s long winding road that wraps around this estate and it goes by the name of Sandy Lane - a tarmac beach. Were these houses designed to mirror the architecture of our seaside resorts or have the streets, like dogs that resemble their owners, taken on the characteristics of the towns they’re named after?

Le Corbusier famously outlined his plans for a new Paris in his manifesto The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning. The streets that had grown from the paths of least resistance, those traced by meandering pack-donkeys during medieval times, were not efficient for modern man. To Le Corbusier the city was a mechanism and neither character nor exploration were necessary components of his well-oiled machine. The streets in his vision were laid out in meticulous order, exact geometry that suited and served the way of man, and not the way of the donkey. Manchester, like much of the UK, is part man and a whole lot of donkey. But not entirely. Some of the order found within the grid layout of new transatlantic cities, their blocks and their numerical naming convention, made it to Manchester.

The water tower of the Westinghouse factory, Trafford Village. Image care of Metropolitan Vickers

In 1886 American owned Westinghouse Electrical Company built besides the Bridgewater Canal on what had been meadows up until the completion of the Manchester Ship Canal. Westinghouse pulled out all the stops to have his enormous factory built in record time along with a model village for his workers. He based his Trafford Park Village on the regimented blocks of America and provided four avenues and twelve streets of housing, small businesses and community centres. Today the streets have been altered somewhat but this grid layout still exists to some degree

Feb 14

The Demolition of BBC’s New Broadcasting House

New Broadcasting House on Oxford Road was the location of the BBC headquarters for the North-West of England from inauguration on 18 June 1976 until it was demolished during the final months of 2012. Today a small part of the entrance wall still remains, and the road it once straddled is lined with bollards bearing the BBC logo in place of the standard Manchester bee.

Feb 08

The Midland Hotel’s secret gallery

The art galleries of a city are larger in number than you first perceive if you look not only to the official institutions but to the galleries that are formed in the corridors of hotels and the stairwells of office blocks.

One particularly exhaustive collection in the city is that of The Midland Hotel’s Wyverne Restaurant. Here in the Wyverne (every Midland hotel has a Wyverne restaurant) is the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge.

Feb 06

This is the first time I’ve curated a show and I’m overwhelmed by the press coverage and interest from the public. Overwhelmed but overly nervous, so do come and say hello and share the fun of the evening with me.

If you want to buy a print but didn’t get chance during your visit my shop or if what you like isn’t on there then email: theskyliner.org@gmail.com

Streetview made the BBC! How exciting. You can take a look at some of the artworks on their ‘In Pictures’ feature here.

Thank you for the support of Ubiquitous who have sponsored the print of 250 event brochures, Sam Swaffield for designing them, Tunnock’s for driving all the way from Scotland with Burn’s Night biscuits for the event, James Travis and Mat Dean of Dots and Loops for giving us music on the evening, 2022nq for hosting the exhibition, Dan Zomack for being the inspiration and face of the event, and all the wonderful friends and artists involved.

The show runs until February 18th, and stay tuned for two frankly ludicrous ideas I have for a further two shows in the coming year.

Dec 30

Wondrous Place very kindly asked a few of this year’s curators back for a quick Christmas special. Each of us had a creative challenge; mine was “You’re a fugitive in your home city - you’ve got 20 minutes to hide. Where do you go…?”

I’m sure that among the collection of complicated minds that are my fellow Wondrous Place curators, I’m not alone when I confess that large chunks of my time are taken up by re-imagining my life as a story. My train of thought that was brought into the world with the sole purpose of deciding which crisps to buy eventually becomes a detective story – it takes only a minute or two for my thoughts to wind up here in my internal mystery, this imaginary film that my life becomes functions like a screensaver for my brain when its attention to the mundane has timed out.

Sometimes detective, other times fugitive, the scenario is still the same but what of the setting? Where in Manchester does my story pan out? Is it in the hidden rooms of an Oxford Road hotel where I chase my leads, or is it along the tow paths of the Rochdale Canal where it becomes lonely and its most ugly that I encounter my assailant?

Today I am a fugitive and I have twenty minutes to find a hide out, and I already know where to go. I start out on the canal, in those parts of it between the cafe culture of Canal Street and the yuppy culture of Castlefield; the parts where only three things decide to settle – crisp packets, used condoms and the burly blue heron that sits one-legged on the corner of Deansgate, the gatekeeper of the detritus. There’s nowhere to hide here.

Where I go is a limbo; a wasteland; an island. My island can be reached within minutes from here.

I leave the canal, cross a small car park and head for the hole in the iron fence. What surrounds me is a strip of railway arches. Some retain a sort of privacy with the remnants of old facades, and in the gloom of these particular arches I am cold to the bone, but the pathway linking each new geometric arc of brick and vanquished industry is lined with thick grass – greener than anywhere else in the city, a miniature meadowland. And finding the guts to walk further into the belly of the railway line, I find myself in brightly decorated caverns whose curved ceilings are pierced with angular reveals of sunlight.

There’s a unicorn down here, no, really. It’s bright pink, and if he’s gone unnoticed for so long then I’m sure that I will too. Beyond him, his graffitied form, there’s a curtain of blue and green – sky and grass, a gateway to the water and to an open stretch of land that is the island itself.

A pathway, broken up by weeds looking like the destroyed yellow brick road, leads along the water away from the city. I know where it leads to, but it’s more than my life’s worth to tell you…

You can also read my answer over on their site, along with my previous posts and those of all the other curators of the project - it’s well worth a browse! Remember to look out for some more familiar names coming up as curators in the new year.

Dec 11

Dec 07

Minut Men

The totems of Salford University’s Allerton Building, and other works by William Mitchell.

Whilst on The Crescent in Salford, continue towards Salford University’s Allerton Building and there you will find the striking Minut Men by William Mitchell.

Perhaps the first critique of this concrete trio was by Prince Philip, in 1967 when he opened what was then the Technical College, and exclaimed ‘What the hell is that?”.

Mancograph

I suspect that many of Skyliner’s readers will also be familiar with the architectural sage that is Eddy Rhead. Eddy is on my dream line-up in my imaginary quiz team, admittedly the quiz that we’re playing is Strike It Lucky but my imagination is too full up with concrete and Portland stone to make room for anything more taxing.

Eddy’s latest venture is the beautiful Mancograph, we previously gave away a print of Mancograph V1 and now the second version is available to buy - but it’s of very limited stock so grab one quickly.

Nov 30

Nov 18

The Streetview exhibition dates are set, and launch night is going to be the first big party of 2013. Come and join us.