Help Save Library Walk!

Neither building nor public square, park nor plaza, a small public passageway left by a gap between two buildings has become one of the most contested spaces in Manchester after the council announced plans to turn it into a gated, semi-private space. The designs, which were announced last month, would see a well-loved and much-used footpath, Library Walk (which is currently closed as neighbouring buildings undergo refurbishment), blocked by a glazed box by Beetham Tower architect Ian Simpson, which would be closed at night via gates at one end.

Library Walk, a curved walkway nestled in between EV Harris's Grade II* listed Central Library (1934) and the Town Hall extension (1938), has long provided a convenient link between the municipal heart of the city – Albert Square and the Town Hall – and the busy public interchanges of St Peter's Square and Oxford Street. In an area dominated by continual tram traffic, busy roads with one-way streets, bus lanes and taxis serving the large hotels that face onto nearby streets, the lone pedestrian can feel outnumbered and overwhelmed. Library Walk is a rare place that prioritises the pedestrian, providing a calm, convenient walkway that cuts through the jumble and avoids having to go round the bulk of Central Library or the Town Hall. It is the quickest, simplest route from A to B.

While part of Library Walk's appeal is practical, it also has a value which is indefinable, arising not just from its beauty and elegance but its atmosphere. Unlike in many buildings and urban landscapes, here you can lose yourself in your surroundings and be enveloped in the communion between two buildings reaching for the sky. We can all appreciate how Central Library looks from a distance, but it is equally impressive close-up: by following the contour of its curves we experience the architecture too. It's possible, for a moment, to be overtaken by the place and forget where you're going or why, but feel part of a shared heritage and cityscape that exists on a grand scale. Library Walk is a place that is unlike any other in Manchester.

The argument against altering Library Walk is also symbolic. If Library Walk is gated, we lose not just one footpath, but a significant right; the right to control where we are allowed to go in the city. Public safety arguments in the planning proposal cite a rape which took place in Library Walk, and the tendency of people to urinate in the passageway. Ian Simpson, quoted in Building Design, called Library Walk a 'dangerous place', saying: “It needs to be a managed space.”

While any rape is horrific, it is unrealistic to design out all risk from the city. It is impossible to try to police every public space – but it should be possible to provide education, with the aim of creating a culture in which respect is the norm, and facilities such as public toilets. Making artificially sanitised spaces, and designating some places safe and others unsafe, hides the wider issues around where and why acts such as rape take place. Furthermore, when some people take the attitude that women should not be surprised they attract unwanted attention if they walk alone at night, the public safety argument helps perpetuate notions about what is 'sensible' behaviour for women, stipulating where and when they 'should' and 'should not' walk.

The plans for Library Walk are unnecessary – not least at a time when services such as libraries are facing spending cuts. Ultimately, there is no need to seek to 'fill' Library Walk, or give it a function other than as a thoroughfare. The current absence of a structure on Library Walk does not mean it is lacking in purpose, or a place with unfulfilled potential.

The Heritage Statement on Library Walk says: “As a potential tourist destination, Library Walk is not a pleasant public space for visitors to the Civic heart of one of the largest cities in the UK.” I beg to differ. In its own, unassuming way, Library Walk already captures the public imagination, as is evidenced by it being one of the most photographed views in Manchester. As prominent photographer Aidan O'Rourke, who has snapped most of Manchester's buildings, puts it: “It's perfect as it is.”

For practical suggestions on how to register your objection to the plans, visit http://manchestermodernists.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/do-you-object-to-the-proposals-for-a-glazed-link-between-manchester-town-hall-extension-and-central-library.

To find out more about how to involved in a campaign against the proposals, join the Save Library Walk! Facebook group.

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.

Rock n Roll, Library Theatre

The Library Theatre, St Peter's Square, until March 14

Czech born playwright Tom Stoppard’s latest play is a curious mixture of highbrow and popular culture, intellectualism and an unshakeable belief in Rock n Roll. We all know that popular music at its best has been a form of rebellion against the time in which it was made, yet the heavy handed manner with which Stoppard treats the subject in Rock n Roll doesn’t quite work.

Taking place over the course of 22 years, from 1968 to 1990, Rock n Roll charts the friendship of two friends. Graeme Hawley’s Jan, a Czech brought up in England, is studying at Cambridge for the summer and befriends Max (played by Hilton McRae) an ageing academic who was born in the same year as the October Revolution of 1917 and refuses to give up his membership of the British Communist Party.

