Fallowfield Loop damson gin

In the 1960s, Dr Beeching paved the way for the reduction of the British rail network, closing small village stations and branch lines and catalysing the ascendancy of the motorcar as the dominant mode of transport in Britain*.

Some of long-closed lines are now reopening, after decades dormant. Others, their tracks removed permanently and their station buildings now converted into shops and supermarket cafes (as is the case with the former suburban Manchester stations of Levenshulme and Fallowfield), offer cyclists miles of dedicated bike path free from the traffic and aggressive motoring that increasingly chokes our towns and cities.

Manchester’s Fallowfield Loop stretches around eight miles, looping around the south and east of the city. Beginning in inner-city Openshaw in east Manchester and ending in leafy Chorlton in south Manchester, it undulates through the former industrial dormitories of Gorton and Levenshulme, passes picturesque Debdale Reservoir, skirts the boundary of Stockport at Reddish, and cuts through studenty Fallowfield and leafy Whalley Range.

The Loop has the feel of a linear park, offering a backdoor view of the city and its patchwork of official and unofficial green spaces. The Loop itself is an underacknowledged green space. In spring and summer it’s overgrown with branches forming a green tunnel, although in autumn the slipperiness of the accumulated layers of leaves can be treacherous. In winter, the foliage drops right back to reveal numerous back gardens, allotments, recreation grounds, school playing fields, overgrown brownfield sites and industrial land reclaimed as country parks. It links up with other traffic-free routes, too, from the Ashton Canal, with its miles of recently resurfaced towpath, to former branch canals such as the Stockport canal.

The Fallowfield Loop has become a place of community activism and communal litter-picks. It’s also a place of memorial, to young people who have killed themselves. Recently, it’s become a site of protest, with large EU flags unfurled unmissably from road and railway bridges; when removed, they reappear again soon afterwards, imported en masse from China. Pro-EU graffiti sprayed along the path places the UK at the heart of the EU, and the Manchester bee motif is placed centrally within the circle of stars that represent the EU member states; it’s a reminder that Manchester, along with the neighbouring local authorities of Stockport and Trafford, which the Loop passes close-by, voted remain in the EU referendum, in common with several other northern cities. It’s also a place for creativity, from street art murals celebrating the city’s architecture, to hand-written personal declarations (and accusations – ‘Louis K has a tiny penis’). It’s a place to encounter culture, from bicycle theatre troupes offering outdoor Shakespeare performances to public artworks sponsored by the cycle charity Sustrans, which document and draw attention to the flora and fauna of the route. It’s a place of learning and instruction, for small children to gain confidence and practise their bike skills away from the road. It’s also a place for family time: on father’s day, it’s noticeable how the number of men with small children increases.

Not all is benign – once or twice a year the ambush of women or opportunistic robberies make the deadlines, and mounted police undertake regular patrols. However, generally it’s a place of conviviality and sharing: if a cyclist stops at the side of the path, the next to pass will stop to see if all’s okay, and offer help fixing a chain or a spare inner tube.

Although cyclists benefit the most from a safe cycling environment uninterrupted by the frequent stops and starts of traffic lights, the Fallowfield Loop is also well-used by walkers, joggers, dogwalkers, students, and schoolchildren on their way to and from school, as well as shoppers just getting from A to B. It’s a meeting place, too, particularly for groups of teenagers.

These looplines are also fruitful places for the urban forager. Depending on the season, edible mushrooms, horseradish, strawberries, raspberries, cherries, plums, damsons, sloes and apples can all be found along the Loop, whilst in late-summer individuals and groups of people of all ages gather with an assortment of receptacles, from large yoghurt tubs to seaside buckets, Tupperware tubs and carrier bags, to gather blackberries, and offer hints on the best spots.

This year’s damsons were picked along the Fallowfield Loop, in a year that was unusually fallow for apples, yet plums and damsons of varying hues were in abundance.

* For a more detailed account of cuts to train services in Manchester see https://mancunian1001.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/the-reshaping-of-our-railways-1-before-beeching.

Listen online: All FM Friday Drivetime interview

I was invited to talk about my Pictures for Schools research and upcoming talk for the Manchester Centre for Regional History at Manchester Metropolitan University on Fiona Ledgard’s Friday Drivetime show on south Manchester radio station All FM.

During our discussion Fiona asked me to read a short extract from an article I have written about Pictures for Schools for the new issue of the modernist magazine of twentieth century architecture and design, which is themed ‘Forgotten’. In the article, I chose to focus on Pictures for Schools as a forgotten idea and ideal.

