Transmitting the outskirts: LoneLady's Scrub Transmissions

It's often too easy to conflate place with music, and vice versa. It's tempting to view a city through a lens of its cultural production, to hold on to a static image of past achievements and overlook the ways in which places, and their culture, continue to evolve. It's also easy to reduce an artist to their urban identity, to limit them to an artistic lineage that is geographically - and therefore to some extent always arbitrarily - defined.

There is a sense of LoneLady trying to break out of these boxes, to get away from a very particular - and often male - Mancunian identity. Yet at the same time, her music is undeniably shaped by Manchester. It's the place where she grew up, on the eastern fringes of the city. It's also where her two albums to date were written, rehearsed and recorded, in largely self-built rehearsal and studio spaces in former industrial units in isolated areas outside of the city centre. Until recent acquisitions by developers capitalising on Manchester's property boom, apparently redundant buildings such as these, surrounded by half-demolished buildings, light industrial activity or red light districts, were available and affordable to artists due to their relative geographical and cultural remoteness. Despite their uncertainty of tenure, artists became used to coexisting with damp, cold, mice and indifferent landlords, fashioning and reinventing these spaces to fit their needs and finding the space and freedom for invention and experimentation amidst physical decrepitude. These were the places where most of Manchester's real creative work was done.

LoneLady both acknowledges this geographical specificity in her work and attempts to break away from it; most recently, she's stretched her wings with a long-term residency at Somerset House in London. As a Mancunian woman, she sees herself not just as struggling for visibility within the mainstream music world, but also as an outsider to the city itself. She situates herself both physically and metaphorically on the edges of Manchester, and outside of the myths manufactured by those who wish to shape our perceptions of it.

LoneLady wants us to share and understand the mundane places and subtle experiences which influence her sensations of the city day-to-day, and her place within it, as a place that is lived in, worked in and travelled through, and as a city that - far from the promotional spiel of business, tourism, redevelopment and economic growth - continues to be uncertain, often difficult and sometimes unwelcoming for those who exist outside of its dominant uses and narratives.

Far from the shininess and spectacle of city centre redevelopment, LoneLady tries to tell us different stories and show us other cultural landmarks. In 2012, she invited us to plug our headphones in and experience her music in the context of 1960s elevated motorway the Mancunian Way, through her temporary installation The Utilitarian Poetic, which embedded a previously unreleased track beneath a flyover on the outskirts of the city centre. TUP drew our attention to a structure that is a permanent presence in the city, yet which is almost always experienced in transit, and a place where few stop to linger. Removing fast-flowing traffic from the city's roads, the Mancunian Way flyover distances motorists from the city at ground level, yet it also creates a constant background hum for those who live and work in the estates and buildings alongside it.

Six years later, LoneLady again asks us to turn our back on the city centre and to venture east to the inner-city neighbourhood of Miles Platting, an area that borders Clayton on one side and Ancoats on the other, on the banks of the Ashton Canal. East Manchester, a former industrial and mining district, where Clayton is situated, remains one of the poorest areas of Manchester, despite the new sporting facilities built for the Commonwealth Games in 2002. By contrast, Ancoats, which borders the hip Northern Quarter area of Manchester city centre, has, in just a few years, become unrecognisable. As derelict former factories and mills have been converted, alongside infill apartment blocks, a previously under-visited area of the city has been filled with bars, shops and restaurants catering to young professionals, and is regularly featured in local and national media as a 'foodie destination'. 

New-build flats are gradually encroaching further into east Manchester, following the improved access to the city brought by the building of the East Manchester tram line. However, in spite of its proximity to Ancoats and Manchester city centre, Miles Platting feels like a different world entirely. Here, we see and hear different uses for the city, which don't fit comfortably elsewhere: families gather in special dress in small sections of industrial units repurposed as places of worship; graffiti artists find ample space to exhibit their work. There's also evidence of others left behind by the city's redevelopment, including rough sleeping and heroin use, on wasteland exposed by the demolition of former industrial buildings.

There's also a atmosphere of openness and space here, lacking in a city centre that is increasingly embracing height and density - of a place that is yet to be rediscovered and rebuilt. Into this left-behind landscape, embedded in a tower of rubble, LoneLady has inserted 'Little Fugue', an unreleased track from 2014. Behind you are the skeletal outlines of abandoned gas towers. In front and to the side are patched up industrial buildings, some missing windows, and subdivided for a variety of commercial and creative uses. In the background, plodding indie rock competes across the canal with band practice emanating from a facing building. Through the headphones, LoneLady's guitar chimes gothically over a synthy, dancey track that both suggests something of her city's heritage, but shows it is possible to do something new and different with it.

Then we hear a voiceover, a story about what this area has meant to her. It concludes by urging us to: "Hear the voices of the landscape, before they're scrubbed out."

Scrub Transmissions went live on Sunday 18 February and continues until the battery runs out (duration dependent on weather conditions!). For map and further information, visit http://lonelady.co.uk/blog/scrub-transmissions-miles-platting. 

An accompanying 'zine by LoneLady is available from the Peer Hat and Piccadilly Records in the Northern Quarter.

Reclaiming the streets: An interview with Nick Dunn about his new book Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City

One of the first pieces of advice given to students moving to a city – particularly young women – is to avoid walking the city streets at night. If it’s absolutely essential to do so, you’re told to stick to a large group and “always walk towards the oncoming traffic”. Are the streets really fraught with fear, potential menace lurking around every corner? Are they places to be passed through as quickly as possible, potentially hazardous passages to be navigated from work to bar to club to home?

In his new book Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City, Nick Dunn suggests that walking after dark is not just a means of getting from A to B, but an experience that can itself be rich in interest and stimulation. When he started to regularly walk around Manchester at night, Nick says, “I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.”

“Walking is so natural to humans,” Nick tells me. “It is calming, meditative and therapeutic. It’s about wellbeing and a connection to the world. It’s an escape and a welcome respite, allowing you to be in a time and place in a way you can’t be in your daily life.”

Night time changes expectations, patterns of movement and encounters; places, shapes and materials shift in form, appearance and function. “Years ago people thought darkness rose out of the ground and might even kill you if you touched it,” says Nick. “We don’t think that any more, but it’s still immersive and sight is not that much use in a lot of areas by night.”

Walking at night activates the imagination, raising questions about what it means to be productive and creative. “Walking can be subconscious and you don’t really have to think about it – you can percolate other thoughts whilst walking,” observes Nick. “I’m not a luddite, but so much of life nowadays is mediated by screens, and we’re losing touch with the things that make us human. People would much rather live through proxy. Walking can allow you to give your attention to things. It’s an inscriptive practice.”

