Skyliner

A guide to the venues of Sounds From the Other City 2012,...

Thu, 10 May 2012 11:18:00 +0100

A guide to the venues of Sounds From the Other City 2012, featuring tales from a Chapel Street crypt, a time capsule, the smallest listed building in Salford, William Mitchell’s Minut Men and a very special wall!

Photography by Jennifer Brookes

Please click the image to read the brochure in full screen

Help with The Lost City Memories Project

Tue, 08 May 2012 15:29:00 +0100

I have a small request of you, my lovely readers, and that’s to help me spread the word about a project.

It’s all explained in the link but basically I’m trying to raise some funds so that I can try to turn my site, associated projects and tours into something more than it is. Something of a higher quality, more frequent, with more purpose, the chance to expand nationally and become a database of memories we could otherwise lose, and maybe to pay the occasional bus fare along the way too.

I already hit my initial target which is really like a deposit, you have to set a reasonable target because if you don’t hit the full amount you get a big fat zero, so now I need as much help as I can get to help me raise more. Click here and read my plan and if you like the idea then perhaps share the link, or even donate a £1. There are rewards for donations too!

Any help is hugely appreciated.

Northern Quarter Stories

Wed, 02 May 2012 09:03:00 +0100

The wonderful Documentally came to visit to help out with the Northern Quarter Stories project.

The project is about collecting peoples stories of the area through a variety of ways, many of which includes pub interviews, like mine. There are lovely beer mats distributed around the area with details of the project and how to contribute and a group of reporters will be out on the streets over the coming weeks.

He interviewed me at The Castle yesterday and you can listen to it below.

By a nicely-timed coincidence Mark Kennedy, the man who made the mural I mention during this, wandered into the pub and agreed to be interviewed too. Do look out for that on the audioboo channel that has been set up for the project here

Whilst the point of the project is to share stories from the area then I thought this is a nice opportunity for me to write about my most recent Northern Quarter story.

A few days ago whilst gazing at rooftops and sneaking around buildings I perhaps shouldn’t be in, I found some treasure. In fact that particular week had been one of many treasures - recipient to a box of books to hand out as part of World Book Night, a day of locating William Mitchell murals, reading the letters which adorn the walls of The Midland hotel and finding my new favourite view of the city’s skyline. But this was different, this was actual treasure, tangible stuff that I could take home.

I was sent this photo a few weeks back with no further explanation:

“This is where I’m hiding your present”

I didn’t think there would be anything there, I thought it was maybe a promo for an art project perhaps. I thought about it several times over the coming days but didn’t make it into town for a while, nor remember to check for the graffiti when I was there. Last week, after some exploring around the CIS Tower and NOMA, I decided to run to Shudehill to catch the next tram home. It was perfect timing - one pulled in just as I got there and I pressed the door for it to open and waited a few seconds. I pressed again and it still didn’t open, I looked up and all the other doors had opened just fine but as I ran to the next door realising mine was jammed the trill beeps sounded signalling they were about to close and the tram pulled away before I could jump on.

Those of you who know me will know that I live in something of a dream world so anything like this, rather than irking me, just gets my hopes up for some serendipitous moment that I would have missed had I made the tram.

I had some books left from World Book Night and thought I’d use my time to leave the last of them around Shudehill and the Northern Quarter. As I handed them out I found myself around the back of Band on the Wall, and I remembered this photo I’d been sent. I found the graffiti and looked for where the x had marked the spot and sure enough, even a week or two later, there was still something up there. A CD case.

I couldn’t reach from where I was stood but propped against the hoarding was a pallet that I managed to fashion into some terrifying kind of ladder. I grabbed the case and inside was a beautiful necklace!
There was also a note, and it read:

“the world needs more interesting, interested people”

I wear my treasure everyday; don’t I have some lovely readers?

Boardman's Entry, and other alleyways

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 18:21:00 +0100

For a short stretch of the city centre it’s possible to bypass the crowds and the traffic and to walk across several pedestrian areas and finally down a series of alleyways. In fact you can walk almost traffic-free from Victoria station all the way to Lloyd Street, and in doing so you might spot some rather unusual artwork.

To walk this route you begin at Cathedral Gardens, down Cathedral Street and New Cathedral Street then cut through St Ann’s Square. At the heart of St Ann’s Square stands the only surviving 18th century church in the city (celebrating 300 years in 2012), the tower of which is said to mark the geographical centre of the old city and the surveyor’s benchmark can be seen carved into the stone by the tower door.

The connecting road from the church to Deansgate was once known as Toll Lane as this is where the lord of the manor would collect tolls for the animals on their way to fair after they had gathered here and been pelted with acorns by the locals!

From the back of the church the route through the city continues in a relatively straight line from here. First you cut through St Ann’s Passage, built as a temporary home for the Corn Exchange and then you meet with King Street. In 1976 King Street became the first city centre street to be pedestrianised and it’s here that you find yourself opposite Boardman’s Entry.

This entryway and the subsequent two - Dalton Entry and Mulberry Passage, which straddle John Dalton Street, are adorned with public art. Boardman’s Entry is a short passage lined overhead with sculptural metal umbrellas - this, although not an obvious tribute, is a nod to John Dalton. Although Dalton, ‘the father of science’, is best known for devising the atomic theory he also kept daily weather records of Manchester for fifty years. Perhaps the art is in tribute to these meteorological records, or perhaps it’s down to him never being without an umbrella. According to an article in The Leisure Hour by Miller, Macaulay and Stevens, at fifteen years old Dalton bought an umbrella from a shop in his hometown of Cockermouth and at that moment saw this as a symbol of his “becoming a gentleman”.

If you want to see the man himself there’s statue in the Town Hall entrance. Possibly the only scientist to have a statue made in their own lifetime; Dalton sat for the statue (carved by Francis Chantrey) and was the most internationally famous Mancunian at the time. Moved from its original home of the Manchester Institution, it now sits opposite a statue of his most famous pupil; John Prescott Joule.

A much larger version of this statue was made as further tribute to Dalton and sat in Piccadilly Gardens on the site of the infirmary, but this was moved in the 1960s to the John Dalton College building on Oxford Road.

John Dalton was colour blind, and had a theory that the fluid in the eyes was responsible for the condition. He left his eyes to science so that this theory could be explored. I hear from people claiming to have seen them that the eyes are kept at MOSI until this day.

Dalton was our city’s first celebrated man and one who transformed Manchester into the city of science it is to this day.

photo by Sam Newiss

Continuing on from Boardman’s Entry is Dalton Entry and Mulberry Passage which both feature more traditional tributes to the scientist with chemical apparatus in the decorative roundels and though not obvious at first, if you walk towards Dalton Entry here is where you’ll find a plaque explaining the works.

“The designs for these alleys are inspired by the work of the famous Manchester scientist John Dalton (1766-1844)

Commissioned by Manchester City Council 1988.

