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.

The Shrieking Violet and Manchester Modernist Society joint event — Newspapers on Film, Saturday December 11

Newspapers on film

Saturday 11th December, 3.30pm-6.30pm

Manchester Modernist Society HQ, 142 Chapel Street, Salford M3 6AF

Free

The Shrieking Violet fanzine and Manchester Modernist Society invite you to a seasonal gathering celebrating Manchester's media heritage through documentaries from the North West Film Archive.

There will also be some baked goods from recipes which have appeared in past issues of the Shrieking Violet fanzine — expect shortbread, sloe gin, grape vodka, tea and an edible, highly glittered Daily Express building.

Showing

People and Places Around Ordsall

Salford newsagent, amateur filmmaker and onetime newspaper delivery boy Ralph Brookes documented the changing face of the inner city area Ordsall in the 1960s and ‘70s, making over ninety home movies about the community around him, documenting everything from his home, family, birthdays and Christmas to mingling with the stars for an episode of Coronation Street which was filmed in the local park.

Here is the News

Colourful, jaunty, jazz-soundtracked film about how the Evening News is produced. Made in 1968 to celebrate the newspaper's centenary, the film shows the 'daily miracle' that is producing a newspaper, from visiting the various departments in the newspaper offices to distributing copies around the city to be read in suburban family homes.

News Story

A day in the life of the famous Guardian newspaper in 1960 (four years before it moved to London), from meeting the journalists in the various departments which put it together to printing with linotype and hot lead and its distribution around the country.

The event accompanies a media themed special of Manchester-based fanzine The Shrieking Violet which looks at various aspects of Manchester and the media — including Jack Hale of Manchester Modernist Society writing in praise of the innovative Daily Express building on Great Ancoats Street. The films in the North West film archive help give a sense not just of the labour and space intensive process that traditionally went into making newspapers, pre-digitisation, and the buildings in which they were made, but also illustrate the importance of newspapers in the city. The films, which each last around twenty minutes, provide fascinating insights into the time in which they were made: Here is the News is an optimistic look at the modernist city in the swinging sixties, whereas People and Places in Ordsall depicts the other side of life in the region, and the great changes Salford was undergoing at the time as part of slum clearance programmes.

Poster by Lauren Velvick.

www.manchestermodernistsociety.org/

Here's the edible Express Building — shortbread topped with readymade black icing from the Arndale Market, into which was embedded many silver balls. Sprinkled with black edible glitter.

Ralph Brookes — Salford newsagent and amateur filmmaker

Ralph Brookes saw almost a century of Salford life. Born in 1900, he was a delivery boy for the Evening News and Evening Chronicle who then joined the navy, became a docker and went on to run the family newsagents on New Park Road in Ordsall. In the late 1950s, Mr Brookes, already a keen photographer of everyday people and places, took up a video camera and started recording life in inner city Salford on Standard 8 film*; the man who sold the official version of the news and had delivered the news to local houses started to create his own, informal stories of the neighbourhood around him. The resulting silent films show some of the radical changes the working class area underwent in the space of a few years as part of Salford Council’s slum clearance plan, which led to Mr Brookes’ newsagents being knocked down and him and his wife being moved into new housing.

The film People and Places Around Ordsall starts with Mr Brookes mingling with a crowd that has gathered to watch Coronation Street stars film a tug-of-war in Ordsall Park, which is later shown on Mr Brookes' TV screen as it is being broadcast. Mr Brookes’ shop and home stood in a row of other shops and houses bordering the park, in an area of traditional Victorian terraces not far from a real life street called Coronation Street on the New Barracks Estate.

Mr Brookes’ highly personal films are home movies and thus probably weren’t meant to be seen by a wide audience. They celebrate events such as weddings, birthdays and Christmas — showing his grandchildren dressed up smartly, the house decked out for Christmas and the table laden with festive food. But his camera also frequently visited the outside of the shop which, it seems, was a meeting place for local children who hung around and read comics or played games in the street. We’re also taken to the local nursery, full of smiling children and to the local swimming pool, as well as venturing into the shell of a church mid-demolition.