Over the past couple of years Nick estimates he has spent a couple of thousand hours in total walking at night, sometimes walking all night until dawn. “I’m only doing what you see lots of couples and families doing on Sundays!” he points out. Despite the boom in interest in psychogeography and walking as art practice, however, for many people cities are still not an obvious place to walk. “With a lot of British cities, you go into the city centre as a pleasuredome, to consume,” says Nick. “I’ve always loved walking around cities, but it has usually had a purpose – to see friends, to go to gigs.” 

Cities might be places to live, work and socialise, but there’s an expectation that if you want to walk you get the train to the hills or drive out to the countryside. “On the rare occasion friends have come out with me they’ve been bored and underwhelmed by the city’s ordinariness,” says Nick. “Some people expect entertainment and engagement – they’re not very good with silence.”

Nick’s spent a lot of time walking in London, an oft-trodden literary path, and many other cities, but Dark Matters turns its attention closer to home, to the particular experience of his native city. “I love Manchester but it’s not a 24-hour city,” says Nick. “Apart from the little bumps and grinds of clubs and stuff, Manchester dies at night. It feels like a completely different city. It’s not like London and doesn’t hold the imagination in the same way; it’s surprisingly quiet. Manchester still has massive pockets of quiet, whereas London is teeming with life 24 hours a day. Manchester is also very, very compact – you can walk around the centre, the area contained within the inner ring road, in twenty minutes.”

Much of Nick’s time has been spent on the edges of the city, in semi-rural environments such as the river Mersey, and in suburban south Manchester. These places, familiar to many of us and replicated over and over again throughout the city and its outlying towns, contain a “certain set of houses which are identifiable” and offer a glimpse into a “deeply personal diorama of family living”. At the same time, they’re unfamiliar, rendered “eerie, odd and uncanny at night”, and often empty apart from the occasional speeding car.

Night walking in inner-cities, meanwhile, can throw up “problems and things that don’t stack”. For example, says Nick, Manchester is not an age-friendly city. Its centre isn’t multi-generational. “I look at the future of cities in my day job [Professor of Urban Design at the University of Lancaster] and it’s very pertinent – cities at night is a global problem. The response is usually to make them safer and to use surveillance, often at a huge ecological and environmental cost. There are other ways to approach the nocturnal city.”

No two nights are the same, but Nick has done different walks in the same place, cross-hatching paths which “overlap in a big waggle dance across the city centre”. Small written snapshots of these walks featured in the recent exhibition Loitering With Intent: The Art Politics of Walking in Manchester and Beyond at the People’s History Museum in Manchester. They were presented alongside photographs capturing the invasive, uneasy orange glare, the “strong glow of LEDs and lighting” that pervades the city at night, contributing to a collage of nocturnal experiences.

Nick also led a night time wander alongside the exhibition, showing “there’s so much variety so close to the city centre”. Over a couple of hours it took in canals, elevated motorway the Mancunian Way and its half-finished slip road that hangs over the city like an ellipsis, the landscaped calm of the 1960s UMIST campus, now emptied out and partially demolished in favour of a new-build, high-rise campus elsewhere in the city, the bubble of affluent housing that is Piccadilly Village, which arose from the dust of the almost uninhabited city centre Manchester in the early 1990s and whose private canal basins are hermetically sealed off from the red light district with high security gates, and the former industrial areas of the gentrifying inner-city area of Ancoats, half-abandoned and half-reinvented as a place for living, working and consuming. The walk finished with the “beautiful compressing experience of the passageways leading to St Ann’s Square”.

It might seem odd to organise and collectivise something so inherently spontaneous and so often done alone, especially now that everything from graffiti to drinking to smell is packaged as a city tour, an experience to be purchased and consumed, but Nick’s night walk wasn’t just an architectural guide or urban walk – it was a challenge to participants to do something different. “What I get out of walking is different to someone else; walking with others is a very different experience,” says Nick. “People came as it wasn’t something they’d do on their own. You’re asking people to pay attention to their surroundings and enjoy the city – the texture, smells, sense of enclosure and sense of openness.”

Dark Matters was prompted in part by Nick’s participation in the Royal Academy's Sensing Spaces: Architecture Reimagined exhibition in 2014, where he spoke at a seminar and got really positive feedback about his work on the nocturnal city. He acknowledges that he’s not the first person to think about walking or cities or night, or walking as a spatial practice, or to connect it with capitalism, contemporary politics and social critique – but says he wanted to go beyond walking, to sensing.

“Lots of books have been written about walking and night and cities, from sociological and geographical perspectives,” Nick explains. “I didn’t want to do that, or to generate hundreds of words of footnotes. The book is more open, and more of a framework and way of thinking about things. It’s a series of short ideas that ultimately says just go and do it. It doesn’t reduce itself to nuggets. It glories in being unfinished and starting the conversation and asking questions.” Nick also notes a tendency for walking in literature to be “very solitary, male, macho and heroic”. He admits: “I hope the book has vulnerability, uncertainty and openness to it.”

Despite a long gestation period, Dark Matters was written in a short space of time, giving it, says Nick, a sense of urgency and propulsion, a “call to legs”. Academic musings are interspersed with quotations from poems and vignettes giving the reader a distilled impression of the city by night. As an architect by training and a “designer of things”, Nick experimented with drawing and mapping his journeys, but he realised “words work best – a photo never does justice to the thickness of the night, but it’s amazing how rich and potent memories are and how quickly they come back to you”. Rather than “fuzzy photos”, then, the book uses creative non-fiction as prompts; descriptive interludes convey the idea of what Nick felt and sensed, but “don’t lead by the hand”.

Music also pulses through the book. In particular, LoneLady’s 2015 album Hinterland provides a mental soundtrack. “LoneLady’s second album is very insightful about landscapes, and desolation is very set up in the rhythm of what she does,” says Nick. The jerky, restless, funkiness of Hinterland is part of a distinct northern musical lineage, drawing on post-punk and industrial music like Cabaret Voltaire, whilst remaining resolutely of the contemporary city. It’s frail, fragmented and spidery yet flowing and robust. It’s mechanistic and human, sparse and worldly yet at the same time a product of Manchester and its restrictions, frustrations and opportunities. Ultimately, it’s a pop record. LoneLady was also part of the Loitering With Intent exhibition; a series of opaque clues, teasingly familiar yet just beyond touching distance, led visitors on a treasure hunt of the city that made even the most intrepid explorer and active gatherer of arcane facts question their knowledge and understanding of the places around them.

Dark Matters contains a strong element of critique and, as the title implies, a call to action. “It’s getting increasingly difficult to walk around the city,” says Nick. “The amount of landscape accessible is diminishing. The city is foreclosing and we are constantly being told what we can’t do. We mainly think about it as an arena for consumption, and as cities as having to attract investment – Manchester sometimes believes too much in that story.”