I also picked some songs for the show, some of them tenuously related to art and artists, including Meilyr Jones, the Velvet Underground, WE, Pins, LoneLady, Sauna Youth, David Bowie and Sacred Paws.

Listen to the show online:
For more information about the modernist, and to purchase the magazine, visit www.the-modernist.org/forgotten.

Free Precarious Passages readings at Central Library for Manchester Literature Festival, Tuesday 20 October

I will be reading from my piece of writing about cycling the A6 as part of a Manchester Left Writers event at Central Library for this year's Manchester Literature Festival on Tuesday 20 October. Members of Manchester Left Writers will be reading from their Precarious Passages series of call-and-response creative and experimental writing, accompanied by a selection of films from the North West Film Archive.

Tickets are free and can be booked at www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk/events/precarious-passages-36850.

'Doing the Longsight dash': Manchester Left Writers 'Precarious Passages' collaboration on cycling the A6

Last year I started attending the meetings of a new publishing and discussion group called Manchester Left Writers and I recently, finally did my first piece of writing. It's a collaboration with Steve Hanson focused on our experiences of the A6, one of the busiest roads in and out of Manchester and the main link between Manchester and Stockport, as part of a series called 'Precarious Passages'. Precarious Passages act as poetic call and responses between two writers, reflecting on the everyday lived experiences of our times and our cities. I spent about six months thinking about my experiences of the A6, which I cycle down between two and five times a week to and from Manchester (it's pretty central to the way I experience and pass through the city), and compiling my thoughts and observations (some of this is now out-of-date, eg Tesco Metro's been back in action a while now, and the Arcadia's gone). As a result what I wrote (posted in full below) was inevitably far too long and rambling. A heavily edited version appears side by side with Steve Hanson's musings on experiencing the same road on the 192 bus, one of Manchester's major (and notorious) bus routes. The full version, PP002, can be accessed online here. There are also paper copies available, which will eventually be distributed at various points along the A6.

Although the piece might seem slightly negative in tone, I find cycling exhilarating and it's generally the high point of any day, when I feel most alive, and it's also my time for thinking and working things out in my head. I find it to be a very intense experience, both psychologically and physically, but I think it's one that always does me a lot of good. (My entry to the recent #MCRWomenbike competition is at the bottom.)

A6

2015 started, like so many nights have ended in this city, with me dancing by myself on a near-empty dance floor in a night-club where music never got much better than the 1980s. The club faces the furthest platform of the city’s mainline railway station; indeed, it looks likely that the station’s imminent expansion will be the end point of the venue’s years of decline. Past the station runs the A6, London Road, heading out of the city for the south. As it goes beyond edge of the city centre, the A6 becomes Stockport Road, heading for the suburbs, crossing the imperceptible line from Lancashire to Cheshire, passing through the centre of the next large town along, Stockport, then on towards the hills of Cheshire and Derbyshire.

Tell people you live in Stockport and the A6 is your route into town and other cyclists – and drivers – wince. “Rather you than me,” their faces say. “Be careful,” they say to your face, particularly, as tonight, when they realise that you fully intend to cycle home, post-dance at 3am, having weighed it up and decided that cycling is the cheapest, safest, most direct and quickest option (the local rail operator is unofficially known as ‘Northern Fail’).

To leave the city you pass under the Mancunian Way. Manchester is more than a city of mills and textiles, redbrick and the humble terrace. Yes, Manchester is a Victorian city, but it could, it should, be seen as so much more than this. Manchester’s ‘highway in the sky’ won a 1968 Concrete Society Award, commemorated in block, almost Pop, lettering on its own unlikely concrete plaque. It soars over Oxford Road and Upper Brook Street as the bustle of student life goes on below, coming down to land at the heart of UMIST (aka North Campus, once the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology). At UMIST, the white-painted labs and towers, complete with subtly abstract murals by the likes of Victor Pasmore, have become grubby through the fumes of arterial roads like the A6, which pass by. Today, these monuments to science, education, industry and technology are static and empty as the university concentrates its resources on the southern campus areas. This is now prime city centre real estate awaiting redevelopment, probably to contribute to the sacred industry in Manchester today: hotels. More hotels. Manchester is becoming a city built on hotels: convert old buildings or flatten. The sweeping, office-like Macdonald hotel on the A6 was once a piece of the communications industry but is now a hotel. The old Twisted Wheel Northern Soul nightclub back down the A6 in the city centre, a modest redbrick, wasn't so lucky.

