Transmitting the outskirts: LoneLady's Scrub Transmissions

It's often too easy to conflate place with music, and vice versa. It's tempting to view a city through a lens of its cultural production, to hold on to a static image of past achievements and overlook the ways in which places, and their culture, continue to evolve. It's also easy to reduce an artist to their urban identity, to limit them to an artistic lineage that is geographically - and therefore to some extent always arbitrarily - defined.

There is a sense of LoneLady trying to break out of these boxes, to get away from a very particular - and often male - Mancunian identity. Yet at the same time, her music is undeniably shaped by Manchester. It's the place where she grew up, on the eastern fringes of the city. It's also where her two albums to date were written, rehearsed and recorded, in largely self-built rehearsal and studio spaces in former industrial units in isolated areas outside of the city centre. Until recent acquisitions by developers capitalising on Manchester's property boom, apparently redundant buildings such as these, surrounded by half-demolished buildings, light industrial activity or red light districts, were available and affordable to artists due to their relative geographical and cultural remoteness. Despite their uncertainty of tenure, artists became used to coexisting with damp, cold, mice and indifferent landlords, fashioning and reinventing these spaces to fit their needs and finding the space and freedom for invention and experimentation amidst physical decrepitude. These were the places where most of Manchester's real creative work was done.

LoneLady both acknowledges this geographical specificity in her work and attempts to break away from it; most recently, she's stretched her wings with a long-term residency at Somerset House in London. As a Mancunian woman, she sees herself not just as struggling for visibility within the mainstream music world, but also as an outsider to the city itself. She situates herself both physically and metaphorically on the edges of Manchester, and outside of the myths manufactured by those who wish to shape our perceptions of it.

LoneLady wants us to share and understand the mundane places and subtle experiences which influence her sensations of the city day-to-day, and her place within it, as a place that is lived in, worked in and travelled through, and as a city that - far from the promotional spiel of business, tourism, redevelopment and economic growth - continues to be uncertain, often difficult and sometimes unwelcoming for those who exist outside of its dominant uses and narratives.

Far from the shininess and spectacle of city centre redevelopment, LoneLady tries to tell us different stories and show us other cultural landmarks. In 2012, she invited us to plug our headphones in and experience her music in the context of 1960s elevated motorway the Mancunian Way, through her temporary installation The Utilitarian Poetic, which embedded a previously unreleased track beneath a flyover on the outskirts of the city centre. TUP drew our attention to a structure that is a permanent presence in the city, yet which is almost always experienced in transit, and a place where few stop to linger. Removing fast-flowing traffic from the city's roads, the Mancunian Way flyover distances motorists from the city at ground level, yet it also creates a constant background hum for those who live and work in the estates and buildings alongside it.

Six years later, LoneLady again asks us to turn our back on the city centre and to venture east to the inner-city neighbourhood of Miles Platting, an area that borders Clayton on one side and Ancoats on the other, on the banks of the Ashton Canal. East Manchester, a former industrial and mining district, where Clayton is situated, remains one of the poorest areas of Manchester, despite the new sporting facilities built for the Commonwealth Games in 2002. By contrast, Ancoats, which borders the hip Northern Quarter area of Manchester city centre, has, in just a few years, become unrecognisable. As derelict former factories and mills have been converted, alongside infill apartment blocks, a previously under-visited area of the city has been filled with bars, shops and restaurants catering to young professionals, and is regularly featured in local and national media as a 'foodie destination'. 

New-build flats are gradually encroaching further into east Manchester, following the improved access to the city brought by the building of the East Manchester tram line. However, in spite of its proximity to Ancoats and Manchester city centre, Miles Platting feels like a different world entirely. Here, we see and hear different uses for the city, which don't fit comfortably elsewhere: families gather in special dress in small sections of industrial units repurposed as places of worship; graffiti artists find ample space to exhibit their work. There's also evidence of others left behind by the city's redevelopment, including rough sleeping and heroin use, on wasteland exposed by the demolition of former industrial buildings.

There's also a atmosphere of openness and space here, lacking in a city centre that is increasingly embracing height and density - of a place that is yet to be rediscovered and rebuilt. Into this left-behind landscape, embedded in a tower of rubble, LoneLady has inserted 'Little Fugue', an unreleased track from 2014. Behind you are the skeletal outlines of abandoned gas towers. In front and to the side are patched up industrial buildings, some missing windows, and subdivided for a variety of commercial and creative uses. In the background, plodding indie rock competes across the canal with band practice emanating from a facing building. Through the headphones, LoneLady's guitar chimes gothically over a synthy, dancey track that both suggests something of her city's heritage, but shows it is possible to do something new and different with it.