Physical fences and boundaries are mentally reinforced by our own expectations and inhibitions about where we go and where we don’t go. “Roles and routines are deeply embedded”, says Nick. “To move too oddly in a city, to dance through a space, to move too quickly or too slowly is to bring circumspection on yourself. You’re quickly made to feel unwelcome if you’re not spending anything. For example in Piccadilly Gardens, you self-identify as ‘other’ if you’re not about to get on a bus, or on your way to somewhere. Your motives become suspicious and attract attention from not just police and security but from other members of the public. You’re conditioned into how you expect people to behave in public.”

In spite of this, says Nick: “The urban landscape can be an amazing and wonderful thing. To walk is to read the landscape beneath your feet. The whole thing is underscored by improvisation. You hear voices behind a wall, see something that catches your eye. I make it up as I go along. There’s no right or wrong way to do it, and you don’t need to be instructed – anyone with the will can do it.”

As Nick says, walking in the city is “about finding the extraordinary and fascinating in the everyday”. Everyday life sometimes seems fraught with danger, but it is also be full of beauty and wonder. As our society, culture and politics are increasingly overhung by a cloud of fear and suspicion of the unknown and the other, perhaps it’s time to embrace risk in search of freedom, understanding and even adventure.

Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City is published by Zero books on 25 November costing £9.99. For more information visit www.zero-books.net/books/dark-matters.

Postcard from Manchester: Seeing your city through someone else's eyes

I was recently invited to write a travel piece about Manchester for Marco Travel International, as part of their 'Postcards' series. I was inspired to write this by my experiences of showing my friend Jenny around when she visited from Granada, Spain in March, sharing my life and city with her for a week and seeing it all over again through someone else's eyes.

Read online at: http://mymarcotravel.com/postcards/manchester-seeing-your-city-through-someone-else-s-eyes

Ancoats Peeps: Dan Dubowitz and the Presence of Absence

Walking around Ancoats, it's hard to believe it was the birthplace of the industrial revolution, that the quiet, cobblestoned streets would once have been ringing with the clog-heavy footsteps of thousands of workers crowding into the mills. Almost as hard to imagine is that businesses still operated out of its centuries-old mills well into the twentieth century, clinging on even as production was moved to cheaper factories in the developing world. Walk around the area for long enough, though, and you start to spot things. Brass portholes, barely noticeable, are attached to the outside of boarded up mills and empty buildings. Many look from a distance like just another piece of the buildings, pock-marked as they are with functional bits of metal. Crouch down, though, and peep, and you're looking into another world, a place where workers have just popped out for lunch and could be back at any time. At the end of each of the Ancoats Peeps is a scene, a tiny bit of history; close-ups of machinery, slowly rotating objects, a room with workers' pin-ups still on the wall, the inside of a public toilet. Some have a photographic stillness – until you realise a tiny detail is moving. You're not really sure what you're looking at, or even where you're looking at, but want to look again and again and again, waiting for someone to return or something to come back to life and spring into production again.

The Ancoats Peeps, of which there around a dozen in total, dotted about Ancoats (their exact number and location is delightfully mysterious), are part of a project that's spanned the best part of the last decade. When the last of industry was moving out of the area and buildings had been compulsorily purchased for redevelopment, the Ancoats Urban Village Company decided to hold a nationwide competition for an artist to undertake a public sculpture as part of the regeneration of the area, which was by then run-down and crime ridden. Artist and architect Dan Dubowitz won the commission; however, when he arrived in Ancoats in 2003, he was clear that a sculpture would not be right for the area. “I went and handed the cheque back. The area doesn't need another visual object to try and define it. There is a tendency towards edifices and big objects but Ancoats needed something subtle you would stumble across. It needed something about the whole area and the identity of the area that people could be involved in. The whole area is a sculpture in a way, a visual beast.”

Whilst most of the historic mills of Ancoats (those that weren't victims of arson) are still standing, in many ways the area is being rebuilt all over again. Not just in conversions and new apartment blocks, but culturally, as an area, in people's perceptions, as a place to live and work, a community, and it was this that Dan found he needed to address – why regenerate the area, when it was derelict, over any other part of the city, instead of just leaving it to rot or knocking it down and starting all over again? He explained: “I discovered a real problem that no object could ever address, which was cultural continuity. Ancoats has been such an important place and about certain things – capitalism and communism, written about by people like Engels – and now it's a wasteland. It's going from industrial to domesticity. I had to ask: 'How is it going to be about that if it was once about dark Satanic mills? What is Ancoats going to be used for next?' There aren't really professions whose job it is to ask those questions but they still need to be brought to the table on a weekly basis and asked over again. I was asking, 'If we're going to build, what should we be building and why?'"

Dan has experience of working on cultural masterplans around the country, although he admits: “Some of them don't really kick off and get that far. Public art is a very fraught field. The idea that art is something that beautifies an area does not help. So often the brief of an artist is to try to rescue something, for example liven up a public space when they decide it needs something. There is a huge value in involving an artist at an early stage – but it shouldn't be assumed that it will lead to a physical artwork.” The regeneration company agreed to let Dan approach the project organically. Dan was given his own studio and set about deciding what form his involvement as an artist should take. He started by exploring Ancoats and its stories, getting to know the dynamics of the area and the diaspora of its people by conducting hundreds of interviews. “There were still one or two man businesses in Ancoats – little guys with repair shops hanging on in corners. Lots of people have their own stories from different periods.”

Dan had decided to focus on art rather than architecture when he realised he was more interested in wastelands and derelict buildings, and working with what was already there, than putting new buildings up. Once he had gained access to the deserted mills of Ancoats, he starting documenting the place as he found it: “Once I got inside I'd just stay there all day. I developed a kind of photography using very long exposures and through that I got to know the place.” The resulting photos are beautiful. You feel like you're looking at a scene from a fairytale like sleeping beauty. Once industry moved out, nature moved in. Under glass ceilings, mills become greenhouses, overgrown with ferns and trees. In other cases, whole rooms were found intact, walled up. Some of these photos now sit in light-boxes in Cutting Room Square – the first ever public square in Ancoats, and another product of the regeneration process.

Part of the success of the Ancoats Peeps is that Dan was working with a diverse team that included not just town planners, engineers, architects and a landscape designer but a photographer and archaeologists. The latter unearthed all sorts of artefacts relating to the area's history, including eighteenth century ladies' shoes and a penny that had lain undisturbed in a roof of a mill since it was built. Dan realised the value of leaving things where they were: “I said, if we found things walled up, instead of putting things in a museum why don't we put them back? The team really understood the wider ramifications of things we found and their interest to wider types of people.” Dan appreciated the willingness of different members to bring their expertise to the team, but also “step outside the group and think outside the box”. There was real commitment to the area: “We sat in a room and knew that if we all made decisions this part of the city would be different. We weren't interested in writing reports that would just sit on a shelf.” He admits: “Ancoats was all-consuming. It took over my whole life.The space is really quite special. It really got under the skins of people. It has a spirit. It's something with no rational words, that you can't put your finger on.”