If the rest goes, the Hollaway Wall, at the London Road end of the A6, is all that will stand of UMIST. Blink and you’ll miss it as you whizz past on wheels. A grubby chunk of jagged concrete wall which has both a sculptural and a functional role as a sound buffer, it’s listed due to its association with modernist sculptor Antony Hollaway, who was innovative in his time but not a household name. This was the future, but it was cut short. The Mancunian Way comes to an abrupt stop just past the threshold of the city centre, a diving board going nowhere. Today, its underpasses provide havens for skaters and the homeless as the city goes on overhead at a different speed.

Then on past Downing Street, a far cry from its London namesake. This is the inner-city. The A6 leads into Ardwick, and a small green patch among the fumes, Ardwick Green, with its erratic boulder, a remnant of an ancient time. Georgian, genteel, tranquil and elegant, the Green and its surrounding streets feel like a lagooned island from a different age. Once, this was the edge of the city’s sprawl and not a triangle caught between a petrol station with a Tesco appended onto the side, derelict industrial buildings, and an insalubrious-looking nightclub.

Past Big Bird, the local Jamaican takeaway van, and Ardwick turns into Longsight, with modern St Luke’s Church standing like a sail on the border between the two. In 2012, conceptual artist Martin Creed tried to herald the start of the London Olympics by getting the entire country ringing with bells for three minutes from 8.12am on a Friday morning. It is fair to say that Manchester did not ring with bells. St Luke’s was the only church in the city to take part, and it turns out St Luke’s doesn’t even possess its own bells. At 8am the vicar reached into a wooden cupboard, pulled out a cassette tape marked ‘Births and marriages’ on one side and ‘Deaths’ on the other, and a portable player was set to blast out the sounds of a dying format and a dwindling institution. A couple of ladies emerged in pink fluffy dressing gowns, venturing onto the front door steps of nearby houses, more confused and affronted than aware they were taking part in what was meant to be a mass, participatory public art project. The non-event was celebrated unofficially with a Twitter hashtag: #noneofthebells. Conceptual art doesn't often venture this far out of town.

Across the road is Sunny Lowry Way, not a street but a passageway leading into an estate, named after a local heroine associated with nearby High Street Baths who swam the channel and taught many schoolchildren to swim. Famous for a training regime of 8-egg omelettes, and press images showing her brawn cutting through the waves, a larger than life personality has been reduced to a high-up sign on a nondescript road. Sunny’s generation would find much of this area unrecognisable. Slum clearance. Moving out to Cheshire. On the left stands Daisy Mill, one of the few reminders of the mills and factories that once dominated the skyline. One hulking mass of a building survives, still hoarding all that land, which the council hopes can soon be knocked down to make room for a new school. There’s a population boom. Manchester is a fast-growing city.

I feel for Sunny. Cycling the A6 feels like a feat of endurance too, at times, a gradual uphill slog. I’m never quite the fastest, overtaken by the hi-vis, year-round shorts wearing brigade. Stickers on buses warn ‘Do not overtake on the left’: hang back, or stick your arm out to pass. Buses have ploughed these roads for years, leaving ridges like black volcanic lava which has melted and set in strange formations. This combines with pot holes, broken glass and hub caps to make it a bumpy ride, with bits of old carpet and abandoned umbrellas, scrunched up like the defensive position of a dead spider, gathering at the side of the road. Other bikes crawl along, black clothes and no lights. Do they have a careless attitude to safety or are they just ignorant? Many glide through the red lights but for me, on this stretch of road, traffic lights provide a welcome respite. A chance to stop, to blow my nose and breathe. You lurch to a stop and wheedle towards the Advance stop line, a dedicated space for cyclists to make themselves seen by positioning themselves ahead of the traffic at junctions: there are supposedly fines for those whose wheel crosses the line. However, it’s something taxi drivers need not observe, exempt, as they are, from all the rules of the road.

A man at the junction has stopped too, buffered from the cold and wind in corduroy, a wool hat and a puffer jacket. He holds up a sign, “Jesus Christ: the same today, yesterday and forever.” Optimism, obliviousness – or sheer blind faith? Past Plymouth Grove, where Elizabeth Gaskell's house once stood at the edge of the city. Where we now walk was once all farms and opposite is the Plymouth Grove pub, once home to a modern-day cannabis farm. It’s next to Grove Village, New Labour’'s flagship PFI, where new homes back right up to the main road. You get the sense that these too were political ideas just passing through.