Then we hear a voiceover, a story about what this area has meant to her. It concludes by urging us to: "Hear the voices of the landscape, before they're scrubbed out."

Scrub Transmissions went live on Sunday 18 February and continues until the battery runs out (duration dependent on weather conditions!). For map and further information, visit http://lonelady.co.uk/blog/scrub-transmissions-miles-platting. 

An accompanying 'zine by LoneLady is available from the Peer Hat and Piccadilly Records in the Northern Quarter.

Reclaiming the streets: An interview with Nick Dunn about his new book Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City

One of the first pieces of advice given to students moving to a city – particularly young women – is to avoid walking the city streets at night. If it’s absolutely essential to do so, you’re told to stick to a large group and “always walk towards the oncoming traffic”. Are the streets really fraught with fear, potential menace lurking around every corner? Are they places to be passed through as quickly as possible, potentially hazardous passages to be navigated from work to bar to club to home?

In his new book Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City, Nick Dunn suggests that walking after dark is not just a means of getting from A to B, but an experience that can itself be rich in interest and stimulation. When he started to regularly walk around Manchester at night, Nick says, “I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.”

“Walking is so natural to humans,” Nick tells me. “It is calming, meditative and therapeutic. It’s about wellbeing and a connection to the world. It’s an escape and a welcome respite, allowing you to be in a time and place in a way you can’t be in your daily life.”

Night time changes expectations, patterns of movement and encounters; places, shapes and materials shift in form, appearance and function. “Years ago people thought darkness rose out of the ground and might even kill you if you touched it,” says Nick. “We don’t think that any more, but it’s still immersive and sight is not that much use in a lot of areas by night.”

Walking at night activates the imagination, raising questions about what it means to be productive and creative. “Walking can be subconscious and you don’t really have to think about it – you can percolate other thoughts whilst walking,” observes Nick. “I’m not a luddite, but so much of life nowadays is mediated by screens, and we’re losing touch with the things that make us human. People would much rather live through proxy. Walking can allow you to give your attention to things. It’s an inscriptive practice.”

Over the past couple of years Nick estimates he has spent a couple of thousand hours in total walking at night, sometimes walking all night until dawn. “I’m only doing what you see lots of couples and families doing on Sundays!” he points out. Despite the boom in interest in psychogeography and walking as art practice, however, for many people cities are still not an obvious place to walk. “With a lot of British cities, you go into the city centre as a pleasuredome, to consume,” says Nick. “I’ve always loved walking around cities, but it has usually had a purpose – to see friends, to go to gigs.” 

Cities might be places to live, work and socialise, but there’s an expectation that if you want to walk you get the train to the hills or drive out to the countryside. “On the rare occasion friends have come out with me they’ve been bored and underwhelmed by the city’s ordinariness,” says Nick. “Some people expect entertainment and engagement – they’re not very good with silence.”

Nick’s spent a lot of time walking in London, an oft-trodden literary path, and many other cities, but Dark Matters turns its attention closer to home, to the particular experience of his native city. “I love Manchester but it’s not a 24-hour city,” says Nick. “Apart from the little bumps and grinds of clubs and stuff, Manchester dies at night. It feels like a completely different city. It’s not like London and doesn’t hold the imagination in the same way; it’s surprisingly quiet. Manchester still has massive pockets of quiet, whereas London is teeming with life 24 hours a day. Manchester is also very, very compact – you can walk around the centre, the area contained within the inner ring road, in twenty minutes.”

Much of Nick’s time has been spent on the edges of the city, in semi-rural environments such as the river Mersey, and in suburban south Manchester. These places, familiar to many of us and replicated over and over again throughout the city and its outlying towns, contain a “certain set of houses which are identifiable” and offer a glimpse into a “deeply personal diorama of family living”. At the same time, they’re unfamiliar, rendered “eerie, odd and uncanny at night”, and often empty apart from the occasional speeding car.

Night walking in inner-cities, meanwhile, can throw up “problems and things that don’t stack”. For example, says Nick, Manchester is not an age-friendly city. Its centre isn’t multi-generational. “I look at the future of cities in my day job [Professor of Urban Design at the University of Lancaster] and it’s very pertinent – cities at night is a global problem. The response is usually to make them safer and to use surveillance, often at a huge ecological and environmental cost. There are other ways to approach the nocturnal city.”