Dan described the creation and siting of the Peeps as “a long and complicated process”. Each Peep was installed on a building site – some of which were then themselves abandoned and became the new ruins of Ancoats, half-built skeletons, when the slump and depression hit (in one case, Dan had to steal in and rescue a Peep from a building whose owners had gone in to receivership). Dan ended up banning the use of the word “art”, preferring the word “features” for his work, and funding came from the European Regional Development Fund rather than the usual arts channels. The reasoning was that “the Peeps would be features in the street and a part of the streetscape, where you'd usually put benches”.

Whilst the buildings have had shell repairs to stop their deterioration, their fate is still far from decided. Though they are no longer ruins, several are still empty and “frozen in a kind of limbo”. However, Dan sees the completion of the part new-build Ice Plant residential development, which recently hosted an exhibition of his photos as well as a display of artefacts rescued from the area, as a turning point. With the Halle orchestra looking at moving into St Peter's church, he'd like to see the area buzz with culture and become a hive for arts activity – “like Victoria Baths”. Mainly, he acknowledges, “it just needs more people in it”. The regeneration of the area has created its own set of tales, and Dan and the team recently ran a weekend of walks around the area telling the story of the Peeps, which attracted 1,000 people – including former workers who came back to reminisce (one visitor even recognised themselves in some photos of Whit Walks that they'd forgotten existed). It's quite a transformation for an area that Dan admits “was such a no-go part of the city”. Now the project has come to a natural conclusion, Dan reflects: “We all wanted to see the area change in people's minds – we hope if those 1,000 people begin to see what we see then they will tell another 1,000 people.”

For more information and to purchase the accompanying book, The Peeps: The Presence of Absence, published by Manchester University Press, visit www.ancoatspeeps.com.

For more information on Dan's other work visit www.civicworks.net.

Sleeping beauty: The Ashton Canal (article for Things Happen zine produced by Manchester Municipal Design Corporation)

Geese file by, the odd heron perches on the bank, and overgrown trees form a canopy over the bottle green stretch of water. Willow blossom floats placidly, sometimes catching the sun. You might think you’re in the countryside, and not in Ancoats, less a mile outside Manchester city centre. Trees grow out of the sides of once regal looking mills. Others, blackened, have succumbed to vandalism and arson. But the Ashton Canal has an air of enchantment; bracken clings to canal banks, roses rise from the edge of the water, poppies provide flashes of colour amidst the rubble of partially demolished buildings and, in summer, the bushy blossom of buddleia, or butterfly plant, forms a dense purple corridor. Later in summer, tangles of blackberries and sloe will yield fruit. It's a peaceful place away from the hustle and bustle of the city centre, where the heritage of Manchester's industrial past sits side by side with the future.

The canal, which was built over 200 years ago, was still carrying tens of thousands of goods per year even up until the 1930s, before it was left to fall into disrepair in the following decades when the coal pits of east Manchester closed. That the canal is still open at all is thanks to hundreds of volunteers who came from all over the country to clear rubbish blocking the canal in the early 1970s, when the local council wanted to close it. However, after decades of disuse the canal is slowly being rediscovered and reawakened. Boarded up housing estates, mills covered in barbed wire and empty tower blocks contrast with the first signs of the redevelopment of the area – from the Sportcity complex built to house the 2002 Commonwealth Games to Will Alsop’s lurid canal side CHIPS building, three chip shaped blocks perched jauntily on top of one another offering apartments at the top and space for art exhibitions and businesses at the bottom, which was opened last year.

Sue and Al, a forty something couple from Northwich, go on a canal holiday every year and have been on waterways all over the UK. They’re making their way along the Ashton Canal at the end of a trip along the Cheshire Ring of canals which links the Ashton Canal to the Bridgewater, Macclesfield, Trent Mersey, Rochdale and Peak Forest Canals. Sue said: “We know the city centre quite well but we’re coming into Manchester from a whole different angle. I love the contrast between derelict old industrial buildings on their knees about to fall down and the shiny new apartments blocks next door as the area’s regenerated.”

The Ashton Canal passes the six miles from Ashton-Under-Lyne to Manchester city centre through what have, for decades, been some of the most deprived areas in Manchester; Openshaw, Clayton, Bradford and Beswick and Ancoats. Sue admitted: “The hire company told us trouble spots to look out for but everyone’s been fantastic. I can’t believe how many people use the canal. A group of school kids even helped us through a lock and they loved it.”

In 2001, Urban Splash was chosen to plan a whole new waterside community of low density, environmentally sustainable family housing to be built on the site of the notorious Cardroom Estate in Ancoats, which sits towards the city centre end of the Ashton Canal, and the area was rebranded New Islington. As well as renovating historic mills and the old Ancoats Hospital to attract new residents to the area (the population could rise tenfold, with the number of new properties planned far exceeding the houses being replaced), current tenants were consulted on the design of their new houses, built in collaboration with leading architects selected by competition. An annual summer festival would help established communities mingle with newcomers to the area.

This proposals for this community, with the canal as its centrepiece, were inspired by cities such as Amsterdam, and promised to incorporate facilities like new doctors surgeries, schools, a farmers market and – listed with great precision on the New Islington website – ‘the best fish and chip shop in Manchester, a poncey wine bar, a chic little Italian with red checked tablecloths and a restaurant with 3 Michelin stars’. A phrase was coined to describe this way of living – an ‘uburb’ – combining all the facilities of the suburbs with the urban lifestyle of the city centre. Richard Hatton, Director of Development for Urban Splash, explains: “The idea of New Islington is to be allowed to evolve rather than being subject to one grand master plan. There are quite a lot of different feelings within this area – there’s a bit of everything. The idea is that it’s family friendly. You’re never too far from shops but also never too far from park land. It’s earthy and it’s different from anywhere else in Manchester.”

Work was also started on new canals and a marina. Boat mooring profits will be used to maintain a new eco park called the Cotton Field complete with a beach, orchards, pine trees, a climbing wall and nesting boxes to encourage birds. In the long term, it’s hoped the new canals could even provide water for the surrounding buildings. The park was due to be open in summer 2007, but the credit crunch seems to have put everything back and there’s still no sign of waterside dining, a wine bar, fish and chip shop or farmers’ market either. However, Richard is confident: “Within a year or two there will be lots more boats, lots more colour and lots more life.”

The tour company New Manchester Walks brings visitors to this still relatively underexplored yet fascinating part of the city on a walking tour called Watery Wastelands of Eastlands (soon to be renamed Grand Canals of the East). Green Badge guide Steve Bourne explains: “Almost everyone who visits the region doesn’t know what they’re missing here. This part of Manchester contains the world's early industrial beginnings, but it’s been hit by yet another recession in recent years. We’re just doing our bit to help put it back on the tourist trail again."