Artist Partnership Art Ltd.

Partnership: T Eaton J Waygood J Parkinson

Bronzes: A Buckingham

Metalwork: M Dennis”

From here you can cut across Brazennose Street through another passage that brings you out on Lloyd Street. You can actually continue on a few streets further in this manner by cutting through a series of pubs and car parks.

photo by Mike Rampton

If you retraced your steps back towards St Ann’s Square there’s one more passageway that’s full of history and worth a detour over Cross Street to discover. That’s Back Pool Street. This meandering alley leads off Cross Street to Chapel Walks (Sam’s Chop House is on the corner of these) and to walk through it feels like going back in time. The winding nature of the passageway is a legacy of Manchester’s agricultural past; apparently it traces the old boundaries of Plungeon Meadow (now Cross Street Chapel) and for some reason has remained unaltered in its route since at least the 16th century. Radcliffe Hall which once stood here was the location of Manchester’s original ducking stool

“…for the punyshment of lewde women and scoldes…”

The stool fell into disuse and in 1619 was relocated to Piccadilly Gardens.

The rambling route of this back alley is such that it really does take you back in time to the days before town planners, and to the way of the pack-donkey. It’s also said to be frequented by the devil - so watch out for hoof prints!

(Radcliffe Hall pictured in a 1650 map of Manchester. Acresfield is the area of Cross Street and St Anns Square)

Hello Hayley, what happened to the piece you were writing about the post office murals? I've been waiting ages for that to pop up! :)

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 12:51:20 +0100

Blimey, tell me about it! I’m still researching it!

I’ve had trouble getting a public appeal published in the paper and still trying. There’s someone I’m waiting to hear back from about one element of it and I might give the papers one more try but if I’ve not had any luck in the next month I’ll write about what I know - which I’m 99% is the correct answer. I just don’t like having the 1% doubt - I want to be sure I have the facts.

Two more articles to come this week though in the meantime…

Dodge Hill

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 17:41:00 +0100

with photos by Andrew Brooks

These days a modern urban environment often makes it difficult to realise the origins of a town, of how it was formed, why its location was vital to its survival or even to properly step back and see the lie of the land. Stockport thrived because of the standstone cliffs it was formed around and there’s plenty of evidence of this all around you to this day.

At one particular location on the edge of town there’s a sandstone cliff face and if you’d peered through the trees here until very recently you’d have also noticed there was once a door.

That was until now - the doorway has been sealed up and what lies behind it is documented here for the very last time. This is Dodge Hill.

For thousands of years Stockport has made use of the soft rock faces by inhabiting caves and tunnels. The sandstone here has been deposited over millions of years and is the legacy of ancient riverbeds and desert plains.

But there’s a more recent history to discover than that because behind the door at Dodge Hill is a tunnel system dating from World War II.

Stockport lay on one of two main assault routes into Manchester so was at constant risk and this particular location is one of five war shelters in the area that were formed as part of nationally coordinated scheme of Air Raid Precautions.

There’s rumoured to be a sixth shelter although no one has ever located this and none of the sites are physically connected.

The shelters have been regularly accessed over the years, after the war these visits have mostly been by members of the public whose curious nature got the better of them. To keep the public out of danger the council have instructed these particular shelters be sealed and prior to doing so we took a trip inside with Urban Search and Rescue, and with Stockport’s authority on tunnels and shelters, Phil Catling from Hatworks.

Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) are part of Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service and they come prepared on their visit with Echo, the fire service labrador and his handler Mike Dewar.

Echo, equipped in his protective boots and bells, is sent into the shelters to run the full length prior to the rest of the team entering. Today his purpose is locate any one who might be in the shelters already, either in trouble themselves or who could pose a danger to others.

Within ten minutes Echo has covered every part of the shelter system, during which time we learned of his heroics whilst on duty. Echo has been part of USAR for around five years now and was trained intensively for two years, during which time he’s travelled as part of UK International Search and Rescue to Pakistan, India and Haiti.

After spending 10 days in Haiti, carrying out over 40 searches, saving a young girl buried beneath a school, and surviving himself through heat exhaustion and 24 hours on a drip, Echo was named Animal of the Year.

Day to day the USAR team specialise in working in confined spaces, at safe heights and can work with technology to move and stabilise heavy masses. The team respond to any major unstable or collapsed structure as part of a national response but they also operate collaboratively with 12 other teams to form the UK International Search and Rescue.

Many of the members of USAR have been out on overseas deployments as part of the international team they form and are expected when they do so to be at their location within 24 hours, and to be totally self sufficient for up to 10 days if required.

Inside the tunnels there’s enough room to comfortably stand, the passages are around seven feet in height and width.

Dodge Hill is the smallest of the deep level shelters in the area with a capacity for around 2,000 people and it sits directly above the Tivot Dale Rail tunnel.

The majority of the tunnels are lined with three tier bunk beds, some of which are galvanized and still look in good condition whereas a handful of others which pre-date the galvanization technology now sit rusting severely. The bunks are connected one to the other, head to toe, for entire lengths of the passageways and are nailed and cemented into the ground.

Where a toilet block approaches the double lined passages become less dense and make way to just one row of bunks, making beds by the bucket toilets a desirable, spacious location to spend the night.

Throughout the shelter there are inconsistencies in the sandstone, the tool marks are clearly visible all over the shelters and there are naturally occuring areas of compression or water faults. The sandstone easily crumbles to the touch and where there are areas that water seeps through the soft ground beneath is worn down and forms small holes.

Some areas of the tunnels are quite black and though this is not entirely explained it’s probable these are the stains from old smoking areas.

Though it’s all very basic in here you can see the remnants of electrical wiring where lighting was installed. A couple of the toilet blocks remain intact and are still fitted with the chemical toilets.

Here and there throughout the system you can spot evidence of wardens posts, tool stores and wooden benches and with a little imagination can picture this an almost civil place to rest.

In order to defend themselves against the fear of gas attack, certain points approaching the entrances were fitted with gas curtains. As can be seen when looking at the non-galvanized bunk beds, wars were often fought using a previous war’s technology and these weighted curtains would have provided little more than reassurance. The curtains don’t survive but the frames upon which they were hung can still be found.

Some simple technologies are as effective now as they’ve always been. The nature of the structure means that the shelters form a natural air conditioning unit. Raised entrances suck in the cool, fresh air down into the main shelter area whilst the warm air that rises back upwards and outwards keeps a constant flow and temperature throughout the site. As such the air quality in here is remarkably good.

In total the combined shelters of Stockport could hold around 9,300 people.

Initially there was much indecision over the creation of these deep shelters, politically and fiscally the existence of such a large network sparked debate. It was argued that “no power on earth can save us from attack from the air” so the shelters would serve little use and instead we should concentrate our efforts on peace making. There were several meetings over the course of a few years that ended in approval, then again denial, and so it continued until it was realised that the old terraces of the area could not support their own Anderson shelters.