Although at first they seem similar, the play documents the way Jan and Max’s lives diverge and are shaped by the different events that befall them. We meet Jan, a pop music anorak, as he is just about to return to Prague to ‘save rock n roll’ following the Russian invasion of the city. As far as Max is concerned, given a choice between locking rock musicians up in prison or giving them loads of money, he knows which he’d prefer.

The action takes place between Max’s Cambridge home and Jan’s apartment in Prague. The different cities are flicked between like records in a jukebox, and are accompanied by music from each year, from the sinister snarl of the Velvet Underground to the sunshine pop of the Beach Boys.

Jan’s idea of rebellion is to sit back and do nothing: in his eyes, to grow your hair is to rebel against the dominant norms of the time. Though ostensibly a socialist, his idea of freedom is very different to Max’s. Max’s idea of freedom is for the workers to have the ‘freedom to have a chance’. Jan merely desires ‘freedom to be left alone’. Jan rails against heroism, reasoning heretics merely reaffirm the beliefs of the bearers of the faith. As long as he has his impressive array of American and English records, he’s happy to sit inside whilst freedoms are gradually eroded outside.

Jan’s subversive heroes are the Czech band Plastic People of the Universe, who make ‘socially negative music’ in the eyes of the authorities. The Plastic People, according to Jan, epitomise the rock n roll ideal by biting the head off a chicken, Western rock style.

Jan is contrasted with his friend Ferdinand, modelled on Vaclav Havel, first president of the Czech Republic. Ferdinand is an intellectual who pays Jan regular visits with a never ending supply of petitions against the imprisonment of those who speak out against the system, including members of dissident groups such as Charter 77. To Jan, these are empty gestures.

Of course, it turns out that neither is entirely right. Rock music can subvert the system, or at the very least inspire others to fight for change. Jan is also wrong about being free from state interference. As the high ideals that shape the start of the play give way to pessimism and hardship, Jan describes the police brutality against those who challenge the state by attending rock concerts. When Jan himself is arrested and has his head shaved in prison, it's one of Ferdinand's petitions that gets him out.

The main problem with Rock n Roll is there are too many different ideas to take in, and ideological discussion takes precedence over character. None of the characters quite seem real, more composites of stereotypes: snotty intellectuals and stroppy teenagers sitting round smoking weed. One character even trots out the expression ‘If you can remember the sixties you weren’t really there’.

A satire of the newspaper industry and the way in which the world around us is presented works a little better, though: the real villains of the play are the press hounds who sniff around for the whichever side of the Velvet Revolution will be most unit shifting and pick the carcass of a fallen from grace Syd Barrett. Max’s continued endorsement of press censorship, the idea of curtailing freedom of expression as the people don’t know what’s best for them, is the most revealing admission that he knows his ideological position is insecure.

It’s a shame that the most fully realised characters in the play are the women, yet they fade into the background, playing second fiddle to the men around them. Cate Hamer’s Eleanor, Max’s classicist scholar wife, is killed off by cancer well before the end of the play. A monologue in which she wails “I am not my body, my body is not me”, could be an advertisement for the feminist movement. This says a lot about the failure of Marxism and communism in the modern world - there were other issues to replace it such as feminism and anti-racism. Leila Crerar’s Lenka is another passionate female academic who is the most engaging character in the play, but again she is allowed little chance to develop, used only as a foil to criticise Max.

The play is most poignant as an elegy for Syd Barrett, who died during the London run. It starts with Syd, a young and handsome pop star, playing pipes to Max’s daughter Esme like a modern day Pan, a reference to Pink Floyd's first album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the only full album Barrett appeared on. By the end of the play Syd, is a balding recluse who has been befriended by Esme’s daughter Alice.

Just as Pink Floyd's music became duller and duller without Barrett, the musical timeline Rock n Roll takes us though gets worse and worse as the play progresses and we move into the eighties bombast of Guns n Roses and U2.

We end in up a consumerist Britain where the masses have become desensitized, and are too numbed to what’s going on around them to want to rebel anymore. When Max reveals he considered voting for Thatcher for a moment it doesn’t come as a real surprise. After all, what could be more conservative than steadfastly clinging to outdated beliefs while the world changes around you?

Everything concludes very cosily with Max and Lenka getting together and Jan and Esme finally realising their long held feelings for each other. It might have been designed as a play about radicalism, but Stoppard reinforces the conservatism of those involved. Rock n Roll ends at a 1990 concert by the Rolling Stones, hardly new or challenging music.

I went to see this play for free with this scheme for under 26 year olds:

http://www.anightlessordinary.org.uk/

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.