To call it a wasteland, though, doesn’t do justice to the deceptively wide array of activities the canal is already used for. Businesses still operate out of some of the remaining mills, from wholesale companies to environmental charities. Bass and drums drift over the canal, coming from rehearsal rooms in mills, and a couple are also home to networks of artists’ studios. A large volume of cyclists pass through to the Velodrome at Sportcity and, on match days, an army of fans in sky blue shirts march to city stadium. People also use the canal for its own sake, from jogging to just sitting day after day watching the world go by.

One sixteen year old from Gorton cycles to the same patch, just past the city centre, every weekend, where he sits and fishes for hours at a time, sometimes with friends and sometimes alone. He admits: “It gets me out of the house. I like it because it’s quiet.” Another, an Ancoats resident, walks his dog along the canal for an hour every day.

Two twenty something cyclists from south Manchester have arrived at the Ashton Canal after following the Fallowfield loop to Debdale Park in Gorton, and are returning using the canal as an alternative route to city centre roads: "We like the ducks. There's not really an equivalent in south Manchester – there’s no water to cycle along. It’s a good facility but it could be improved and cleaned up – we haven’t seen one bin for people who are sitting drinking or having picnics."

Ironically, although canals initially foundered into disuse in the early decades of the twentieth century in the face of competition from rail and road transport, a new transport link could help see the area cleaned up and rediscovered, when the Metrolink extension into east Manchester opens in 2012 – running almost parallel to the Ashton Canal.

Read the article online (the title was changed, not my idea!) in issue 2 of Things Happen here or in free paper copies around the city:

Open publication - Free publishing - More design lab

Also features Creative waterways, Manchester Modernist Society, Sans façon, River Medlock, Contemporary Cartography. www.mmdc.org.uk

Where the Wild Roses Grow - Part 2

"They grew down the river, all bloody and wild" - Where the Wild Roses Grow (Ancoats)

It's finally summer. The goslings that patrol the the canal with their parents seem to become less like yellow balls of fluff everyday, getting bigger and more gooselike before my eyes and taking more and more confident steps, and the sunshine is ever bringing new flowers in different colours.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon walk along the Ashton Canal to see what destruction had been done to B of the Bang (more on this vandalism of Thomas Heatherwick's sculpture later!) I spied these wild roses, a few spots of bright colour growing out of a tangle of weeds, an unlikely sign of life against the backdrop of one of the many rows of boarded up houses in this area.

Naturally, I walked the rest of the way home with this song in my head: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8srgfw7GDkM

Capture Manchester, CUBE

If you could sum up Manchester in a single image, what would it be? And is it possible? An exhibition at CUBE sets out to capture the spirit of Manchester, comprising of hundreds of images - mainly photos - sent in by the public. The postcard size images offer snapshots of Manchester life, from its landmarks to small, neglected corners and alleys most of us walk straight past on a daily basis, with ten winning entries receiving £500 for their shots. There's no single image that, taken in isolation, says Manchester and sums up its essence, but taken as a whole the images give a sense of the chaotic fragments that make up life in the city.

I wasn’t impressed by the judges' choices of winners which, apart from a shot of graffiti boasting 'Gorton girls know all the words to songs by Chaka Chan', seemed a bit predictable. Winning images will be printed as postcards (click here to read Phil Griffin's excellent article about the lack of variety of Manchester postcards).

As you’d expect, Castlefield is well represented in the submissions, including the often seen shot of its two towers - an old, redbrick one rising from the shadow of the Beetham tower that dominates the city skyline. The famous curves of Central Library are returned to over and over again, and it’s good to see B of the Bang commemorated before it goes forever.

Many photos take the architecture of the city as their starting point, often focusing in on quirks like gargoyles. Old and new is a recurring theme, and one of the most effective shots places ornate redbrick turrets against the protruding glass blocks of the new civil justice centre in Spinningfields, a bizarre and extreme juxtaposition. The derelict Department of Employment building, its former purpose just about identifiable from battered letters on the front, takes on a new relevance for our times. Victoria Station deservedly gets a look in, with its map of railway routes, and the destination signs outside, where a tiny Hull is squeezed in between Newcastle and Belgium.

There is a large number of photos of triumphant symbols of the new Manchester like Urbis and the big wheel, many of which are embellished with technical trickery and special effects. The ones which are unplayed with are more effective, though, showing Manchester in its natural state, from the utilitarian street namies of Ancoats - Mangle Street - to a row of boarded up terraces. Pictures close in on doorways and abandoned entrances or the front of an Asian grocer's and an MEN newsagents. A worthy winner would have been the photo taken from the top deck of a Magic Bus, a rival Finglands in the background - what could be more typical of the Manchester experience than a journey along the Wilsmlow Road corridor at peak time?

My favourite photos are the ones that look beyond the glossy image - all shiny glass and big gestures - that's sold to tourists and could be seen in any of the council's promotional literature. The photos are best when they just show what's there already, and make us look at it closer, rather than trying to impress by montaging or photoshopping. For example, the area outside the Thirsty Scholar and the Attic with its spiral staircase is given a new, fairytale magic when framed in black and white that would be missed by the casual observer.

Among my favourites are those which look past Manchester's monuments and architecture, forego grand aerial views to get down to the level of its inhabitants - one photo even crouches down to a goose's eye level.

It's Manchester's inhabitants that make the city what it is, after all. A portrait of a teenager wearing a tshirt asking ‘Do I f***ing look like I’m a people person’ is instantly recognisable to anyone who spends anytime in Cathedral Gardens at the weekend, where teenagers congregate. Canals and woodland are more interesting when they have people silhouetted against them, Piccadilly Gardens more alive when children play in its fountains. The shiny new city of Spinningfields is made more human by a woman waiting by a 'Meet me in Spinningfields' poster -the advertising message becomes literal rather than an empty slogan of redevelopment.

The best photos are those dictated by circumstance, such as sunshine catching on street sculptures in New Islington, a springboard for a burst of sunlight to leap out against a cloudy sky. One of my favourite photos shows the outline of a couple holding hands in the snow, next to the Temple in Heaton Park.

Until April 18.

Incidentally, I'm far too disorganised for submitting anything to any exhibitions. I think this is my favourite Manchester photo, of Plymouth Grove pub in Ardwick, taken well over a year ago. It was the first photo I developed by myself, and wasn't meant to come out so dark, but I thought the darkness suited it perfectly, making its distinctive clock tower (Grade 2 listed) stand out against a moody Mancunian sky. The pub's derelict and boarded up, in an area that's had huge building programmes going on all around it. I don't know if it's still there, but I hope so.