The sandstone is very soft and easy to carve into so the tunnels were completed remarkably quickly, in around four months, by a team of men using pneumatic drills.

There’s evidence all around of the visitors to the shelters since the war ended especially of the great force exerted in trying to gain access.

There are pneumatic drill attempts to access bricked off areas - the notion that a wall indicates some great secret store room or pathway to somewhere unknown when in fact these walls lead to nowhere at all. Someone has even taken it upon themselves to totally demolish one of the brick toilet blocks (pictured above).

Discarded tealights, plastic sheets, glowsticks, trails of red, white and blue threads, all of these are reminders of the homeless who’ve slept in here, explorers who’ve mapped their way around, and others who have been in the shelters to drink, graffiti and generally leave their mark.

Dodge Hill has been sealed off previously, several times, but a flooded drain above ground resulted in the hole through which we entered today.

After our visit a team of contractors sealed over this last remaining point of access.

You can visit Stockport Air Raid Shelters to experience for yourself similar conditions and learn more about their history.

Andrew Brooks is a photographer, a digital artist and a film maker living in Manchester, his previous works include the Secret Cities exhibitions with Curated Place Please visit his site to see these images and more, in high resolution and in all their glory - exactly as they should be viewed.

Andrew and I visited the site with Urban Search and Rescue and, of course, Echo!

The House on Ship Canal House

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 22:58:00 +0000

There are two things of interest on this aerial shot of Ship Canal House on King Street. The first is one you can see quite clearly from street level if you crook your neck enough, and it’s a rather grand sculpture of Neptune.

Neptune, being the god of water and sea, is clearly a symbolic choice for the premises but it’s also a practical one. Neptune’s three-pronged fork that he holds domineeringly above the street below is a rather fanciful disguise for the building’s lightning conductor. If lightning ever strikes the building it should hit the rod and be conducted to the ground through a wire rather than passing through the interior and risking fire.

The figure and sea-horses that surround it was said to be ‘the finest group of sculpture to be seen in Manchester’ and was designed by H R Bond with work carried out by Earp, Hobbs and Miller

Regardless of the craftmanship behind this lovely sculpture, it’s not actually Neptune that interests me, rather it’s what’s set back from the main street, just above the upper levels and visible on the aerial shot - there once was a little house.

In 1940 it was the home of the building’s resident caretaker and his wife. The caretaker was an ex-Indian army veteran and lived in five-roomed abode high above all of Manchester. Sadly, there’s no archived information on the caretaker and his wife, not even so far as their names but you can see a short video of the couple living ‘in perfect quiet above the mists of Cottonopolis’ on the British Pathe site.

Commissioned by the Manchester Ship Canal company to serve as their headquarters, Ship Canal House on King Street was finished in 1926 after a construction period of two years.

The canal was a booming business by this time with the largest amount of company shareholders ever known (39,000) and, in 1886, the largest cheque ever signed was for the company’s purchase of navigational rights. Manchester had become one of the busiest ports in the UK, despite being 35 miles inland and it’s success was possible due to the ship canal linking the city with the docks at Liverpool. Liverpool however, thought the project was a waste of resources and of money and named the canal ‘The Big Ditch’. The site remained the premises of The Manchester Ship Canal Company until 1969 when it was sold.

The architect is Harry S Fairhurst, whose buildings are noteable for their elegant designs. Fairhurst based the design of the building on rejected plans he had seen by Charles Holden, a local architect who designed many of the London Underground stations, for the Board of Trade building and Ship Canal House, when it opened, was one of the tallest office buildings in the country. Due to an Act of Parliament that controlled the height of buildings it meant that the top floors had to be set back from street level by around 15 feet. The best image to illustrate this can be viewed here

Eventually, Harry S Fairhurst passed the business to his son Harry S Fairhurst, who continued to be as prolific as his father but built modernist designs using red brick walls and copper roofs and he worked with artist Anthony Holloway to produce modernist icons such as the Holloway Sculpture Wall at UMIST, which like Neptune’s lightning rod, also has a practical use as a ‘sound-buffer’ for the Engineering Pilot Plant building.

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Previous: Beneath Trafford Town Hall

Something exciting this May comes… Stay tuned for an...

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:46:00 +0000

Something exciting this May comes…

Stay tuned for an alternative guide to this year’s Sounds From the Other City

Beneath Trafford Town Hall

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:36:00 +0000

with photos by Andrew Brooks

If you’d ever looked closely enough at the shrubbery around Talbot Road you may just have uncovered an emergency entrance to Trafford Town Hall’s cold war bunker.

The entrance, pictured above, led to a series of rooms and passageways with concrete walls and steel doors but is now just an open space devoid of any fixtures or fittings and, at the time of our visit, flooded.

In November 1980, Manchester City council declared the city a nuclear free zone, and when this bunker was proposed a few years later, despite Trafford itself not being part of the zone, the anti-war feeling amongst the community led to opposition from the residents of Trafford borough.

When it was announced in October 1982 that the bunker, “an underground protected communications emergency centre”, would be going ahead at a cost of £2.5m it took only two weeks for a petition signed by 10,000 Trafford residents to be passed to the council requesting to end construction. The petition stated:

We [also] request that the construction work is halted on the nuclear shelter being built under the new Town Hall office block. We say that this shelter is a waste of public money and a futile exercise which perpetuates the idea that a nuclear war is avoidable and survivable.

Despite protests the bunker was thought essential as part of our civil defence against attack, and construction went ahead.

The 10,000 ft sq bunker provided shelter and a means to maintain communication links in the event of emergency. Little information is held about the location but it was said to have housed a morgue.

Trafford’s bunker, until now, still served its purpose as an emergency communication site and day-to-day it had been used for archiving as well as a CCTV centre.

Today, however, the 1980s extension that stood above this site has been demolished and progress is being made on a new extension that aims to save long term costs and be more sympathetic in design to the historical town hall.

The underground bunker is now cleared and is nothing more than a pitch-black, flooded carvern that, with the echoing of the heavy machinery directly above ground, has a haunting post-apocalyptic feel to it.

Len Grant guiding us through the bunker

Construction of the Town Hall began 21st August 1931 and it was designed by Bradshaw, Gass & Hope; specialists in municipal buildings who had an array of other town halls in their catalogue, as well as the extension of the Royal Exchange in Manchester. The site actually began life as Stretford Town Hall but the formation of Trafford Metropolitan Borough in 1974 called for the renaming.

Inside there’s a central staircase flanked either side by bronze statues of Electra, the symbol for controlled electricity, and Niord, the God of wind and sea – it’s likely that these figures are representative of the trade and enterprise so vital to the region.

