Friday 17 December 2021

Winter Hill sloe gin (Is this the way to San Marino?)

I had never been to Winter Hill – an open expanse of moorland above the large industrial town of Bolton – before. As a committed urbanite, I hadn’t walked up many hills of any scale. It wasn’t until the summer of 2021 that I finally fulfilled a long-held ambition of climbing Kinder Scout in the Peak District. I was inspired by a longstanding interest in the famous Kinder trespass of 1932, which pitted the rights of working people against private landowners who sought to deny them the freedom to roam in the open countryside that surrounded polluted, overcrowded towns and cities. When I heard about ‘Winter Hill 125’, therefore – a march to commemorate another successful and significant, but lesser-known, mass trespass – it seemed like the perfect excuse to get on the train to Bolton and take another walk. 
I didn’t expect it to be so far – or for this sunny Sunday in early September to be one of the last blazing hot days of the year. From the station, I walked alongside busy arterial roads to the start point of the march, a nondescript health centre a mile and a half out of Bolton town centre. Mingling with the crowd, I followed a colourful array of banners bearing socialist slogans and campaigning imagery, as the beats of the PCS union’s samba band buoyed us uphill through residential streets. Most of my fellow walkers seemed to know each other – and commented that I appeared to be the youngest on the walk by some distance! Many shared memories of taking part in similar commemorative walks, on previous anniversaries (including the centenary of the Winter Hill trespass in 1996). 

As we passed through different neighbourhoods, people turned out to wave: everyone, young and old, seemed pleased to see us. Heading towards the outskirts of the town, the houses changed in character, from dense redbrick terraces to mellow stone. Eventually, the roads narrowed to a country lane. I ate handfuls of blackberries from the side of the road, and picked a few sloes – a woman of South Asian heritage, curious, asked me what I was doing. 
As we left the town behind, the air began to clear and the samba band dispersed. For the first time, I stopped to look behind me, and saw the mass of people in the distance. There were hundreds – you don’t appreciate how many there are when you’re in the middle of it. I realised how high we were now, the town far below us. 
I kept walking. As we picked our way across the moors, over rough stones and clumps of grass, my footing became less steady. What should have been panoramic views of the surrounding landscapes were obscured by haze, and sheep and moorland was all that could be seen. Climbing higher and higher, I began to wonder where we were actually aiming for – and if we would ever reach ‘the top’. Eventually, six miles out of town, we seemed to come to a natural pause at a TV transmitter, a giant aerial stretching into the deep blue skies above, almost too tall to comprehend. 
Other walkers took out their sandwiches and made small talk with the Bolton Mountain Rescue team, parked up in a van. I wondered what going on. It turned out these were splinter groups, local rambling societies with plans to go in different directions and find their own routes across the moors. It appeared that I had, in my zeal, outpaced the rest of the organised march, and that we were now waiting for them to catch up. I felt truly as if I was in the middle of nowhere. It would be a long walk back down again and I began to panic, wondering how I would ever find my way back to the station. 
‘There’ll be buses from San Marino,’ I was repeatedly reassured. But what was San Marino? A little bit of southern Europe in windswept, post-industrial Lancashire? It seemed unlikely. Eventually, and gratefully, I was rescued by some friendly faces. Two former colleagues from my past working in the co-operative movement (which felt like a lifetime ago) appeared, who I hadn’t seen in years, and who lived nearby. 
We walked downhill together, a shorter and gentler route. San Marino was a Mediterranean restaurant in a picturesque spot overlooking a reservoir (one of many in the area, originally built in the Victorian era to service Bolton’s growing industries). There, we were met by local buses, which took us back to the town centre free of charge. The short journey back to town wasn’t just a welcome opportunity to rest my legs, but to catch up with others on the walk, find common ground and connections, and share stories. Winter Hill had brought us together.

Thursday 18 November 2021

The Shrieking Violet in the University of Salford Library

A full set of back issues of The Shrieking Violet is now available to view in the University of Salford Library zine collection.
This has entailed returning to the cheap photocopier shop on Oxford Road where I copied issues of The Shrieking Violet between circa 2009 and 2014.  
It felt really strange stepping back into a spot where I had spent so many hours engaged in the repetitive and almost meditative motions of copying, folding, ordering and compiling. I always thought of The Shrieking Violet as a zine about the city, but I realised for the first time how personal and autobiographical they were at the same time, almost like a diary of discovery and learning at a formative time of my life. Reading back now, I was struck by how righteous my younger self was at times, but also by how long I’ve held the same interests and motivations (from a very early age), which have only deepened and expanded over time.