On the main strip in Longsight, the confetti of city life – the rainbow hues of free advertising inserts for discounters like Asda and nearby Lidl – blows across the pavements, and skitters across the road. Foreign language communications dance with local news, but nobody's paying any attention to any of them. In high winds, a carrier bag blows into my back wheel. I stop and spend a good ten minutes disentangling disintegrating plastic fragments from my greasy chain. A number of shops offer threading and waxing,the beauty industry making money off women's insecurities, but it’s also a place for a spot of shopping for those in the know. Authenticity. “Go to Longsight for the best coriander,” I’m told. They sell it by the bunch. Better than the flat, sad, plasticky leaves sold by the greengrocers or the supermarket down the road. The smell of fresh produce mingles with the dingy street smell of grease and grime, incense mixed in with clay ovens.

The locals use a method of crossing, particularly when emerging from the spaces in between parked cars, or from behind buses, I mentally term the ‘Longsight dash'. It’s practised by those with no time nor energy to walk to the crossing: young men, groups in religious dress, mothers and grandmothers clutching tiny hands in oversized uniforms, and the pushers of prams. We all know the pedestrian code: look both ways before crossing the road. They look. They see you, and decide to cross anyway. The young men in particular have perfected the move: head down, body bent slightly, ready for a dash propelled partly by shame, partly by defiance.

A large sign advertises Elliot's Car, van and helicopter hire. This area is transitory, a place that is passed through by a changing population. As you get into Levenshulme you pass numerous buildings reappropriated as ‘colleges’ offering 'ESOL for a diploma’ and, more importantly ‘ESOL for citizenship', ‘Home Office-approved’. “Welcome to your new job.” An arts and technology college, a school for business, performance and music, in what appears to be a converted pub, for those who don’t know what they want to do but know they that they should do something. At one, above fast-food joint ‘Foodies’, English learning takes place with the pungent smell of onions and what increasingly seems to be the national dish of choice, fried chicken, in the background. Knife and fork cross arms in a defiant gesture with a sticker in each window urging: ‘Don't Cook, Just Eat.’ The local Tesco Metro has been ‘closed for refurbishment’ for some time, though this is the understatement of the year. The roof was rendered a skeleton by fire, and the front was been hidden behind hoardings for several months, meaning the groups of schoolgirls waiting to cross the road in hijabs every morning had to find somewhere else to get their pre-class snack.

Nearby the former Arcadia skating rink, being flattened for a new sports centre and swimming pool, has a hidden claim to fame. The most famous tramp of them all, Charlie Chaplin, may have once attended Bennett Primary School down the road in Ardwick. Chaplin's Wikipedia page neither corroborates nor denies this. It merits no mention – a passage from his life brushed from memory, or urban myth, local wishful thinking? What's certain is that he was drawn back later, to skate at the Arcadia. The site of the suburb's current baths sits opposite Levenshulme Library, incubator for one of Levenshulme’s more famous sons, architect Sir Norman Foster who, too, seems to dwell little on his Mancunian past. He too just passed through. Local to global. Global to local.

The area is seen as up-and-coming now, but many of the shops are still improbably specialist: ‘Snooker & Pool tables and accessories’. Manchester might be seen as a big city to some, but to me it feel like a village. I receive emails from colleagues saying they saw me ‘whizz past’, exchange a fleeting smile with acquaintances, get shouted at from moving cars and say a quick ‘hi’ as friends out walking their dog stop at the traffic lights. But there’s still a near-constant sound of sirens. It’s disorientating as they creep up behind you, sounding like they’re coming at you from all angles. I’ve started to feel like I hear them at all times now, a kind of sensory perception before the even start, like an early warning, a phantom limb. Another sensory overload comes from the party car, pulling up alongside you at the junction with its blacked out windows, emitting the rich, spicy smell of cannabis and hip-hop rhythms over bass-heavy beats. You hope the driver's not high off passive smoking. The lights change. The streamline shape is already straight off the mark, zooming off into the distance, as the cars behind struggle to jerk and splutter back into gear.