Trafford Town Hall was granted Grade II listing in 2007 as an example of municipal interwar architecture.

during the initial stages of clearance, photo by Len Grant

The bunker isn’t the only association with war that this area has, Trafford Park, the world’s first planned industrial estate (and largest in Europe), served as a major supplier of military equipment and produced engines for the Lancaster and Spitfire and Stretford itself was the birthplace to John Holker; one of the world’s first industrial espionage agents, whose role it was to entice British artisans to export their labour and machinery to France.

Just a little further up from the Town Hall you’ll come to Great Stone Road. The road gets its name from a large glacial stone, unremarkable in appearance but Grade II listed, and is likely to have been the base of a cross shaft. There’s a widespread belief that during the Manchester plagues of the 14th century it also served as a plague stone where large holes in the rock would be filled with vinegar wherein the public could wash their money in order to prevent the spread of disease. Going back even further, the stone features in the legend of King Arthur who was said to have fought a giant at Castlefield, during battle the giant threw the stone where it landed several miles away, in Stretford.

image sourced from Wikipedia

Andrew and I visited the site with Len Grant. Len is a photographer and writer specialising in urban regeneration and will be documenting the construction of the new extension to the town hall. You can see all of his projects here.

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Next: The House on Ship Canal House

Previous: The Onward Building

The Onward Buildings

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 20:20:00 +0000

What on the face of things is a small commercial site on Deansgate, you’ll find a beautiful building complete with wrought iron balcony and decked out inside with personalised bottle green ceramics. Look above Topkapi and the model shop on the corner of Bootle Street and Deansgate and not only will you spot the golden sign bearing the name ‘Onward Building’ but below a tiny, ornate white balcony and above the entrance are the words ‘Band of Hope’ enscribed on a keystone above the face of a cherub.

The site of The Onward Building was previously Number 1 Court and just next-door, 201 Deansgate, had been the site of a Quaker burial ground. Finished in 1904 by architect Charles Heathcote, this building was occupied by a federation of temperance societies. This particular temperance movement was started in Leeds in 1847 and aimed to save working class children from the perils of alcohol.

The Band of Hope society published a paper aimed at children under the title Onward, hence the name of the building. The paper warned the readers to be on constant guard from temptation, and promoted the temperance movement by publishing moral tales and poetry. It’s perhaps easily forgotten that children were also the victim of alcoholism in these times of poverty and child labour, the movement became hugely successful with 2 out of 8 million children of Band of Hope age taking “The Pledge” in the last decade of the 19th century.

If you step back a little and look further upwards, you’ll notice the third floor windows are all porthole style. Behind these is a most splendid room, with the air of a Victorian bath, a raised stage at one end and ceramic tiles all around the room bearing the inscription of all the people who contributed in some way to the erection of this particular office of the Band of Hope.

images courtesy of Canning O’Neill

Manchester had many ties to temperance over the years and it was in 1851, in America, the Maine Law was passed; one of the first statutory implementations of the temperance movement in the states. This passage of the law, which prohibited the sale of all alcoholic beverages except for “medicinal, mechanical or manufacturing purposes” quickly gained recognition overseas and it was the inspiration for the United Kingdom Alliance here in Manchester, who aimed to outlaw the sale of alcohol. In honour of the movement a street known as Dog Kennel Road was renamed to Maine Road, this street is perhaps most well known in modern times as the site of the Manchester City football ground for 80 years between 1923 and 2003.

To further support the movement many temperance bars were set up around Lancashire, these bars were allowed to open on Sundays despite laws at the time prohibiting trade. It was in these temperance bars that Vimto, or Vim Tonic as it was then known, was first sold. Invented by John Joel Nichols, Vimto was sold as a health tonic and was manufactured at 49 Granby Row, the site is no longer there but there are signs of the movement all around this area. The most obvious sign being the Monument To Vimto, an oak sctulpture by Kerry Morrison that was unveiled in 1992 and towards the back end of 2011 it was given a new lease of life and now sports a colourful painted finish. You can find the statue, owned by UMIST, besides their Sackville Building.

image courtesy of Mancunian Wave

On Fairfield Street, adjacent to London Road fire station, and right next-door to the Bulls Head pub, is another Charles Heathcote building dating from 1902. If you look up here you can see above the doorway the words ‘The Manchester Coffee Tavern Company Limited’. Coffee was cited by doctors at the time as a cure for alcoholism and was another step in the movement against alcohol. Coffee Taverns distributed tokens to the poor, the tokens were only redeemable at their taverns, and this method hoped to keep business out of licensed premises.

Although this building is quite an unassuming one, and coffee houses didn’t fare as well as temperance bars seemed to, there was still high demand for them early in the 20th century and the Athenaeum served only coffee for many years whilst boasting a membership, in 1913, of 2,250 people and an esteemed clientele at that with regular visits from Charles Dickens and Benjamin Disraeli.

According to The Drink Map of Manchester, originally published in The Manchester Guardian Janurary 1889, there were 2,585 licensed premises across Manchester, which equates to 1 drink seller for every 107 people. You can also spot on this same map, (shown below overlayed with a recent map) that Fairfield Street has since been extended and it now cuts across the site of the Bulls Head, slicing a corner from the building which called for a remodel of the site and thus explains the peculiar shape of the lounge bar to this day.

Following Fairfield Street as far as the Star and Garter you will eventually come to Temperance Street, a rather insalubrious looking street following the path of the train tracks from Piccadilly Station.

Image taken from Manchester Historical Maps

Ironically, many temperance venues were eventually converted to bars, an example of which is The Sedge Lynn on Manchester Road in Chorlton. A venue that was built as the Temperance Billiard Hall and remained as a snooker club until 1990s when the Wetherspoons chain took it over. The Co-Op Funeral home just next door was the site of a Savoy cinema, and although heavily altered both inside and out, the room in which coffins are stored today retains the original ceiling.

There is one surviving original temperance bar in the UK to this day, Mr Fitzpatrick’s in Rawtenstall.

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Hulme Hippodrome

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 21:18:00 +0000

With photos by Andrew Brooks

Although you’d never know it from the rather dowdy, reclad exterior, inside this Hulme building you can time travel.

On October 10th 1901, exactly 110 years prior to our visit, the Hulme Hippodrome as it is now known opened its doors as a spectacular melodrama venue. Originally named the Grand Junction Theatre and Floral Hall (which explains the neighbouring pub; the Junction Hotel, which has an unexplained missing third floor as illustrated in the video below), this building hides beneath modern cladding, and you’d never guess that such a grand venue was right there before your eyes, in plain view from a busy road and bus route.

A year after the hippodrome was built, next-door the Hulme Playhouse opened. Both buildings are by architect J J Alley, and were connected by an arcade.

The Grand Junction Theatre and Floral Hall, with a capacity of 3,000, was built for melodrama, with the Playhouse next door designed as a music hall. In 1905 the two venues changed names and the newly christened Hulme Hippodrome with its larger auditorium became the new music hall. Later on, the playhouse was taken over by the BBC, and it was here the first radio recording of The Beatles was made.