No two nights are the same, but Nick has done different walks in the same place, cross-hatching paths which “overlap in a big waggle dance across the city centre”. Small written snapshots of these walks featured in the recent exhibition Loitering With Intent: The Art Politics of Walking in Manchester and Beyond at the People’s History Museum in Manchester. They were presented alongside photographs capturing the invasive, uneasy orange glare, the “strong glow of LEDs and lighting” that pervades the city at night, contributing to a collage of nocturnal experiences.

Nick also led a night time wander alongside the exhibition, showing “there’s so much variety so close to the city centre”. Over a couple of hours it took in canals, elevated motorway the Mancunian Way and its half-finished slip road that hangs over the city like an ellipsis, the landscaped calm of the 1960s UMIST campus, now emptied out and partially demolished in favour of a new-build, high-rise campus elsewhere in the city, the bubble of affluent housing that is Piccadilly Village, which arose from the dust of the almost uninhabited city centre Manchester in the early 1990s and whose private canal basins are hermetically sealed off from the red light district with high security gates, and the former industrial areas of the gentrifying inner-city area of Ancoats, half-abandoned and half-reinvented as a place for living, working and consuming. The walk finished with the “beautiful compressing experience of the passageways leading to St Ann’s Square”.

It might seem odd to organise and collectivise something so inherently spontaneous and so often done alone, especially now that everything from graffiti to drinking to smell is packaged as a city tour, an experience to be purchased and consumed, but Nick’s night walk wasn’t just an architectural guide or urban walk – it was a challenge to participants to do something different. “What I get out of walking is different to someone else; walking with others is a very different experience,” says Nick. “People came as it wasn’t something they’d do on their own. You’re asking people to pay attention to their surroundings and enjoy the city – the texture, smells, sense of enclosure and sense of openness.”

Dark Matters was prompted in part by Nick’s participation in the Royal Academy's Sensing Spaces: Architecture Reimagined exhibition in 2014, where he spoke at a seminar and got really positive feedback about his work on the nocturnal city. He acknowledges that he’s not the first person to think about walking or cities or night, or walking as a spatial practice, or to connect it with capitalism, contemporary politics and social critique – but says he wanted to go beyond walking, to sensing.

“Lots of books have been written about walking and night and cities, from sociological and geographical perspectives,” Nick explains. “I didn’t want to do that, or to generate hundreds of words of footnotes. The book is more open, and more of a framework and way of thinking about things. It’s a series of short ideas that ultimately says just go and do it. It doesn’t reduce itself to nuggets. It glories in being unfinished and starting the conversation and asking questions.” Nick also notes a tendency for walking in literature to be “very solitary, male, macho and heroic”. He admits: “I hope the book has vulnerability, uncertainty and openness to it.”

Despite a long gestation period, Dark Matters was written in a short space of time, giving it, says Nick, a sense of urgency and propulsion, a “call to legs”. Academic musings are interspersed with quotations from poems and vignettes giving the reader a distilled impression of the city by night. As an architect by training and a “designer of things”, Nick experimented with drawing and mapping his journeys, but he realised “words work best – a photo never does justice to the thickness of the night, but it’s amazing how rich and potent memories are and how quickly they come back to you”. Rather than “fuzzy photos”, then, the book uses creative non-fiction as prompts; descriptive interludes convey the idea of what Nick felt and sensed, but “don’t lead by the hand”.

Music also pulses through the book. In particular, LoneLady’s 2015 album Hinterland provides a mental soundtrack. “LoneLady’s second album is very insightful about landscapes, and desolation is very set up in the rhythm of what she does,” says Nick. The jerky, restless, funkiness of Hinterland is part of a distinct northern musical lineage, drawing on post-punk and industrial music like Cabaret Voltaire, whilst remaining resolutely of the contemporary city. It’s frail, fragmented and spidery yet flowing and robust. It’s mechanistic and human, sparse and worldly yet at the same time a product of Manchester and its restrictions, frustrations and opportunities. Ultimately, it’s a pop record. LoneLady was also part of the Loitering With Intent exhibition; a series of opaque clues, teasingly familiar yet just beyond touching distance, led visitors on a treasure hunt of the city that made even the most intrepid explorer and active gatherer of arcane facts question their knowledge and understanding of the places around them.

Dark Matters contains a strong element of critique and, as the title implies, a call to action. “It’s getting increasingly difficult to walk around the city,” says Nick. “The amount of landscape accessible is diminishing. The city is foreclosing and we are constantly being told what we can’t do. We mainly think about it as an arena for consumption, and as cities as having to attract investment – Manchester sometimes believes too much in that story.”

