Get green fingered in Whalley Range

In these troubled times, we're being bombarded with messages of doom from all sides – credit crunch gloom stories predicting we'll all be unemployed in a few weeks, and climate change warnings which tell us we're leaving future generations to either burn up or be submerged under rising sea levels. We're expected to help the environment while trying to deal with our own money worries closer to home. We're also constantly being asked to think about where our food came from and make sure that our runner beans aren't being flown in from Africa, as if we didn't already have enough on our minds.

Many of us would like to be more “eco-friendly”, but don’t quite have the time or space in our city lifestyles and postage stamp sized gardens to go about it.

We can’t all drop out of society to live in a hut and be self-sufficient, Henry David Thoreau style, but a group of volunteers is setting up GROWTH, a “grow your own scheme” that will meet every two weeks in Whalley Range to share skills and enable people to grow their own vegetables in an urban plot. Odette O’Reilly, project coordinator, says it’s all about “teaching people good habits”.

The first project will be based in a small plot at Tangmere Court residential home on Dudley Road, Whalley Range. An “introduction day” on Sunday 22 February will include sessions on organic gardening, vegetable plot design, composting and permaculture (O’Reilly herself isn't entirely sure how to define this, but describes it roughly as learning to “work with your environment but not take from it”), before the real work of digging commences.

The volunteers are involved in the Manchester based charity Action for Sustainable Living, which was set up in 2004 with the aim of helping people to make sustainable lifestyle choices and bring about a difference to the communities around them.

The charity works on the premise that “small steps lead to big change”, so it aims to educate people to “think globally but act locally”. The words "holistic" and "permaculture" bandied around GROWTH might put people off with images of crusty hippies, but these small steps include switching off the computer, shopping locally, cycling to work, recycling and supporting fair trade.

AFSL also stresses the power of the individual. Volunteers with GROWTH will have the chance to participate in other volunteer gardening projects around Whalley Range, including helping elderly and disabled residents in their gardens, tidying up public areas or using green areas to grow fruit, vegetables, herbs and flowers. No experience is necessary, and volunteers will be given training. O’Reilly says GROWTH will be a perfect opportunity to “learn as you grow”.

Although several of the volunteers are involved in The Lost Plot allotment at Southern Cemetry and Chorlton Allotments, there are no allotments in Whalley Range. Whalley Range in Bloom will donate tools and planters.

Admittedly, the idea of scrabbling around in the earth at any time of year, let alone during our snowy winter of discontent, is enough to send many people running, but pop-up tents will shield volunteers from the worst of the elements and there will be a hot vegetarian lunch of homemade soup and bread.

Most importantly, in our modern, isolated society, GROWTH will also offer the chance to become part of a community.

Yes, it does sound like hard, potentially back-breaking work, and you only get out of it as much work as you put in, but it's one thing that will provide a glow in your cheeks during the icy weather. Plus, I've been reliably informed that food tastes better when you've grown it yourself and the volunteers will be sharing round seasonable recipes when it's time to reap the benefits of the project.

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If you are interested in volunteering, contact Louise at Louise.allen@afsl.org.uk

www.afsl.org.uk
www.permaculture.org.uk
www.manchesterpermaculture.net

Japanese Pavilion, Piccadilly Gardens

What? The Japanese Pavilion which dominates Piccadilly Gardens. Its most defining feature is a large concrete wall which is sometimes described as the Berlin Wall of Manchester. Anyone stepping off a bus or tram is greeted by the brutal expanse of bland greyness, made even worse by rows of portable urinals.

A pavilion should be a pleasant, relaxing place, though? The word 'pavilion' has connotations of pleasure and recreation, but Piccadilly Gardens isn’t exactly a place in which you want to hang around. The Japanese Pavilion is minimalist, cold and hardly welcoming - unless you’re gladdened by the sight of yet another Café Nero.