(Image courtesy of Manchester Library and Information Service, MCC, Local Image Collection )

Inside, the hippodrome is an explosion of reds, purples and gold gilded Rococo plaster. The auditorium is designed quite differently from conventional music halls and theatres, with two galleries decked out with straight rows, a stage box on either side of the arch (known as a proscenium arch) and further upper boxes above these.

In 1950 both venues were sold and renovated externally.

The popularity of the music hall escalated in the mid 19th century, meaning the hippodrome opened its doors at the very peak. In fact, if you visit the park at St John’s Street, by Granada, you’ll find a small cross and plaque commemorating the man who played a huge role in the surge in popularity of the halls. That man is William Marsden, and his plaque reads;

William Marsden who originated the Saturday half holiday was buried in this churchyard

Marsden campaigned to give our mill workers free time. Mancunians became the first workers in the country to finish at noon on a Saturday, and the music halls gave them a place to spend their leisure time and their money.

Needless to say, over the years the hippodrome and the playhouse (now the Nia Centre) have hosted a variety of stars well known to this day, from Laurel and Hardy to Nina Simone

Performers to have graced the stage here include a member of Bert Loman’s dance troupe, Rene Mills who went on to perform with a screen villain under the dastardly stage name Con Vince, and Ann Perrin, who was the youngest performing puppeteer in the world.

In the very early days of the hippodrome there was a female performer who went by the stage name La Belle Duchess. Her act involved a show of “highly trained stallions, ponies and dogs”. La Belle Duchess is a mystery today, despite being thought to have performed with Buffalo Bill Bill (at the time considered to be the most recognisable celebrity on earth) during the UK tour of his wild west show, which included a five month stint in Salford at the very end of the 19th century.

No one even knows her name.

In 1928 a new wave of stars performed at the hippodrome. The Mancunian Film Corporation was founded, and Manchester became known as the Hollywood of the North. Some stars of this enterprise are household names. George Formby is most notable, but there was another Wigan-born star who was the most popular and highly paid of his time, who often attracted more viewers than his Hollywood contemporaries and who seldom left Lancashire to perform. He was called Frank Randle.

Randle toured as a character comic prior to his film debut and performed at the hippodrome. Randle was, to put it mildly, a diva. He had been known to destroy his dressing room with an axe, he burned down a hotel when disappointed with the service and he hired a plane to drop toilet roll over Blackpool.

Randle was often drunk, and his style of comedy has been compared to Steve Coogan’s character Paul Calf. He dressed sloppily, brandishing a bottle on stage in a comedic role and then, when performing as an actor, embellished his script in a ‘vulgar manner’, resulting in being summonsed on charges of obscenity.

This big crowd puller wore his boots on the wrong feet, dismissed authority of any sort and would disappear on three day drinking binges whilst scheduled to be on set.

There are many people who have passed through these doors that are long forgotten, along with their acts, eccentricities and charm. The hippodrome had its day and in 1962 (perhaps under the name Second Manchester Repertory Theatre) it closed to make way for a new enterprise; a Mecca bingo hall. The Floral Hall section of the premises was converted to a lounge bar and snooker room.

The theatre closed completely in 1986 and was left empty for many years, until an evangelist group, Gilbert Deya Ministries, bought the site.

And what of the Hippodrome today? Now, the Grade II listed building is in the hands of The Youth Village, a not-for-profit organisation. Operations manager, Tony Wright, intends to create a community hub at the venue, and is in the process of recruiting volunteers and raising funds for the project. A large project indeed, with an estimated £20m required, but he sees it as “a baby, not a monster” with huge potential and pay-off for the young people of Hulme.

Taking a look around the theatre it’s not difficult to see why Wright also has plans to run it as a living museum.
Down in the basement is a network of tiny rooms; some for storage, some unknown and some, in the rot, the darkness and the cold wet passages, are a million miles from the colourful splendour found upstairs. When investigating it we found, at the end of a long dark passage to the rear of the stage, a bathroom straight out of scary movie.

There’s also a battery room down here, which is thought to be the only power system of its type still installed in any building.

The hippodrome epitomises the sort of eerie, almost post-apocalyptic atmosphere you find with long deserted buildings. The restaurant besides the Floral Hall is decorated with 60s floral wallpaper, and has an ice cream freezer decaying out back. The dressing rooms are littered here and there with old toothpaste packages, drinking glasses and a wall of enormous old television sets. In the auditorium there’s reels of bingo tickets and in the bathroom, beneath beautiful plasterwork finishes, is a sink full of bingo balls.

The place is enormous, imposing, opulent, and at risk.

This is somewhere full of stories, beauty and history. Already some of that history has been forgotten, but maybe the Youth Village can help save this hidden landmark.

To find out more about the project, volunteer or donate, contact Tony Wright at tony@theyouthvillage.org

Andrew Brooks is a photographer, a digital artist and a film maker living in Manchester, his previous works include the Secret Cities exhibitions with Curated Place

Please visit his site to see these images and more, in high resolution and in all their glory - exactly as they should be viewed.

Some extra shots from the day come from Rick Webb and can be found below, and many more of them are over on his Flickr account here.

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Lewis's

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:55:00 +0100

What we now know as the premises of Primark was originally built to house a Lewis’s Department store. By virtue of housing such a spectacular venture the building has some wonderful features that you wouldn’t expect to find when you’re fighting through the crowds on a sticky Saturday.

What’s hidden on the rooftop isn’t actually visible from the street but you can see on the Google image above there’s a large glass dome, an ornate feature that is no longer in view whilst in the building but once was an integral part of the magic of the Lewis’s store.

On the corner of Market and Moseley Street this particular branch opened in 1877 and closed as a Lewis’s in 2001 (though Lewis’s had actually gone into adminstration ten years prior to this). The building is by architects Horton and Bridgford and is built in a French renaissance style with a grand corner tower.

The shop applied for an extension in 1915, buying up the Royal Buildings (the site of the Royal Hotel, where the football league was founded in 1888) and with the expansion two back streets were absorbed into the buildings and covered over by a glass archway. This was the Lewis Arcade and is briefly featured in the film ‘Hell Is a City’. These days, the Mosley Street entrance has become nothing more than a rubbish bay, although what little is left of the passageway does retain the original glass roof. The other end of the arcade, on Market Street, is obscured by Cafe Nero - if you stand back and look at this you can see it’s actually a free-standing shop located in a street and not actually part of the Royal Building’s nor Lewis’s).

The new site was over twice the size of the original and it was during this extension that the glass dome in question was erected. From the dome down to the ground floor was an atrium which would house the Christmas grotto where a steeple jack dressed as Santa would climb a golden ladder towards a crowd of excited families on the upper floors as a circus was held on the ground floor.