Physical fences and boundaries are mentally reinforced by our own expectations and inhibitions about where we go and where we don’t go. “Roles and routines are deeply embedded”, says Nick. “To move too oddly in a city, to dance through a space, to move too quickly or too slowly is to bring circumspection on yourself. You’re quickly made to feel unwelcome if you’re not spending anything. For example in Piccadilly Gardens, you self-identify as ‘other’ if you’re not about to get on a bus, or on your way to somewhere. Your motives become suspicious and attract attention from not just police and security but from other members of the public. You’re conditioned into how you expect people to behave in public.”

In spite of this, says Nick: “The urban landscape can be an amazing and wonderful thing. To walk is to read the landscape beneath your feet. The whole thing is underscored by improvisation. You hear voices behind a wall, see something that catches your eye. I make it up as I go along. There’s no right or wrong way to do it, and you don’t need to be instructed – anyone with the will can do it.”

As Nick says, walking in the city is “about finding the extraordinary and fascinating in the everyday”. Everyday life sometimes seems fraught with danger, but it is also be full of beauty and wonder. As our society, culture and politics are increasingly overhung by a cloud of fear and suspicion of the unknown and the other, perhaps it’s time to embrace risk in search of freedom, understanding and even adventure.

Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City is published by Zero books on 25 November costing £9.99. For more information visit www.zero-books.net/books/dark-matters.

Tune into architecture: LoneLady's The Utilitarian Poetic/Manchester's Modernist Heroines walking tour to be repeated

As Love Architecture festival celebrates buildings great and good, one installation is reminding us of an equally important part of the built environment which tends to attract less excitement – the infrastructure all around us, that gets us from A to B.

The Utilitarian Poetic makes a new song by Warp Records' LoneLady, resident in one of the nearby housing blocks that is surrounded physically and aurally by the the hum of the car, available to anyone who plugs their headphones into a temporary socket cemented into a slip road where the Mancunian Way curves down towards the ground. The work inhabits a barren, leftover landscape – battered flowers and trees grow out of an undulating floor of rocks, discarded sweet wrappers and broken glass – where one isn't inclined to stop. It's demarcated only by a lavender graffiti tag, one among several impermanent scrawls. The song, 'Good Morning, Midnight', loops metallic percussion, distant echoes and fade-outs over bassy undertones, constantly on the move; even its rhythmic bleeping could be there to guide you across the next road. The hiss of the traffic continues in the background, audible over the headphones, as cars charge past, cyclists puff and pedestrians scurry home.

As I stand, a lone listener plugged into a wall for five minutes, no-one stops to ask me what I'm doing, or comes to have to go. They're all plugged into thoughts and sounds of their own. But it made me think: if our roads are part of the physical, utilitarian infrastructure, then music and dancing are part of a cultural infrastructure that's no less necessary; an unofficial, after hours route to escape where dreams are dreamed, connections are made, friendships are forged and networks come and go.

A pamphlet on The Utilitarian Poetic, including a location map, can be purchased for £1 from Manchester Modernist Society's pop-up shop in the Royal Exchange until Sunday June 24, 1pm-8.30pm. The installation runs for the same period (or as long as the life of the battery!).

In other news, the Manchester's Modernist Heroines walking tour, an outcome of a joint project between the Shrieking Violet, Manchester Modernist Society and the Loiterers Resistance Movement, will be repeated on Thursday June 21 as part of the Love Architecture festival.

Manchester Modernist Society

From a grubby concrete wall hidden behind scrawny trees to a shabby former council building turned into a giant advertising hoarding, all across Manchester are iconic pieces of the city's fabric laying neglected and forlorn. Otherwise known as the Holloway sculptural wall on London Road, built in 1968 as a sound-buffer yet an artwork in its own right, and the former Unemployment and Benefits Office on Aytoun Street, these are just some of Manchester’s hidden treasures that we walk past on a daily basis.

Whilst to some these buildings rank amongst outdated eyesores that should be pulled down as soon as possible, many regard them fondly as a vital part of their personal experiences of the city.

Manchester Modernist Society was formed in April by Maureen Ward and Jack Hale, two Manchester enthusiasts, to inspire people to look again at the buildings which, while not necessarily beautiful in a conventional sense, are central to our cityscape.