As the A6 creeps into suburbia, the road widens, a gradual incline towards those hills in the distance. Victorian house conversions, flat piled on top of flat, thin out into neat, polite 1930s semis for families in cul-de-sacs and back routes, with the odd solid detached. The houses start to retreat further back from the road. No-one is going in or out. They never do. Their lives are lived to the rhythm of commuter jobs – and perhaps they get all their shopping delivered too. The street signs change as you leave Manchester to enter another town. Stockport Road becomes Wellington Road North. But it's the smell that says, more than any municipal road sign: 'You are now in Stockport.' As you pass the McVitie’s factory on the edge of Stockport, industrial strengths and quantities of classic baking ingredients mingle in the most intense olfactory hit of sugar, butter and chocolate chips you'll ever experience. Digestives, the nation's favourite, heightened into a smell that is overpowering and all-pervasive.

The next day I read in the Manchester Evening News that there was a new year’s drama on the Stagecoach bus I’d nearly caught. Held up by a gunman in Longsight. Perhaps it’s better I took the bike after all.

Interview with Castles Built in Sand, directors of Helpyourself Manchester (screening at Victoria Baths on Sunday May 5)

Helpyourself Manchester, a recent film telling the story of Manchester’s unsung DIY music promoters, will be screening at this year's Victoria Baths Fanzine Fair (Sunday May 5), accompanied by an exhibition of original fliers from gigs featured in the film. The documentary focuses on a group of friends who found new and creative means of organising and promoting gigs in the mid- to late years of the previous decade, featuring bands such as Burnst, Cat on Form, the Enablers and McWat. From living rooms to basements, the promoters shown in the film put exciting and unheard bands on not for financial reward, but because they loved the music. The film, which makes uses of animation, photography, interviews and archive footage in a cut-and-paste style appropriate to the subject matter, is the work of Castles Built in Sand, a Manchester-based documentary film collective working on a DIY, not-for-profit and copyleft basis. The Shrieking Violet spoke to Castles Built in Sand to find out more about how they formed as a group and their collaborative approach to film-making.

SV: Tell me a bit about Castles Built in Sand – who are you and how did you come together as a collective? 

CBIS: We are a group of visual anthropologists, artists and musicians. Paddy, Huw, Insa, Yas and Birgitta met through their studies (some of us did an MA of Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester). Simon joined us later.

SV: Why did you decide to start a film-making collective? 

CBIS: After our graduation we all wanted to continue making films and to improve our skills. That's why we decided to start working together as a collective – to share skills, equipment and to motivate each other.

SV: You've also collaborated with some of the participants in your films. What do you gain from working collaboratively, both within the collective and with other groups of people such as interviewees, that you don't get working alone? 

CBIS: Working collaboratively allows us to gain different perspectives on the topics we are working on. It also ensures that everyone feels engaged and represented. This is especially important for us in regards to the people we are working with. We want to ensure they feel like they had a say and are portrayed in a way that leaves them empowered. Filmmaking for us is a mutual process, a give and take and learning from each other.

SV: How does the filmmaking process work – how do you set the theme and direction of where your projects are going? Is every project a joint project, or are there some films where certain people take the lead based on their interests or choose to adopt a lesser role?

CBIS: If we work on a project together there is a lot of discussion involved. We are never quite sure what exactly a project will end up as, because of the collaborative approach, everyone has an input which means a project can change quite a bit in the process of making. For our next project we are going to define our roles a bit more, which will be an interesting new approach for us.

However, we are also not always all working together on a project. Sometimes some of us decide not to be engaged in a project due to time constraints or varying interests or because it doesn't make sense to have too many people involved.

SV: How do you choose your subjects? Is there anything that ties all your projects together, either thematically or in the approach taken to filmmaking? 

CBIS: Our projects are not necessary linked in any way, we choose them according to what we are interested in or think is an important topic to portray.

SV: How did Helpyourself Manchester come about? What's your involvement with that scene, why did the film need to be made and why make the film now – in retrospect? 

CBIS: The idea to make a film about Helpyourself Manchester and this part of Manchester's DIY scene came out of conversations Paddy had with Lee, one of our friends who was involved with Helpyourself Manchester. Huw was around for the last few gigs, whereas Insa and Paddy came to Manchester in 2009, a few years after Helpyourself. We wanted to look at the way people had used space in Manchester to organise culture outside of the mainstream. With all the government cuts and the current debates about gentrification it seemed like a topic that is actually quite timeless and important to discuss.

SV: How did you go about making the film and how long did it take? 