Mr Brookes also often travelled further afield, and showed the world outside his immediate community. It appears that he took his camera nearly everywhere: window shopping in a toy shop in Manchester city centre, admiring central library, taking us round the exhibits at the zoo, even on a daytrip to Liverpool on the train to look at the Christmas lights — Mr Brookes spent the train journey glued to the window, his camera speeding through the snowy landscape outside.

People and Places Around Ordsall is a collage of snippets of film spanning the seasons, shot across a wide time frame, which leads up to a scene showing the empty plot of land where his shop once stood. Though there’s no commentary explicitly stated in words, by choosing to take us into his bathroom earlier in the film, and showing us how the floor tiles match the bath, with a carefully co-ordinated checked towel hung neatly over the side, you get a sense Mr Brookes was proud of his home. Mr Brookes’ camera closes in on the compulsory purchase order made for his property in 1969, returning several times to the value of £5 which was to be given by the council in compensation.

I watched the films People and Places Around Ordsall and Christmas Streetscenes; Manchester and Liverpool in the North West Film Archive.

*There is a fascinating essay by Heather Norris Nicholson comparing the films of Ralph Brookes and Michael Goodger from 1957-1973, and their differing representations of Ordsall, which can be read here.

The Shrieking Violet Issue 11 media special

Issue 11 of the Shrieking Violet is out now. It is a media special — I started with the aim of looking at Manchester media city then and now, considering the history of the city and print, but ended up focusing on a few specific areas I found particularly interesting.

This issue's cover is by Dan Russell of Manchester Municipal Design Corporation, which produces the Things Happen fanzine (to read the current issue, including my article about the Ashton Canal, click here).

I'm interested in the way old newspaper premises still leave a mark on the city, from the Printworks to the Daily Express Building. I interviewed Manchester Modernist Society in 2009 when they had just formed and, when I asked them each to pick their favourite modernist building in Manchester, Jack Hale chose the Daily Express building because of the way it combines form and function. I asked him to elaborate by writing an article on the building for this issue.

I've also considered free weekly titles Shortlist and Stylist, and their skewed perceptions of men and women.

Evan Cowen has written a tragicomic diary of week undertaking work experience — that essential, yet often frustrating rite of passage for anyone hoping to work in the media — at his local newspaper in Cumbria.

Manchester based artist, singer and performer Lowri Evans, who is currently living in Brazil, has captured a day in her life as a page from the São Paulo Folha newspaper.

Matthew Austin of Austin Brothers Films has written an account of the challenges of producing a feature film on a tight budget, and looks ahead to the premiere of their debut feature length film Cricket, which will close the Salford Film Festival at the Lowry Outlet Mall on November 14.

Other articles in this issue include my write-up of a visit to the North West Film Archive to watch documentary films about Manchester newspapers from the '60s and '70s, which are fascinating not just as portraits of the publications themselves but glimpses into the society of the time and Manchester in days gone by.

I am interested in not just the 'official' media that forms the narrative of the city, but also independent, alternative publications, and I have profiled publications that have inspired me, from the Salford Star magazine to local fanzines.

I have recently been asking Manchester based zines and magazines why they still bother to produce a print publication — a very labour intensive form of communication — when it is so cheap, easy and convenient to publish online. I have compiled a few of the answers.

Issue 11 also features illustration by Alex Boswell, poetry by Rachel Cranshaw and photography Manchester Daily Photo blogger Paul Capewell. Chef and film maker Rich Howe contributes recipes for banana soup and an Elvis Sandwich, whilst Norwich based singer Kayleigh Read has written a recipe for vegan moussaka.

I went a bit linocut crazy having recently rediscovered it!

Free paper copies of the Shrieking Violet will be scattered around Manchester city centre at some stage today and tomorrow. Likely places include the Cornerhouse, Piccadilly Records, Koffee Pot, An Outlet, Oklahoma, Good Grief fanzine shop in Afflecks Palace, Nexus Art Cafe, Magma Books, Manchester Craft Centre etc.

Download Issue 11 with the pages in the right order for printing here.

Read Issue 11 with the pages in the right order for reading here.

Open publication - Free publishing - More media

Back issues of the Shrieking Violet can be downloaded here.

To obtain a free paper copy of this zine or any back issues (free service), email your name and address to Natalie.Rose.Bradbury@googlemail.com.