Part of me wondered how I ever had the time, energy and motivation to do such things, how I managed to write so much, and if I was mad to do this. 
I thought about getting a set of back issues printed professionally for the library (which would have been a lot less onerous and time-consuming), but going back to the photocopier made me realise how intrinsic the material and act of photocopying and folding by hand was to The Shrieking Violet. While there are many things I would do differently now, not just from a design perspective, but to improve accessibility and legibility (for example I never realised how tiny the text was!), there’s something that really appeals to me not just about the instant, cheap format, but the unpredictability and randomness of the quality of the reproduction and the tone of the ink according to the individual machine. Perhaps it’s because no matter what my interests are, the spirit of punk is there somewhere in the background, underlying everything I do … 
I also always enjoy becoming reacquainted with one of my favourite ever interviews, with the artist Maurice Carlin, in issue 12 of The Shrieking Violet (2011), about his project The Self Publishers, which collected and compiled discarded sheets found in photocopier shops around Manchester and Salford. 
Other issues particularly pertinent to Salford include issue 9 (a special guide to Sounds from the Other City festival), issue 23, which features Claire Hignett on the story of the Basque children who were evacuated to Salford during the Spanish Civil War, and issue 24 (The Shrieking Violet guide to the Public Art of Central Salford). 
The zine collection can be viewed during library opening hours (24-hours daily for students) and during staffed hours (until 9pm daily) for visitors, at the Clifford Whitworth Library, University of Salford, M5 4NT. 
All back issues of the Shrieking Violet can also be viewed online at www.nataliebradbury.co.uk/publishing.

Saturday 4 September 2021

Modernist Heroines article in Gender, Place & Culture by Morag Rose


Congratulations to Dr Morag Rose on the publication of her journal article in Gender, Place & Culture, ‘From an aviatrix to a eugenicist: walking with Manchester’s Modernist Heroines’, which documents Manchester’s Modernist Heroines, a joint local history project between the joint Loiterers Resistance Movement, Manchester Modernist Society and the Shrieking Violet in 2011. The article focuses on the alternative walking tour Morag developed, inspired by the ten twentieth-century women we highlighted through the project, and explores walking as feminist pedagogy; it's been great to see the project revisited, contextualised and reevaluated from a new perspective.

Read Morag's article online here.

Read the Manchester’s Modernist Heroines publication here, and find out more about the project and the heroines, here.

Sunday 27 June 2021

How it started: How it’s going: Darren Nixon and Laura Hopkinson, in dialogue with Natalie Bradbury, PAPER Gallery, 3 July-7 August


How it started
How it’s going
brings together new work on paper by Darren Nixon and Laura Hopkinson, shown in dialogue with The Fourdrinier writer Natalie Bradbury. For Nixon and Hopkinson as artists, and Bradbury as a writer, the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic have also presented an opportunity to experiment with new media and explore different ways of working. In the past, Nixon and Hopkinson have worked primarily with video, incorporating elements of performance, painting, installation and sculptural intervention. Shown across PAPER and PAPER², the work on display in How it started How it’s going reflects a change of direction for both artists, both of whom are working with paper for the first time. This was prompted in part by the constraints imposed by lockdown, including a lack of access to studio space and a necessity to work with materials found close to hand. 

 Nixon’s resulting work is drawn from a large mass of collages, numbering more than four hundred in total. In these collages, found images, alongside images newly created by the artist, are reworked, redrawn and reimagined in new combinations and pairings, creating absurd, surreal and playful juxtapositions. Hopkinson has developed a series of witty text-based drawings, incorporating elements of wordplay alongside found phrases sourced from Amazon product reviews. As a writer whose work usually entails in-depth research, a tightly controlled style and close attention to detail, Bradbury has sought to rediscover the freedom, looseness and spontaneity of writing freehand on paper, without a pre-determined outcome. From their origins on paper, the bodies of work created by Nixon and Hopkinson have undergone a process of transformation. Scanned and transmitted digitally, the artworks have travelled backwards and forwards between Bradbury, Nixon and Hopkinson as large-scale file transfers. 

These electronic images have formed the basis of an ongoing, three-way collaboration: each has navigated through the work with a shared sense of humour, play and openness to multiple readings. 

The aim of How it started How it’s going is not to present two artists’ work side-by-side; instead, the show offers a snapshot of a conversation in progress. Rather than seeking to interpret or explain, How it started How it’s going sketches out creative connections between the artists’ work, which may act as starting points for further stories.


PAPER #67: How it started How it’s going: Darren Nixon and Laura Hopkinson, in dialogue with Natalie Bradbury 
Exhibition dates: 3 July-7 August 2021 
Opening Times: 11am-5pm every Saturday 
PAPER Gallery, Mirabel Studios, 14-20 Mirabel Street, Manchester, M3 1PJ 
Website: www.paper-gallery.co.uk 
Free