CBIS: From start to finish it took us about one and a half years to complete the film. We collected material on the way, interviewed our friends and tried to get as much info as possible. Then we edited separate sequences which we thought should be in the film and which we joined up eventually. Once we had a first watchable version of the fllm (which at the time was about two hours long) we showed it to the people who we had filmed and to friends who hadn't heard about Helpyourself Manchester before. These sessions provided us with a lot of different opinions as to what would work and what wouldn't and suggestions for changes. In the end we cut the film down to 54 minutes.

SV: Your projects seem to have a political dimension running through them to do with power, voice and representation. Do you consciously try to make films from that perspective?

CBIS: It's less a conscious choice to make films which might be considered political, but it rather comes out of our interests and ways of looking at the things going on around us. So it happens naturally rather than us trying to provide a political stance.

SV: Whether focusing on DIY promoters, the residents of a temporary care home, protestors or young people affected by cuts to education, your films quite often depict the type of subjects and people that might not normally have a film made about them. What do the subjects get out of being part of the filmmaking process – and what do we get out of it as viewers? 

CBIS: It is important to show what wouldn't be shown otherwise and to make people conscious of what is going on around them. Film, photography and sound are powerful tools which offer people outside the media focus a way to express themselves. The collaborative way in which we are working hopefully leaves the people we are working with with a feeling of actually having had a possibility to say what they wanted to say.

SV: You've collaborated with bands like Levenshulme Bicycle Orchestra and Tubers in the past; can you explain the importance of sound in your work?

CBIS: Sound lets us see things differently. When the sound is good, the images seem more powerful and engaging.

SV: There is also a really strong sense of place in your films. How would you describe your approach to representing and describing place? 

CBIS: We try to engage with the place or space we portray – you could almost say we let it speak to us. Using different media is very important for this approach. We don't confine ourselves to one medium but use whatever medium we think best conveys a sense of the place. That's where sound is also very important – if we listen we discover different aspects of what contributes to our notion of a place.

SV: Your webpage has quite a few texts as well as films, which seem to stand together – what is the relationship between the texts and the films, and do you find it to be a useful process to write about the processes of making and conceiving films?

CBIS: What we tend to forget is that each medium has its own qualities and its own place in the context of representing a topic. We try to use different methods and media depending on their usefulness to portray a topic as complete and from as many perspectives as possible. Film can't express or explain everything but it gives a good sense of place and people's personalities. Sound lets us experience place from another standpoint. And texts can help us putting everything into a greater context or to deconstruct the images we present. It is important to question different methods of representation and using mixed media allows us to bear the construction of these representations in mind.

SV: What are you working on at the moment and what are you planning to do next? 

CBIS: We have just started working on a trailer for our next project, which will be an apocalyptic photo essay film. This should keep us busy for a while.

SV: Where can people see your work? 

CBIS: We have a blog which we update as regularly as possible. There you can also find a list of upcoming screenings, the next one being Helpyourself Manchester at Victoria Baths on 5 May, as part of the Victoria Baths Fanzine Fair (12-14pm).

Helpyourself Manchester trailer:

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Review: Greater Manchester's Public Swimming Pools: A Pictorial Guide

The Shrieking Violet issue 15 featured a page about Levenshulme Baths, the historic swimming pool in the Manchester suburb of Levenshulme, drawn and written by John Mather, who got in contact after setting himself the challenge of swimming in each of Greater Manchester's 50-odd public pools.

His project is now complete, and the resulting guide, Greater Manchester's Public Swimming Pools: A Pictorial Guide, is out now. Mather's watery journey was a labour of love, and he fights the corner for what he terms “swimming's unique and often understated role in society” – the Guide is clear that the function of swimming reaches far beyond health and fitness to encompass social and community benefits. As well as acting as a guide to each building and each pool's facilities, Mather's book goes out beyond the pool doors to take a wider look at the people and communities they serve, taking care to include something memorable or special about each pool's location, from local landmarks to famous innovations such as Rolls-Royce (Stretford) and Stephenson's Rocket (Eccles), and show the “fascinating and diverse collection of towns and people” that is Greater Manchester. Each entry is handily annotated with essential information such as contact details, location and amenities such as parking.