To contribute to future issues email Natalie.Rose.Bradbury@googlemail.com or join The Shrieking Violet fanzine facebook group.

In an homage to the pointless lists Shortlist magazine loves so much, here is a list of trivia relating to things I did during the making of this issue:

Went from never having seen any of Sex and the City to having seen all of it apart from the second film.
Started watching Mad Men but only got as far as the first two episodes.
Read a copy of Nuts magazine, Zoo magazine and Glamour magazine.
Used my John Rylands University Library alumni card and spent a couple of hours pretending to be studious.
Was inspired by watching the films Beautiful Losers and $100 Dollars and a T-Shirt.
Cut my fingers open several times with lino cutting tools.
Discovered and fell in love with balsamic vinegar.
Attended two debates about the media, one about ownership of the media organised by the Mule newspaper which featured Stephen Kingston of the Salford Star, Dave Toomer from the National Union of Journalists and Nigel Barlow from Inside the M60, and an Urbis Research Forum on digital media and the city which had representatives from Creative Tourist, Manchester Climate Fortnightly and Future Everything on the panel and had a pessimistic tone but seemed to conclude that media works best when it is a complementary combination of new digital media and traditional print media.
Joined twitter because everyone else has.

Newspapers on Film — visiting the North West Film Archive

I first became interested in films about newspapers after discovering Wakefield Express by the Free Cinema director Lindsay Anderson, a portrait of the town’s newspaper commissioned to mark the paper’s centenary in 1952, which places the Express at the heart of the Yorkshire community it serves. Lasting just over thirty minutes, it’s a snapshot of Wakefield life, and the city’s expansion, which the Express was there to record at every moment — as the narrator notes, ‘the Express has grown with Wakefield’. It was rescreened in the town last year during protests against the Wakefield Express leaving its town centre offices and moving to the outskirts of town.

Similarly, films in the North West Film Archive document Manchester’s history as the ‘second city of newspapers’, where both northern editions of the daily national papers were produced, as well as Greater Manchester's own regional daily paper the Manchester Evening News.

News Story is a twenty minute behind the scenes portrait of the Manchester Guardian made in 1960, four years before it moved to London (and a year after it dropped the ‘Manchester' part of its name), which traces the history of the paper from its foundation in 1821 following the Peterloo Massacre to its status as an international paper.

The NWFA also holds two documentaries about the Manchester Evening News (like the Wakefield Express, the Evening News, too, has now moved out of town — from Deansgate in the city centre to Chadderton, Oldham earlier this year): Here is the News, made to mark the paper’s centenary year in 1968 and The Voice of a Region, from 1970-2, which celebrate the Evening News’ role as ‘an important voice for a famous city’ and ‘a strong heart for the community it serves’.

Lingering on the city’s achievements and admiring its new modernist architecture, they’re modern and optimistic, talking admiringly of Manchester’s abundance of supermarkets and self-service stores, panning past glamorous shop fronts, showing celebrities such as George Best and exalting the young people of the city. In Here is the News, bright yellow Ford vans glide around the city's roads to a soundtrack of jaunty jazz, distributing newspapers like rolled up rays of sunshine.

Shown being read in a suburban home by members of the nuclear family, the Manchester Evening News is ‘the family newspaper that is indeed a member of the family’. It’s a ‘pleasure at the end of the working day’ that's ‘read by all types of people — men and women, young and old, rich and poor’, and is ‘full of the sorts of things that everyone is interested in’, from the stock market, football, dogs and horses to fashion pages, recipes and hints for housewives and nightclubs, cinemas and jobs for young people.

The films rush around the different departments that work towards the ‘daily miracle’ that is the production of a newspaper; from crime reporters at the scene of the crime to clattering typewriters with hands dancing over the keys, splashing chemicals in the darkroom, pipe-smoking men in waistcoats, girls chattering on telesales headsets, the sawing of metal plates and the rolling of printing presses that could turn out up to 38,000 papers an hour.

The Voice of a Region visits the Evening News’ then new premises, purpose-built by the architects Leach Rhodes Walker next to John Rylands Library on Deansgate (where Spinningfields is now), praising the ‘striking modern building’ surrounded by courtyards and squares where the public can relax, ‘soothed by the sight of flowers’. It concludes ‘as the city continues to grow, so will the newspaper’.