Rapunzel

The Shrieking Violet is unemployed. And spends most of her time wandering round aimlessly. However, she has been meeting up with inspiring people who have been setting her challenges. This was a challenge - to write a story. There was a building that looked like a castle that had always fascinated the Shrieking Violet, and made her think of a modern day Rapunzel, so she relocated to Central Library and sought inspiration in Grimm's Fairytales, charmingly illustrated by Walter Crane. This story was also written under the influence of the album The Power of True Love Knot by Shirley Collins, an English folk singer. Most of her love ballads do not have happy endings either.Castles in fairytales are usually magical, awe inspiring fortresses surrounded by cruel rocks and wild seas, over which the hero and heroine have to make their escape from the clutches of a dastardly step parent. The castle in this tale is rather less imposing. In fact, it’s not really a castle at all. The castles of folklore conjure up images of rugged grey buildings, in which every flint brick is enchanted. This one is red brick and grubby, and actually looks more like a prosaic Victorian warehouse to the casual observer. Instead of being protected by a moat or tumultuous sea, it stands amidst tall weeds and barbed wire on the bank of the Ashton Canal, a stretch of water that’s brown-green and impassive and breaks a ripple only in the windiest of weather. The only thing about the Ashton Canal which implies danger is the amount of rubbish floating in it, which suggests anyone who falls in will be struck down by some kind of horrible waterborne disease.

Those who choose to live their lives on the waterways usually have usually opted to live a slower pace of life, in the company of ducks and geese, and are the not the type of people whom excitement follows. It was a bargeman, however, making his leisurely way through the canals of North Manchester with plenty of time to develop an over active imagination, who noticed the building’s intriguing resemblance to a castle (or at least the type of stereotypical toy castle a child would make out of Lego). The building was a solid, impenetrable looking block flanked by strong towers topped with battlements in a sand coloured stone.

As his houseboat cruised by, the bargeman noticed a flickering light in one of the towers and an open window high up one of the walls. Otherwise, the building seemed to be deserted, like the rows of boarded up houses it rose up amongst, awaiting demolition. In common with the shells of warehouses around it, it was crumbling and its cracked windows laid it open to the elements.

After deciding to moor for the night, the bargeman became more and more intrigued. Seeing as there isn’t much in the way of entertainment on a houseboat, he decided it wouldn’t hurt to have a look around. So, in the dead of night, he scrambled onto a muddy bank, strewn with rubble from warehouses that had already been knocked down to make way for regeneration of the area. He could see no way to scale the smooth walls of the castle to reach the only opening, a high up window, but the rather more ordinary building next door had several smashed windows through which it was possible to climb if he was careful not to cut himself.

It was pitch black when he dropped down inside, and he couldn’t see anything. His other senses overcompensated and he was overwhelmed by a cold mustiness that chilled him to the bone. When his eyes acclimatised, however, he started walking through huge rooms full of machinery. Out of nowhere, he heard the distant strains of a female singing, and was taken by surprise, at first thinking the building was inhabited and he would be caught trespassing. When his heart was still again, he decided to follow his ears in the direction of the eerie tune. His feet led him through corridor after corridor and room after room of cruel looking contraptions and stacks of boxes that were intriguingly labelled ‘blonde’, ‘brunette’ and ‘redhead’. Eventually, they all began to look the same. Panicking he wouldn’t be able to find his way out before daybreak, he left through an open window.

The next day, he went about his business as usual, preparing the barge to move further down the canal, back into the city and civilization. In daylight - it was a rare sunny day - he thought no more about the strange and beautiful song and the mysteries of the castle. He set off on foot exploring the area, but found nowhere that caught his imagination. However, night fell once more and he heard the song from outside the castle this time, louder and more insistent on second hearing. He gingerly crept onto the bank and back through the same open window he had climbed through the night before.

This time, he noticed there was a covered walkway in between the building he was exploring and the castle next door, and used a rickety iron staircase to access it, each footstep making a metallic clang as if in collaboration with his pounding heart. He saw there was a strange glow at the other end of the walkway and entered, his heart beating wildly for fear of detection. He emerged in the furthest tower, and was greeted by the sight of a beautiful maiden with hair down to her knees, gleaming the colour of the terracotta bricks from which the castle was made. She was pale and unblemished, as if she had been locked up in the tower all her life, and sat singing to herself by candlelight.

She was afraid of the man, and was about to call out, but he spoke to her, saying “Don’t be afraid” and asked why she was sitting in dim light in the tower. She had never seen a kind man before, only the factory owner and his clients, who kept her there in captivity as an incentive for her family to work harder. He asked if he may touch her beautiful red hair, and she was nervous but consented. When she realised how gentle he was, she asked if he would return with help and rescue her from the tower and take her away with him. Since she did not have the preconceptions of men that are learned in the wider world, she instinctively trusted him, and said she would let her hair down the side of the tower the following evening and he could climb up, thereby avoiding the roundabout route he had taken to get there. She also did not know that in these stories the gallant rescuer is generally rich, royal and handsome, none of which could be said to apply to the bargeman. However, the beautiful maiden, her mind finally at rest, fell asleep and the bargeman crept away to formulate plans for boating away to a place they could never be found.

The next evening, as the bargeman climbed onto the bank to ascend the rope of red hair that was camouflaged against the building, he saw a small, chubby, mean looking man in a black suit had beat him to it and was clambering inexpertly up the tower. He waited, and heard harsh words from the tower, followed by a strange buzzing sound that sounded like a gentleman’s razor. After a while, all was quiet and the hair appeared again. The bargeman was worried for the maiden in the tower but hoped the man had merely been having a shave in preparation for a night out, and had exited in a more conventional manner. He took a chance, and shinned up the surprisingly strong plait. On reaching the top, he looked around triumphantly, but got a shock when he realised he was looking into the squinty black eyes of the factory owner, who was dangling the hair over the side of the building. “Hahaha”, said the factory owner, “the hair does not belong to her, it is mine as the owner of this wig factory. Her hair has become long and strong enough, and now it will adorn the heads of rich old ladies who no longer have hair of their own”. Before, he could get over his shock, the bargeman had been pushed backwards and fell into the canal, where he lost consciousness and floated away.

This is the part of the story where the hero would usually come back to life, take the hand of the maiden and they would live happily ever after with beautiful children. However, we all know that’s not how life works. Boy meets girl, but boy doesn’t always fancy girl and anyway, beautiful maiden doesn’t always equate to interesting girlfriend material. Even of they did become lovers, it doesn’t always work out. It’s perfectly possible boy would get bored and find another maiden.

The bargeman was dead so he never got to find out what could have been. All the maiden was left with was a cropped head and memories of a kind man stroking her hair, and a new interest in breaking out of her tower to explore the world outside.