Mather's love affair with swimming started when he learned to swim in Bury's old Victorian baths, which “seemed not just a place to swim but more like a landmark of civic pride and opulence”. Just as there is a huge diversity of towns in Greater Manchester, there is a great variety in the styles of pools found within them, from those associated with Manchester's first city architect, Henry Price, in the early twentieth century, with the old-fashioned pool-side cubicles remaining (Withington, Chorlton), to a number of pools built in the 1960s and 1970s – including Radcliffe Pool which, Mather said, set a benchmark for future pool building by local authorities – as well as recently opened, bang up-to-date facilities and even a pool in a converted cinema (Tyldesley). Mather views each pool on its merits, without expressing a preference for any architectural period or style.

The Guide is often humorous, and Mather slips in references to local celebrities, from the Rochdale Pioneers, who opened the first successful co-operative shop in the town, to Frank Sidebottom (Altrincham), John Cooper Clarke (Broughton) and George Formby (Atherton), as well as local personalities such as longstanding swimmer Sam Quinn, who has been a Broadway Baths regular for 75 years.

Dive below the surface, and you discover stories about the individuals who have used these pools over the years. Greater Manchester, Mather says, has a long tradition of swimming and Olympic success, a “long forgotten 'Golden Age' of swimming prior to the First World War”, when “Greater Manchester's swimmers literally led the world”. For instance, Henry Taylor from Chadderton, a swimming instructor for many years in the town, won three golds at the 1908 London Olympics. Today, the region's pools are used by everyone from learner swimmers to elite swimmers from national and international teams, and have hosted many Olympic and Commonwealth medallists.

Pool buildings have social history written into their brickwork and tiles. Now derelict, Collier Street Baths in Salford, opened in 1856, is Britain's oldest surviving swimming baths building. Withington Baths in Manchester, which still says 'Men' and 'Women' above the entrance where the sexes would once have been separated before entering the water, took the daring step of allowing the city's first mixed bathing in 1914. No visit to Manchester's pools, of course, would be complete without a reference to Edwardian water palace Victoria Baths (despite the current lack of water!), and Mather considers the past, present and future uses of the building.

I read the Guide as a call to action, a reminder to get swimming and use some of these pools before they disappear forever. Rochdale's spectacular art deco Central Baths, which were still in use as recently as this summer, have now been demolished. The futures of Levenshulme and Chorlton Baths are both uncertain, and there are plans to close the historic, much-loved Royton and Crompton pools in Oldham (Crompton Baths is the oldest Baths in Greater Manchester still serving its original purpose) in order to replace them with a single, modern facility.

Greater Manchester's Public Swimming Pools: A Pictorial Guide can be purchased for £5.99 at www.lulu.com/shop/john-c-mather/greater-manchesters-public-swimming-pools/paperback/product-20441129.html.

The SHED Gallery, Levenshulme - allotment art this weekend

MANCHESTER’S smallest art gallery will be offering a close-up glimpse at the work of a local artist this weekend. On Saturday and Sunday, the miniscule SHED gallery in Levenshulme - which, as the name suggests, is housed in a garden shed - will allow visitors to peek into the latest sketch book of Longsight based artist Annette Ebanks, entitled Flower Power.

Ebanks will also be showing colourful canvases worked with different drawing techniques, including oil pastel, collage and charcoal, at the unique gallery, which is situated at the Tonbridge Road Allotments in Levenshulme.

Visitors will also be able to flick through Ebanks’ last sketch book, African Masks, which was published by Manchester’s Slap-Dash Books, as well as meet the artist on both days.

Ebanks, who has a history in textile design, exhibited prints in the café at the Whitworth Art Gallery last year.

Her expressive art, based around plants and flowers, will be accompanied by home grown vegetables on Sunday, as the allotments will also be throwing the gates open to the public for their Spring Open Day.

As well as being an opportunity to browse art in the open air at the Gallery’s first show of the year, there will be activities and demonstrations for all the family, provided by The Community Allotment Project.

The exhibition is being held by Pool Arts, a community arts organisation that formed in 1999 to give local people access to the resources and space to make art. Pool Arts is based at St Luke’s Church in Longsight.

Curator Alison Kershaw said: “It will be an intimate exhibition as visitors will actually be able to handle Annette’s books and look through them. Her books are bursting with colour.”

1-4pm, Saturday 4 and Sunday 5 April

The SHED gallery

Tonbridge Road Allotments

Tonbridge Road

Levenshulme

M19 2TQ

http://www.stlukesartproject.org/

www.poolarts.org

ArtYarn knits the Shed Gallery, Levenshulme, a jumper for Christmas

There has been a growing interest in the home made over the past few years, even before the current credit crunch forced people to seek less costly goods and new forms of entertainment. Knitting in particular has enjoyed a revival and, far from being a solitary, spinsterish activity indulged in by lonely old ladies in rocking chairs, it's become more and more common to see groups sat knitting or crocheting in bars and clubs.