Unfortunately, though, within decades the old ways of newspaper production were becoming obsolete. In complete contrast to the confidence of the Evening News films, The Way It Was comprises of grainy, jerky footage shot in Thomson House (now the Printworks entertainment complex) on Withy Grove, base of the Mirror and Telegraph, which was once home to the largest composing room in Europe.

Filmed shortly before the printworks was taken over by the press baron Robert Maxwell in 1985, maudlin classical music accompanies images of the massive machinery which has come to rest, zooming in on contemporary headlines and hovering over the word ‘redundancies’. Another brief film, New Newspaper Premises, shows old staff who made been made redundant being shown the new computerised facilities which replaced them.

If you're interested in seeing archive footage relating to any aspect of local history, you can search the North West Film Archive's website and make an appointment to go in for a viewing. Also look out for public screenings of highlights from the collection.

Michael Portillo's Great British Railway Journeys

Having read finally read the DJ Stuart Maconie's portrait of the north of England, Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North (a Christmas present I gave my dad, both parents being avid listeners to his Radio 2 show, a year or two ago) whilst visiting my parents in Kent for Christmas, it was a delight to find another guide to the north was being broadcast on my return to Manchester.

Great British Railway Journeys, which was shown this week, is a daily, half-hour documentary in which Michael Portillo takes the train from Liverpool to Scarborough in sections, exploring the country's first passenger railway line, which was opened in 1830, accompanied by the writing of 19th century train fanatic George Bradshaw. At 6.30pm, it's a welcome and educational alternative to Hollyoaks.

On the surface, the two projects couldn't be more different — Maconie's a northerner, from Wigan, with a background in music journalism who presents radio shows on fairly obscure music, and Cambridge educated Portillo was once a controversial Thatcherite MP, but both offer affectionate portraits of the north that made me feel that, if I was the type of person who made new year's resolutions, I would resolve to get to know the north better and spend my weekends daytripping and taking more excursions by train.

Interestingly, although Maconie grew up in the north, both broadly approach as outsiders. An exile to the home counties, the north Maconie returns to is in many ways greatly different to the one in which he grew up (especially the regeneration of the big cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and, most of all, Leeds). As the title suggests, Pies and Prejudice aims to in some way demystify the north and its rich heritage for southerners, many of whom have rarely ventured far north of London.

Maconie's book also considers what it is to be northern — he seems to suggest there's a north west-north east divide almost as great as the north-south divide, with those from the north east considering themselves the 'true northerners' (as he points out, 'it's a long way away — not on the way to anywhere except Berwick or Oslo in a slow boat'). He touches on rivalries such as historical Yorkshire-Lancashire friction more than Portillo, who moves seamlessly from Cheshire to Lancashire to Yorkshire.

Witty and opinionated, and written in an almost hyperactively detailed, dense style, Maconie's book isn't afraid to challenge and offer controversial opinions. In contrast, Portillo's a far more laid back host, offering an inoffensive presenting style and generally content to let the people of the north tell their own stories.

He approaches a great range of interviewees, who exude a passion for the place they're from and what they do. These include workers at an Eccles cake factory, milliners at a hatmakers in Denton and Manchester historian Jonathan Schofield. A chicken keeper in Todmorden spreads the word of the town's grow your own food movement, knitters of fishing sweaters in Filey demonstrate how their craft has been handed down the generations and a jolly, smiley train spotter in York admits he's generally in his 'own little world' . Portillo gamely joins in various activities, having a go at folding his own Eccles cake, creating a trilby and even learning Scouse.

One way in which both Maconie and Portillo present the north is through their culinary traditions, from Wigan's renowned pies and Uncle Joe's Mint Balls to the black pudding and flat bottom muffins Maconie samples in Bury, and the Indian food he eats in Bradford and Oldham. Fish and chips crops up over and over again in Portillo's programme as encapsulating the difference the railways made to people's lives - as he says, they entered 'every corner of people's lives'. Landlocked cities such as Manchester became inland ports, and people who would have previously only been able to eat locally caught freshwater fish were introduced to 'cheap and fast' meals such as cod and chips.

Both Pies and Prejudice and Great British Railway Journeys are immensely educational, and obviously meticulously researched, covering historical events in a city's life and how they relate to today, in Manchester's case from the Peterloo Massacre - detailed by Maconie - to the IRA bomb.