The Smiths' City

For many music fans, especially angsty teenagers, the miserablist group and Manchester are synonymous. Here's a guide how to find them in the streets around you.

The artist more commonly known as Morrissey, who was born Stephen Patrick Morrissey in Davyhulme in 1959, will be returning to the city in 2009 to play two sold-out dates at the Apollo. A concert on 22 May will mark the fiftieth birthday of the man who has sound tracked the lives of generations, first as frontman of the Smiths and then as a distinctive performer in his own right.

The Smiths' lyrics may be awash with references to areas of Manchester and its history, but Morrissey hasn't actually called the city home for a while. The bequiffed one left to live in the sunnier climes of first Los Angeles, and then Rome, over a decade ago.

The remaining Smiths still contribute a visible presence to Manchester's musical landscape, though, and the band's legacy lives on in the city, not least in the Star and Garter's monthly Morrissey and Smiths disco, which caters for both those old enough to have been there from the start and teenagers young enough to have not been born yet when the Smiths split up. This guide will trace the history of one of Manchester's most famous musical exports, which also roughly coincides with some key events and places in the development of Manchester.

1: Park Hospital (now Trafford General Hospital)

When Anuerin Bevan symbolically handed over the keys to this hospital in 1958, it marked the start of the NHS and free healthcare. Eleven years later, Morrissey, the man who would go on to change the course of popular music (at least in cult circles), was born in the hospital.

2: 382 King's Road, Stretford

Morrissey spent his first six years in Hulme before his family relocated to Stretford during a slum-clearance scheme. This unassuming semi was where the momentous first meeting between unemployed writer Morrissey and guitarist Johnny Marr took place in 1982, the culmination of Marr's search for a singer and lyricist to match his distinctly crisp Rickenbacker sound. It went on to be one of the great rock partnerships, although not always a happy one. Johnny Rogan's dense tome Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance is recommended for more reading on this well-documented topic.

Morrissey has since gone on to have a lucrative solo career, collaborating with established artists such as Nancy Sinatra. Marr is still at the forefront of new music, appearing on records by both the American band Modest Mouse and the Cribs in recent years.

Mike Joyce went on to play drums on Julian Cope's acclaimed album Peggy Suicide, as well as joining punk groups the Buzzcocks and Public Image Limited and touring with Sinead O'Connor.
The Smiths' bassist, Andy Rourke, is now a DJ on XFM.

3: Crazy Face, Portland Street

This innocuous looking wholesale clothes shop, situated close to Chinatown, was where The Smiths honed their unique sound. Mike Joyce describes its importance to the band: “It was the first time we ever played together as a band. I think it's a restaurant now. We had our offices there and Joe Moss, our manager at the time had his shop Crazy Face in the basement where he used to sell his clothes. We used to push all the trousers and jeans and tops to one side and just play there. We used to hang out there every day – it was a base for us. It was pre-Smiths, really – before we even had our record deal. Then he bought the upstairs, the second to top floor, and we used to rehearse there for about a year in 1982.”

4: The Ritz, Whitworth Street West
One of Manchester's major gig venues, the Ritz holds over 1,000 people, which is a scary proposition for any band's first gig. The Smiths made their debut here supporting the decidedly less catchily named Blue Rondo A La Turk on 4 October 1982. With a name like that, taken from a jazz tune by the Dave Brubeck Quintet, it's no wonder The Smiths made it big and Blue Rondo A La Turk seem to have been forgotten in the mists of musical history. To dwell on the name a moment, it's been suggested The Smiths was chosen as it sounds quintessentially, ordinarily English (which is ironic, as all of the band were of Irish descent).

Last year, Whitworth Street West gained a new Smiths association: Mike Joyce now hosts a weekly club night at the Brickhouse venue just across the road from the Ritz, named AlternativeTherapy after a popular Revolution radio programme he used to present.

5: Ancoats (or Ann Coates)
Manchester was a very different place when the Smiths were recording. The old mill area and birthplace of the industrial revolution is all about regeneration and expensive flats now, but in the 1980s it was a symbol of Manchester's decay. Morrissey may be famous for his moroseness, but at least he had a sense of humour: backing vocals on the tune Bigmouth Strikes Again from The Smiths' 1986 album The Queen Is Dead are attributed to Ann Coates, but are really just Morrissey's voice speeded up.

6: Strangeways, Southall Street
Although it's not officially been called Strangeways for years, HM Manchester Prison is still known by the name it lent to Strangeways Here We Come, the Smiths' final studio album, which was released in 1987. Morrissey's lyrics are often preoccupied with the city's most notorious criminals, notably the Moors Murders on Suffer Little Children from the band's eponymous first album.

7: Platt Fields Park, Mabfield Road
The Smiths' song Rusholme Ruffians, which is found on their 1985 album Meat is Murder, made the titular phrase famous, as well as the funfair that still takes place there. Morrissey's lyrics often focus on the mundane and everyday aspects of life, and the words to Rusholme Ruffians are typically bleak: by the big wheel generator on the last night of the fair, “a boy is stabbed and his money is grabbed and the air hangs heavy like a dulling wine”.

Incidentally, Rusholme is situated in south Manchester student heartland, which might well boast the highest concentration of Smiths fans in the city.

8: Salford Lads' Club, Saint Ignatius Walk
This redbrick social club is often the first port of call for many visiting Smiths fans, because it features on the inner sleeve of the iconic Smiths' album The Queen is Dead. It now has a Smiths room dedicated to the band. At the time, however, the club's committee were unhappy with its association with the group, fearing Morrissey's lyrics would lead young boys astray.

Two decades on, it seems the band have been embraced by the establishment. After revealing a fondness for the Smiths, Conservative leader David Cameron attempted to pose outside the club on a visit to Manchester last year. He was thwarted by local Labour MP Hazel Blears and protesters bearing placards saying 'Salford Lads not Eton Snobs' and 'Oi! Dave - Eton lads' is 300 miles'. Determined Dave got his picture in the end, even though a gloating Blears assured him “Not on my watch you won't, Dave” after an unsuccessful first attempt.

The club has been cash-stricken in recent years, and has benefited from Smiths-related fund raising activities aiming to get together money for repairs.

9: Southern Cemetery, Barlow Moor RoadMorrissey's bookish nature is evident on Cemetery Gates, from The Queen Is Dead, which takes place on a “dreaded sunny day” in Southern cemetery and name checks Keats, Yates and Wilde. Morrissey often borrowed phrases from films, books and plays, including Shenagh Delaney's Salford play A Taste of Honey. Pretty Girls Make Graves, from the Smiths' self-titled debut album, is a line from Beat author Jack Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums.

Morrissey's lyrics in turn went on to influence popular culture worldwide, a cult American punk band that formed in 2001 taking the song title Pretty Girls Make Graves as their name. Likewise Canadian author Douglas Coupland named a book Girlfriend In a Coma in tribute to the Smiths song of the same title.