Immediately below the dome was, and still very much is, the ballroom complete with a sprung dancefloor.

image courtesy of Millhouse

Located on the 5th floor along with this ballroom was a restaurant and a cafeteria. The ballroom was used in the proper sense only four times a year for staff dances; spring dance, summer ball, autumn dance and Christmas Ball, and in between dances the ballroom was used as an exhibition hall. Footballers from both City and United would regularly appear to sign autographs up there. Not only that but through a trap door onto the roof itself one would find the store bakery.

The dome eventually had to be floored off to comply with fire regulations after a fire in what is now Debenhams across Market Street.

The 5th floor is almost untouched to this day although the majority of the upper floors are now in the process of being fitted out with electrical cables and cleared of airborne asbestos with a view to being occupied, perhaps as offices. But that’s not all that’s fascinating about the building.

The building hasn’t been documented particularly well over the years so exact dates and details are hard to come across, as are photographs which is particularly sad in the case of the flooded sub-basement. At some point the store adopted a Venice theme and to complete the window displays, then what better than an underground boating lake. The basement was flooded and equipped with gondolas in which the public could ride. This was only for a short time but it was one in a long line of attractions for which Lewis’s was famous.

The exterior of the building was often adorned with distorting mirrors, a magic lantern show in the windows, a basement full of slot machines and, in one branch, the hand of a woman retrieved from the ashes of Pompeii was displayed in the windows.

Due to the poor historical documentation it’s impossible to say which store you could find it but there was a rooftop zoo for a spell. It’s likely to have been over at the Liverpool branch as there was certainly an exotic animals department on the top floor selling bears and monkeys who would end their days in Chester Zoo once they became too large.

In keeping with the city in which it stands, the Manchester branch is one of firsts. When the extension was completed it was fitted with the first escalators outside of London and the largest soda fountain outside of the USA. It was one of the first stores to use plastic mannequins and there was a popular phrase adopted “standing there like one of Lewis’s” that’s thought to refer to the mannequins although it’s arguable that it could also refer to the prostitutes who frequented the Lewis Arcade.

Much of the splendour of the interior has been coverd up with plasterboard and the escalators to the ballroom have been covered with false walls for many years. The staircases are perhaps the only hint of any grandeur although they have rather a tragic history as one busy shopping day a local school teacher climbed the staircase as far as she could, scrambled over the bannister and threw herself to Piccadilly Gardens below.

If something happened, it happened at Lewis’s.

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Great Abel

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 20:14:00 +0100

Autumn in Manchester is one of my favourite times of the year for one reason only and that is the calendar of events. The Science Festival, Literature Festival, Food and Drink Festival, Comedy Festival, the Manchester Weekender and preceeding all of those, there’s the nationwide, National Heritage Open Days. And it’s that particular event which leads me the Town Hall.

There are 14 million bricks in the Town Hall and delicate images of cotton flowers and bees are set into the mosaic floors to signify the origins of our wealth and the industrious nature of our people. In the Great Hall there’s the famous Ford Madox Brown’s Manchester mural complete with a depiction of a tee-total Bridgewater glugging wine and the dark, gothic courtyard has been the set of many a London street, most recently in Sherlock Holmes and The Crimson Petal and the White. But of all the wonders of the building there is one we don’t even see from street level.

Designed by Alfred Waterhouse, although his original proposal was heavily altered from a dowdy little structure to the much grander one we see today, the town hall and its tower are a wonderfully clever use of the triangular space given to work with. Not content, however, that they were celebrating Manchester’s city status quite as dramatically as they could; six years into the project Waterhouse called for suspension of the building works and added an additional 16ft to the tower. So today the clock tower stands 288 feet high and from 1877 - 1962 it was the tallest structure in Manchester.

Taking the lift six floors up as far as we can there’s still a long climb up a dark, stone spiral staircase to reach the tower. One room off from this stairway houses the original mechanics of the clock itself which were amongst the largest available at the time and were custom made especially for the clock. In the bell ringing room above this floor is the original pendulum for the clockworks encased in a glass cabinet along with bright red and blue ropes hanging from the ceiling that are pulled to chime the carillon of 23 bells. These bells, manufactured by John Taylor bellfounders, are suspended above a series of trapdoors that enable each of them to be lowered to the ground floor entrance of the town hall at any point should it be necessary.

Eventually, many steps into the spiralling chamber later, you arrive at a room directly behind the faces of the clock. Inscribed above the face on three of the fours sides, and just about visible from the street, is the biblical quote ‘Teach us to number our Days’.

The clock is by Gillett and Bland and originally lit behind by gas lamps. It’s 15ft in diameter with the hour hands measuring 6ft and the minute hands 9ft. The clock itself was originally powered by Manchester Hydraulic Power which also powered the lifts at John Ryland’s Library, the organ at Manchester Catherdral and rose the curtain at the Opera House.

At this point you can access the lower balcony and walk around each face. The carvings of angels have been decayed by the weather and their stumpy hands that reach out have begun to look a little gnawed at. Up here it’s also a resting point for Manchester’s famous city-dwelling peregrines, as the pigeon skeletons cast between corner turrets indicate.

From this balcony is access to the chamber which holds the bell. Great Abel is named after Abel Heywood, the mayor at the time. Heywood was a fascinating man who pioneered for inexpensive newspapers at his own cost and subjected to brief imprisonment as a consequence. He set up a successful penny reading room followed by his own bookstore, he became a radical and campaigned for the lower classes to have their say, he then became one of the commissioners of police, was prostecuted for blasphemy, became mayor of Manchester, saw the town hall to completion and finally set about dedicating his time to producing penny guides to local tourist destinations now accessible by train so that the poor could see the best of the local countryside. Abel Heywood was a man I would have liked.

It’s a shame then that his bell isn’t visible from the street and it does seem rather a large piece to keep tucked away. After repairs were carried out to reinforce the original bell it now weighs a massive 8 tons. The bell continues to count the hours and is heard across the city although it no longer swings and the clapper inside it isn’t used.

The bell itself rang for the first time on New Year’s Day 1879 and is inscribed with the initials ‘AH’ and the Alfred Tennyson line ‘Ring out the false, ring in the true’ which seems exactly the kind of phrase Heywood would have chosen himself and my favourite secret that the rooftops of the town hall hold.

You can view a short video about the Town Hall that The Guardian recently aired here

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Godlee Observatory

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 22:58:00 +0100

The Godlee Observatory makes up part of the Sackville Building of UMIST on Sackville Street. It’s quite a large spectacle to overlook yet so many people are unaware of this treasure in the centre of the city.

The Sackville building itself is one of imense beauty, with fine details like intricate glass etchings of the building itself carved into the grand doorways. The building is by Spalding and Cross and was completed in 1902 with further extensions beginning in 1927 by Bradshaw, Gass and Hope. The interior of the building mirrors the splendour outside and there are a series of outdoor sculputures in the grounds reflecting the scientific theme of the site, notably a sculpture of Archimedes arising from his bath beneath the viaduct archway.