They also made me want to spend more time going on holiday in my own country, and realise how much there is to explore so close.

Michael Portillo's Great British Railway Journeys can be watched on the BBC iPlayer here.

The series continues at 6.30pm on BBC2 next week, with Michael Portillo heading north to Scotland via Cumbria.

Manchester on Film, the Cornerhouse, Thursday May 14

I’ve long wanted to go inside the North West Film Archive on Chorlton Street, intrigued by what celluloid time capsules of Manchester life lie within. Last night I got a taster, at a special screening of films from the archive at the Cornerhouse.

I’ve also long been meaning to write an article about the decline of the local press in relation to a film about one newspaper, the Wakefield Express, that was recently rescreened during protests against moving the Wakefield Express from its city centre site to an out of town location.

I’ve wanted to be a reporter for as long as I can remember, and finished my news writing training at the end of January, only to enter an industry in decline, every week bringing news of more and more redundancies on weekly and daily newspapers.

It was during my adventures in the film section of Central Library on an early day of unemployment that I discovered what is probably my new favourite film - Wakefield Express: Portrait of a Newspaper, directed by Lindsay Anderson in 1952.

Imagine my delight when last night I discovered that Manchester has its own version, produced by the Guardian in 1960. News Story is a short documentary film that explains the function of the paper - ‘to inform and entertain through news, comment and opinion’ - as well as how it was made (these were the days of Linotype and hot lead).

Lasting only twenty minutes, the film goes behind the scenes at the offices of the Manchester Evening News and Guardian, four years before the Guardian moved to London. It’s a portrait of the Manchester Guardian, tracing the history of the paper, from its formation in 1821, following the Peterloo Massacre, through its famous editor CP Scott to its status an international paper sending news, via Manchester, to cities all over Europe, from Vienna to Milan.

The film visits each section of the newspaper in turn, including the editor and subeditors. We meet the writers on the international news desk, where we hear about floods in India, and local reporters interviewing strikers, as well as being introduced to the sports desk, cartoon section and features writers.

Reporters call in stories from telephone boxes and copy is sent around the country by wire machine before the paper makes its journey across the United Kingdom by train.

All the films shown were fascinating, including a behind the scenes look at Manchester City in the days long before football was the big business it has become today.

My other favourite, though, was Late Hope Street, from 1968, a grainy black and white film - ‘deliberately arty’ according to the man who introduced it - showing the regeneration of Hulme and Moss Side, and the slum clearance of whole areas of terraced housing. The man warned us that it would be accompanied by pathos inducing music, and sad strings led us to sympathise with the narrator, a lady who was refusing to leave her home amongst boarded up shells and bulldozers. She spoke of the pride the people around her had in their houses, and clearly couldn’t understand why the council was trying to get rid of her home. Against shots of people carrying front doors on their backs over heaps of rubble where streets once stood and children removing salvageable furniture through front windows, she told us ‘all we wanted was a bathroom and an indoor toilet’. She spoke of communities split up and flung across the city, often miles from each other.

Our Friends the Police was more lighthearted, showing an almost unrecognisable Manchester of flat caps and cobblestones, horses and carts and double decker trams, adverts for Bovril everywhere.

We were shown some propaganda films too, from a fundraising film for Manchester Society for the Blind, humorous for its outdated attitudes, to Summer on the Farm, a wartime drive to get people working out in the fields that emphasised the interdependence between city and country. A City Speaks, from 1946, was the most exhilarating, a council produced film that set the rollercoasters of Belle Vue, speeding over the city, a wrestling bout and a football match against the Halle Orchestra playing Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries.

One of the few colour films showed a 1970s Piccadilly Gardens as a riot of flowers in the sunshine - very different to how it is today! Smithfield Market, similarly, showed the activity of the now boarded up, deserted market on Swan Street in the days when it was a thriving place in which to buy flowers, meat and vegetables.

There was lots of architecture on display, including an unrecognisable Market Street, and landmark events like King George opening Central Library and laying the foundation stone of the Town Hall extension, but as ever it was the shots of ordinary people and day to day life that I liked best.

http://www.nwfa.mmu.ac.uk/