10: The Free Trade Hall, Peter Street
The Smiths played at the site of the Peterloo Massacre twice, the first time in 1984 whilst promoting their debut album. It's here that the Smiths story comes to an end - their last ever Manchester gig was held at the Free Trade Hall in October 1986.

The Loiterers Resistance Movement - Loitering with Good Intentions

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY: mention that to most people and they’ll probably look at you blankly. But a Manchester psychogeographic group offers monthly tours as an alternative to official, Blue Badge guides to the city.

The Loiterers Resistance Movement, a collective of urban explorers “loitering with intent to make Manchester wonderful”, is probably Manchester’s only local history and walking group watched over by the Greek goddess of chaos, Eris, and influenced by the flâneur, a dandy-esque Victorian figure who wandered the city as a detached observer.

Founder Morag Rose complains “modern society is so rigid”. Chaos, on the other hand, “can be a creative force”.Morag explains, “chaos is thought of as scary, but it can be beautiful”.

In a manifesto-esque statement of intent on the internet, The LRM lists its likes and dislikes: “plants growing out of the side of buildings” are good, “gentrification” is bad. The LRM celebrates the “colourful and diverse”.

The movement was born late in 2005, out of the Basement on Lever Street, an anarchist meeting place. It has close links with other Manchester groups such as No Borders, which defends the rights of immigrants and refugees.

Although even most psychogeographers can’t agree what it means, psychogeography has its origins in the Situationist Movement, and the Paris Riots of 1968.

The situationists were concerned with how we relate to and interact with the city emotionally, and how we can disrupt it. They encouraged debate about who is included and excluded in a city, and who can change it.

Psychogeography is a world-wide activity - there is an Australian branch of The LRM, and it also has links to Germany and Belgium.

Psychogeographers dispute the ownership of the city: “the city is made up of a million different stories, and the official history is just one of them”, explains Morag. The city is a public space with the potential for public revolution and change. Loitering, therefore, is a form of political protest.

What does this have to do with modern Manchester? Late Manchester music mogul Tony Wilson was influenced by situationism, and hosted a Situationist International conference at the Hacienda in 1996.

Today, psychogeography is a way of making sure that “the spiritual history of the city” and its “mythical undercurrent”, isn’t forgotten.

The LRM is about dark alleyways and going through doors you’re not supposed to. It’s about serendipity: unearthing the hidden treasures beneath the streets and the forgotten ghosts lurking in those dark alleyways you’re too scared to go down. It’s about social history and the way in which the city’s past residents, such as Friedrich Engels and the mathematician and astrologer John Dee, live on, in places like Chetham’s library.

It’s about finding the courage to visit “places never been before but you’ve always really wanted to, or the places you’ve been too scared to go to”.

Mainly, though, The LRM recommends setting off on a walk where you don’t know where you’re going. The best way to find out more about the city, recommends Morag, is to“stop and look at things, talk to people and ask loads of questions” - like many of us, Morag admits that one of her main motivations is that she’s “really nosy”!

The LRM is also to do with community mapping and remapping the city. Morag is fascinated by ‘DIY mapping’. She says, “ask twenty people how they got to the same place and they’ll all say something different.”

Don't be put off by all the theory, though - Morag says, “it’s nice to get people along who haven’t really thought about psychogeography”.

Whereas the Situationists were often “contradictory” and “used words no-one could understand”, the LRM is open to everybody.

Although the LRM took part in the TRIP (Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives) conference at Metropolitan University in June, Morag stresses that the LRM is “community based – not academic”.

The LRM is an antidote to a city which is “becoming more and more commercial and alienating for people”. Modern life, says Morag, is “stopping people being to engage with what’s around them”.

Morag offers the Free Trade Hall as a particular place that alienates people: “it’s an expensive hotel with an oriental theme, when there could be so much heritage to celebrate there”. Morag adds, “We’re really busy - the whole city is rushing around. People go to work in a job they hate. It’s sad that life revolves around commerce and money”.

If people looked around them, and got rid of their preconceptions, they’d realize that “there’s always more to explore and discover - when you’re looking, you see signs”.

Furthermore, Morag thinks “It’s a shame that regeneration policies centre around shopping”. “People should play and have fun, not just go shopping”. The trouble is sometimes, finding a peaceful or quiet space where that’s possible. The LRM aims to restore the balance.

Although Morag acknowledges it’s “good that cities are always changing”, she bemoans the fact that “regeneration often gets rid of the interesting things”. She stresses that the movement isn’t “anti-progress”, however. They don’t want to “go back to some kind of golden age”.
We should just be thinking about what it is that makes Manchester Manchester.

The LRM sets out to reclaim Manchester, whilst having a lot of fun and “giving people a good time” along the way.

As Morag observes, “everyone loves Manchester for a different reason”, and has “their own sense of history and own stories”.

Past dérives have included a pigeon’s eye view of the city that celebrated the oft-maligned creatures, a stroll based around the ‘lost rivers’ of Manchester, and night time walks.

Morag is delighted when people bring stories with them. Old ladies who went along on the tour of fast-changing Ancoats shared anecdotes like memories of the canals turning frothy with soap from laundry, and reminisced about being threatened with the prospect of a monster called Jenny Greenteeth.

Dérives often throw up myths and legends, such as that of the ice maiden in Salford who became pregnant at a time when it wasn’t socially acceptable and killed herself by jumping off a bridge. She got stuck in ice and people went to look at her. Morag says that this story is probably “half-myth, half fact”. The LRM may itself have created a few urban myths during its existence.

Morag also offers intriguing titbits about Lincoln Square, ‘Umbrella Alley’, just off St. Ann’s Square, and antiquated laws relating to the walking of cows to the city from the outskirts.

One walk took in masonic and sacred architecture, looking at some of Manchester’s most famous buildings, such as the seven-tiered town hall. The LRM also educated walkers about how the Royal Exchange theatre, ‘the biggest room in the world’, was built on different religious ideas using Kabalistic and Rosicrucian dimensions. A caduceus walk explored the origins of the serpentine symbol, which used to be the symbol of medicine, and is seen on lots of banks.

September’s wander was based around CCTV cameras, and considered how being under constant surveillance affects our perception of the city - should we perform for the camera?

Walks start in landmarks such as the John Rylands library, and usually end up in pubs like the British Protection, often taking place on historical date such as May Day and the Winter Solstice.

Morag “never comes away without learning something” on one of her walks – “there’s never a wasted day”.

Morag hopes in the future to do a 'Manchester music tour'. She asks, “who decided Manchester music was all about bands like Oasis, lad bands? What about Manchester’s folk tradition?”.

Morag concludes, “look around you and there’s magic”. Even in the Mancunian rain!