The site is divided from the more recent UMIST buildings by the Manchester, South Junction & Altrincham Railway (MSJ&AR) which ran a service between the then London Road (Piccadilly) station and Altrincham and famously ran three different systems of electronics within a 60 year period. Since 1992 this viaduct has served as part of the Metrolink route and that’s actually a great viewpoint to look out for the observatory.

Access is via floor G and the Octagon meeting room, the base for the Manchester Astronomical Society. The society itself is thought to be the oldest provincial astronomical society in England, with its origins dating back to 1892. A splendid, ornate spiral staircase leads you from here up to the telescopes, which are the originals made by Grubb of Dublin, in fact everything here is original - even the ropes that move the telescope around. Once in the centre of the doomed rooftop you can view the mechanisms and see how the dome slides open like a segmented orange to allow the telescopes to penetrate the night sky. The amazing thing about all of this is that the dome itself is made from papier mache and has managed to survive the elements for well over a hundred years.

The observatory was a gift, in 1903, from Francis Godlee. Godlee came to Manchester to run his cotton manufacturing business Simpson & Godlee and was quite the character by all accounts. He had quite a range of interests from breeding horses to yachting (the site of the Hacienda was once a yacht warehouse) and was known for his devout punctuality and massive collection of clocks. Godlee even had his own x-ray machine at home and would photograph the hands of his visitors when they dropped by.

During the late 1990s the society discovered that the Bevis star Atlas they had in their possession was one of only twenty-three copies known to exist (at the time the original estimate was one of sixteen but new discoveries have since been made). John Bevis famously discovered the Crab Nebula and was one of only two people in Britain known to have observed comet Halley upon its return in 1759.

The atlas is made up of fifty-two detailed carved plates that were never published in their entirety as the publisher declared bankruptcy before the project could be completed. The title for the collected works is the Uranographia Britannica but is also known as Atlas Celeste, and it’s safe to say it would have ranked among the best celestial illustrations of its period. There are some delightful images within it and although not officially discovered at the time, there is at least one depiction of Uranus.

No other astronomical society can claim to own a copy of these works.

You can visit the observatory by appointment during Thursday evening meetings although at present the site is undergoing repairs until further notice.

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Upper Walkways of Oxford Road

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 18:15:00 +0100

Wilson & Wormersley’s Oxford Road plans, 1960s

This time what we see when we look up isn’t so much an architectural quirk, nor is it an example of street art but it’s the ghost of an idea that was never executed.

At various points along Oxford Road, the education mile, you can find recesses at first floor level that were intended, one day, to be the connecting points of pedestrian walkways. Pedestrians were to be put up in the air with a system of interconnecting overhead walkways linking the main buildings with their entrances at first floor level. Oxford Road, effectively, was a road atop a set of concrete stilts.

The image below is part of the MMU at the corner of Oxford Road and Cavendish. What was once intended to be a walkway from here to neighbouring buildings is now a rather ugly looking, boarded-up, dead end.

An earlier image of the same building show the walkway unboarded (but unconnected) with a car entering the ground floor level. This was taken in 1974.

(courtesy of Manchester Archive Plus)

The walkway notion didn’t completely fall flat on its face as upper level commercial ventures and some existing paths are still to be found above the street level; the precinct and walkway at the Kilburn Building and the chapel for example. Although this one in particular is a revival on the 1960s plans and not an original installation.

Some walkways, such as one that connected the Precinct block to the Royal Northern College of Music, have come and gone, with this particular one surviving 30 years, albeit of disuse, up until the front of the RNCM was recently rebuilt. The old connection recesses are still to be found (and shown below) and there are other first level dead ends to be found down Oxford Road; for example, a recess at the Humanities Building, just behind the Museum Cafe, which has removable panels.

Post-war cities drew up modern plans to revitalise and renew their central zones and so it was that Manchester created The 1945 Plan. Swaths of wide roads and bold modernist buildings were to characterise the new Manchester, with a huge boulevard running up to Albert Square from Deansgate. You can see how the boulevard was to appear here

For one reason or another The 1945 Plan didn’t materialise but fresh ideas were always in the pipeline and after a plan drawn up in the early 60s by Cruickshank and Seward failed to fully materialise, it was in 1967 that a design concept was drawn up by local architects, Wilson and Wormersely, for a precinct walkway on Oxford Road. This plan failed due to economics and in the failing of this plan we perhaps avoided some sticky social situations as a consequence.

There are successful upper level ventures; High Line in Manhattan has reclaimed a 1.5 mile stretch of elevated railroads for community parks and it’s a wonderful project but it’s not quite comparable to enclosed pedestrian pathways. Rather than remove the fear and stress of the busy roads below we potentially face a huge problem with crime.

For an example of how elevated walkways can turn sour we only have to look toward the iconic Hulme Crecents. With no legal requirements to patrol the passageways connecting the residential blocks it was here that crime found a perfect home. It was something of an urban planning disaster, although like many of the purpose built council blocks of the time it was initially seen as revolutionary, cost effective and fine modern living - the idealism soon wore off.

In doing some research for the piece I found this quote to illustrate how commonplace crime became:

A series of eight-storey semi-circular tower blocks linked by walkways. It was a robber’s paradise. I used to regularly visit people who lived there and the thieves were really polite. They used to push notes under the door asking people to please leave their valuables outside to minimise the damage of a break-in. They did as well!

The mystery in all of the 1967 plans is in the form of the Mancunian Way. Why an inner-city motorway was erected at the proposed pedestrian level during the planning period is quite baffling but the road went on to win the 1968 Concrete Society Award and who’s to argue with that.

The Crescents, their famous residents and some wonderful photographs and historical accounts can be found here

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In the beginning. Discussing Skyliner with the BBC, summer 2011

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 19:00:00 +0100

In the beginning.

Discussing Skyliner with the BBC, summer 2011

John Street Birds

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:45:00 +0100

On John Street in the Northern Quarter, and around the corner on Tib Street, you may have spotted these ornamental birds and their neighbouring ceramic parrots. There’s no shortage of street art to be found in this area yet it’s surprising how few people know the motivation behind each installment.

As Manchester moved into the Victorian Era this particular area transformed from a poorly maintained, muddy lane that was characterised by poverty to a much more amiable community. The cotton trade had brought some riches to the area and the radical, publisher and eventual major of Manchester, Abel Heywood, had brought education and free speech. The residents of Tib Street began to shape the trading community and, once where pigs roamed the lanes raiding side streets for discarded offal, there stood a thriving hub of enterprise. In true Victorian fashion, the shops pulled a crowd because they provided entertainment for the consumer and the speciality of Tib Street became a form of natural history.