Inspired by groups across the world such as Knitta Please from Texas, and the textile artist Elaine Bradford, artists Rachael Elwell and Sarah Hardacre set up the guerilla knitting project ArtYarn six months ago.

Rachel, who is based at Islington Mill, attributes knitting's enduring popularity to the craze for all things “retro-vintage”. She says: “Knitting has made a big comeback in recent years, and people arebuying more handmade goods.”

ArtYarn, however, is separating knitting from its association with misshapen scarves and unwanted jumpers given by relatives who don't know what else to get you for Christmas and turning it into an “artistic medium”.

If you were at the New Islington festival at the end of summer, you probably saw ArtYarn's brightly-coloured 'tree cosies', tree-shaped garments adorning the trunks of trees in Ancoats. The duo also works in street art, 'yarn bombing' various cities, from London and Berlin to New York, by tying small patches of knitting to street furniture as “graffiti knitting”.

ArtYarn was invited to contribute to the Gaia project at this year's Liverpool Biennial, creating 'plastic bag bombs' out of yarn recycled from carrier bags found on the streets of Liverpool. Now, it's embarking on its most ambitious activity yet, knitting a jumper to cover the Shed art gallery - a small gallery run by independent arts organisation Pool Arts - at the Tonbridge Road Allotments in Levenshulme.

The project started with a joky remark that ArtYarn should make the shed a jumper to “keep it warm over the winter when it's closed”, but curator Alison Kershaw liked the idea. Each part of the shed was measured for panels of knitted patches created during public sewing workshops at St Lukes church, Longsight, and donated by the communities of Longsight and Levenshulme. Crocheted squares will tile the roof, pockets below the windows will hold flower boxes, and permanent knitted curtains will be installed.

Rachael likes the“social aspect” of knitting, and estimates there are at least ten knitting clubs in Manchester, including the Levenshulme Knitters and the University of Manchester Knittingsoc as well as groups that meet at the 8^th Day Cafe and Odd Bar. She set up the popular Kings

Arms Knitting Club in September 2007, saying: “ I couldn't really knit – I could do the basics but I wanted to learn some new skills such as crochet. After pulling my hair out over knitting books and youtube videos I realised the best way is to learn from other knitters.”

Through word of mouth, the club swelled from being a select gathering of three knitters to attracting ten to fifteen knitters a week. Rachael says: “Some weeks we can't even sit down – it's absolutely packed out with knitters, both male and female, ranging from beginners who have never picked up a pair of knitting needles in their lives to people who have been knitting for 40 odd years.”

Conventional garments and baby clothes are popular, but there are also arts students who knit with videotape and other crafts such as embroidery are encouraged. The most unusual work being created is Mexican wrestling masks.

The club meets in the Snug, a small room off the main bar at the Kings Arms, so it's not closed off from the rest of the building. Regulars, artists from the studios upstairs or people there for plays and gigs can wander in and look at works in progress, such as a spectacular knitted chandelier that's covered with French knitted tubes.

The knitters fund raise for Breast Cancer Care, and ArtYarn has further politicised a craft often seen as sedentary or old-fashioned by creating a blanket from 1,400 knitted squares, donated from all over the North-West, for the Manchester Oxfam Maternal Mortality campaign. Each patch represents one of the women across the world who dies in childbirth each day. The blanket was displayed at Beluga bar during the Labour Party Conference as a “knitted petition”. Rachael says it was effective in drawing attention to the cause as knitting is something “most people can relate to”, whether through knitting themselves or seeing one of their family knitting.

The Kings Arms Knitting Club meets at the Kings Arms, 11 Bloom Street, Salford, M3 6AN, every Monday from 7-9pm.

The Shed jumper project will be launched on Thursday 18 December from 3-7pm with mulled wine, mince pies and knitting demonstrations at Tonbridge Road Allotments, Levenshulme, M19. There is a frequent 192 bus service from Piccadilly to Levenshulme. Get off at The Wheatsheaf on Stockport Road, turn left into Broom Lane, then take the first right into Tonbridge Road.

The jumper can also be viewed from Friday 19 December – Sunday 21 December from noon-3pm

www.artyarn.blogspot.com

www.myspace.com/knittingkings

www.poolarts.org