When and who? The council set up an international competition to redesign the gardens as part of the regeneration that followed the IRA bomb. It also coincided with the smartening up of the city that happened in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games. The winners were announced in 1998, and Japanese professional boxer turned award-winning architect Tadao Ando was enlisted, completing the building in 2003.
What was wrong with the old Piccadilly Gardens? The garden, which is the largest green open space in central Manchester, was created in 1914 where the basement of the original Manchester Royal Infirmary stood. By the time of the 1996 bomb, though, the sunken Victorian style ornamental gardens were seen as being both out of date and an unsafe no-go area populated by drug dealers. Now, all that remains of the original design are the statues, including the imposing figure of Queen Victoria.

What’s Ando's track record? He's designed churches, art galleries and housing, which often incorporate natural elements such as light into the design – see the Church of Light in Japan or Church on the Water, which is surrounded by an artificial lake. The problem is, given the above average grey element of Manchester's skies, the greyness of the pavilion serves only to emphasise the prevalence of our overcast skies rather than distract from them, and the grubbiness of the wall is in keeping with the shabbiness of the gardens as a whole, with their patchy grass and litter.

So it’s something to make Manchester proud? Let's take a look at another city, Sheffield, and what it's done to regenerate one of its public spaces. Visitors leaving Sheffield's train station walk out into Sheaf Square which, like Piccadilly Gardens, has fountains and a large wall. Sheffield's though, designed by international glass artist Keiko Mukadie, reflects (literally) the city's history.

Cutting Edge is a five metres high, 90 metres long sculpture made of the steel for which the city is famous, and depicts the fashioning of a knife blade as a tribute to the city's reputation for fine cutlery. Finished in 2007, it has lights embedded in it and its mirror finish gleams and excites more than our bland concrete block.

We drew the short straw, then? Yes. The Japanese Pavillion divides people – literally, as it's designed to separate the busy bus and Metrolink terminal from the rest of the space.

Didn’t the council have ambitious plans for the Pavilion? Yes - in September 2007 it announced plans to create a living roof, and work was supposed to start this time last year. The council wanted to make Manchester Britain’s greenest city and attract wildlife to the area. The roof would have attracted birds and butterflies and come alive in summer. But it would only have been seen from offices that overlook the Pavilion anyway.

That’s the main problem, isn’t it - the Pavilion is bit lifeless, especially compared to the hub of activity that goes on around it? The word on the street is that people would like to feel a bit more involved in the space.

But at least people are trying to enliven the place - in April 2006, Manchester International Arts covered it in 25,000 pink, scented flowers as an installation called 'Wall Flowers'.

And not very Manchester (there's a clue in the name)? No. Rachael Elwell of art knitting group ArtYarn says its “bleak” and “uninspiring” appearance is “a complete contradiction to what Manchester claims to achieve artistically”. She suggests a knitted panel covering the wall to bring back memories of “forgotten practises and ways of old living” from Manchester’s textile heritage.

What else do you suggest we do about it? We could have a mural, stick with the fairy lights that are there at Christmas and at least bestow the Pavilion with a little bit of warmth, or even have changing projections on the wall. It could be given to graffiti artists like the street art walls down the road in Stevenson Square, or provide a new home for the Afflecks Palace mosaics.

Morag Rose, founder of the Loiterers Resistance Movement psychogeography collective, came up with the most inventive suggestion: “one week cover it in glittery pink fake fur so stressed commuters could have a stroke or a hug.”

Sally Makison, an interior designer at Maddocks Design Partnership, thinks the tourist information centre should be moved from the town hall to a more central location inside the Pavilion.

As a Victorian city, how about updating a Victorian leisure tradition that's a welcome addition to any park and turning the pavilion into a bandstand? Offer city centre buskers, who provide one of the last remaining shreds of individuality amid the chain stores of Market Street, rotating slots in a rain and wind free environment, and give people a reason to stay in Piccadilly Gardens rather than rushing though it.