Almost every shop featured live animals on display inside the window or tethered outside in the street and often the shops would remain open well into the night pulling a larger crowd still as food prices dropped as the clocks approached midnight. At one point it’s believed that almost 20,000 people descended on the area in a single evening to take in the sights and pick up a bargain.

The area quickly became synonymous with animals and there was even a travelling canary salesman based on the street. The novelist Howard Spring sets his children’s book Tumbledown Dick in Tib street of the 20s and Mike Harding’s comic sketch The Fourteen and Half Pound Budgie features the former Bob Groves’ pet shop.

The last of the pet shops, Walter Smith’s, closed in 2002 as the area became the focus of a regeneration project but for a hundred years Tib Street had continued to showcase its natural wares and as ‘pet paradise’ it became a huge draw for children and families, which is quite the opposite now when you consider that the area is saturated with bars and sex shops. But this shift in trade is natural given that the post war focus was to revitalise the city centre thus leaving the Northern Quarter to fend for itself, and it did so; offering the cheapest rents in the city it continues to host all manner of local businesses that took refuge here from the commercialism of the city and its blossomed as a refuge for artists, musicians and alternative business ventures. For administration purposes the residential figures for the area don’t actually exist but it was recently awarded Great Neighbourhood of the Year 2011 at the Academy of Urbanism Awards in London.

The artist responsible for these beautiful ornamental birds is Guy Holder, a Brighton based sculpter. The idea is that although the exotic birds and pet shops of the area are gone, the birds are not - instead they escaped their demise and fled. They flew to the surrounding streets and made their homes there and now freely perch on old fire escape brackets and window ledges.

I’m glad they escaped their ‘paradise’ in the end, and that they’ve stuck around the neighbourhood.

Thanks to Sam Newiss for this image

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Pear Mill

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 19:44:00 +0100

Began in 1907 and completed in 1912 by A.H Stott & Sons, this is Stockport’s Pear Mill. The mill is Grade II listed and was one of the last cotton spinning mills to be built and to go into production. It ceased operation as a textile mill in March 1978.

Although an usual feature to gaze upon now, the pear that nestles on the water tower wasn’t particularly out of character at the time. These Edwardian mills were often adorned flaboyantly and during the design of the twenty-four A.H Stott & Sons mills, meticulous attention was cast upon the water towers and parapet of the main mill block. A signature style of the architects’ was the use of horizontal bands of yellow bricks above the windows, Accrington brick and terracotta ornamentation.

This behemoth of a pear isn’t the only fruit you’ll find up on the roof, flanking the mill at the furthest corners from this are two more, much smaller yet much greener, pear finials. These tiny siblings of the main feature are sadly showing much wear and tear.

Lead architect, Abraham Henthorn Stott, served his apprenticeship with Sir Charles Barry, the architect of the Houses of Parliament and his firm eventually became big players in the mill industry of the time. With the money from his business rolling in, A.H. Stott bought an estate near Conway, the house he had built caught fire and he was charged with arson. He was acquitted on the grounds of insufficent evidence but during this time his brothers (and partners in business) had expressed concerns over his mental health. They stated he’d mooted suicide after failing to persuade his wife to move to the Welsh estate with him. Quite why his wife wouldn’t go with her husband is unclear, and a little bizarre.

The Stott’s florid Pear might not have caught your attention if you’ve not had cause to visit Stockport, however that’s no longer an excuse - the pear is visible upon descent into Manchester airport and, was certainly at one point, floodlit during the evenings, making it glow white.

In the Stockport Archives you can access records relating to the mill, that in a few pages, detail a timeline from 1912 - 1965 including the applications made for planning permission, the firing of A H Stott and Sons for running over budget and time, and a complaint regarding breaches in employment law filed by the beautifully named ‘Stockport and District Weavers, Winders, Warpers and Reelers’.

Venturing North, thirty or so miles away in Oswaldtwistle, you’ll find another mill and another pear.

This time it’s at Oswaldtwistle Mills; the site of Stockley’s Sweets and the pear in question?

The biggest pear drop in the world.

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The Thomas Street Pineapple

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 22:15:00 +0100

Thanks to Sam Newiss for the image.

This old building on Thomas Street, sometimes known as the Binks Building, is on one of the busiest corners of Manchester when it comes to nightlife. The current tenant is Odd Bar and the neighbours are a collection of bars, restaurants, secret cocktail lounges and traditional boozers. But as well as all this the area is steeped in history, art and culture and the view from Binks Building is one of the loveliest in all of Manchester; the walls and gates of Speakman, Son & Hickson’s Wholesale Fish Market.

The market entrance is, for want of a better word, entrancing but look up just a little and you might be surprised to find this pottery pineapple settled on the highest ledge of the Binks Building. The exotic finial perches on the crow-stepped gables and it isn’t as rare as you might imagine to find this particular fruit incorporated into the design of a building. In terms of carvings and architectural adornment, the pineapple, was most prevalent from around the mid 1700s to the back end of the 1800s (until the influence of Egypt and Greece set in).

We first caught sight of the pineapple in Europe in 1493 but it was from around the 17th century onwards it truly became the most coveted of rare fruits. In preparation for a feast, a host (should he be lucky enough) would rent a pineapple for his table’s centrepiece and so it was only natural that it was adopted by artists and architects as a symbol of hospitality and of wealth.

The most impressive of all it’s architectural applications must be the Dunmore Pineapple near Airth, Scotland. The roof of the building is a 14 metre high carved pineapple and part of the grounds at Dunmore contain a hothouse in which the fruit could be grown, and was done so succesfully throughout the 18th century. Sadly, it’s unknown who is responsible for this great architectural wonder of Scotland.

But back to our Thomas Street pineapple, glistening in the sun as vibrantly as it does I should have suspected this was not the architectural pineapple of the 18th century but rather a recent piece commissioned at some time in the late 1990s by Liam Curtin of Majolica Works. Majolica are responsible for a number of street art projects around the city, especially so in the Northern Quarter. The artist is Kate Malone who said of the piece:

I see my pineapples as a symbol of friendship and hospitality, for me it is the celebratory essence of the shape, with its crown of leaves reaching outward like a party popper or firework .. and its sumptuous fruit being sensual and fiery…

There are more fruity delights to be had in Manchester so keep your eyes peeled. In the meantime, whilst doing some research for this piece, I came across a Flickr group of London pineapples so check it out and see if you can help find any more.

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Blank Pages

Wed, 04 May 2011 00:48:58 +0100

I’m featuring as this month’s highlighted blog over in issue 34 of Blank Pages.

The Blank Media Collective champion emerging artists and run some fantastic events; the creative writing group (that I only ever made it to once - shame on me!) is a great place to meet and motivate each other and if you can make it down or support these guys in any way then you truly are a lovely person.

Check out issue 34 here and see which blog I recommend for next month’s issue