The pair, who are members of the Twentieth Century Society, the organisation which campaigns to protect the architectural heritage of the last century, acknowledges there are already a lot of fragmented groups that look at how we relate to the city, but wants to encourage them to work together.

Maureen said: “Lots of really interesting things exist relating to how we live in the city in a variety of ways, but often they don’t know about the others. People are coming at the city from all sorts of different angles trying to do the same thing - CUBE, flâneurs, the Loiterers Resistance Movement, the North West branch of the Twentieth Century Society We wanted to get together with likeminded people who could give us ideas we hadn’t thought of.”

As the first modern city, Manchester is choc a bloc with modern buildings, which for the society's purposes are those built between 1914 and 1999. This encompasses a lot of different architectural styles and movements, from 30s Art Deco to 60s Brutalism.

We all know Manchester is renowned for its Victorian and Edwardian architecture - think about the attention conferred on buildings like Gorton Monastery and Victoria Baths, as well as its mills - but what about those buildings that get on with it quietly in the background, minding their own business? While often not as ostentatiously flashy as the grand redbrick Victorian buildings, they have a beauty all of their own.

Maureen said: “We‘re proud of the Victorian city but the modern city developed in a totally different way to the Victorian and Georgian cities. It’s based around cars and roadways, movement and speed and that’s reflected in the design.”

She continued: “Manchester is a really modern city - so modern it doesn’t seem to care about its history. It’s in love with the future but it thinks it’s good to remember the past. The city has no history of itself if it’s always changing.”

Maureen enthused: “I wanted to spend my tiny free time saving the city from itself. We share a real concern about our recent past and our place in the future of the city. We live in the city and it forms us, so us and the city are tied to each other.”

She continued: “Manchester is so in awe of the image it has of itself post bomb. It’s very glossy and glamorous but a lot of people are worried it isn’t really for them. We’re often interested in beleaguered buildings.”

Jack added: “We’re interested in the curious, hidden and quirky bits too.”

Often deserted, Manchester’s modernist icons are neglected and left to rot, until they’re torn down to make way for the new city of glass that’s taking over Manchester, street by street, turning it into something shiny and homogenous yet sometimes cheaply built. Jack said: “It’s expensive to use old buildings in a modern way - it’s cheaper to build new ones than to modernise 1930s buildings”.

Maureen added: “I’m not convinced we’re building really excellent new architecture. Often, new buildings look as if they’ve been wrapped in tinfoil.”

Tearing down these buildings often rips out a page from the city’s history. Maureen said: “The whole of the twentieth century is gone now. Modernism means a lot of different things to different people but the vernacular is fast disappearing without really being documented - we are trying to find people who are documenting it.”

Jack, a freelance arts project facilitator and fundraiser who has spent time working at CUBE, said: “I’m an urbanist. I’m not interested in the country or medieval churches, but I’m interested in recent history. It’s a part of our architectural heritage that needs caring for so we’re doing it ourselves.”

Maureen, who has an academic background in archaeology, agreed: “Our architectural heritage shows what we were. For example, the New Century Hall had a ballroom and scooter boys used to meet there. I’m interested in old cafes as well, and meeting places.” For example, pre-1967 cafes became spaces where gay men could meet when homosexuality was still illegal.

That’s what the buildings of modern Manchester capture - its recent history, from old cinemas to tower blocks and council estates. As Maureen says, they show the ‘machinery of how the city works'.

Two buildings stand out for the pair as epitomising the society’s fasincation with modernist architecture. Maureen said: “I’m obsessed with the UBO office and have been for years. It’s magnificent in a peculiar way but it’s increasingly being surrounded by very tawdry modern buildings and its beauty is becoming very obvious.”

Jack singled out the Daily Express building on Great Ancoats Street as ’unique’ in Manchester, saying: “I love the fact it’s one of only three of its kind built. The black glass they used has become very common since the 1930s but then it was radical. A successful building has to work as a building and be beautiful as well. The Express building is a great example as you could see the factory printing machines through it, the massive newspapers going on big conveyor belts.”

He elaborated: “Disappearing buildings are often part of what we’re proud of. Buildings aren’t very interesting by themselves - it’s about what they represent and what goes on in them. The Daily Express building was part of an alternative Fleet Street.”

Maureen agreed: “Manchester was the setting of lots of firsts - what are we first in now?”

Unfortunately, few of these buildings survive in their original purpose - the Express Building for one is now flats and offices. Lutyens’ magnificent former Midland Bank on King Street, built in the 1930s, is lying empty, having trouble finding someone to give it a new use, and the Coop is moving out of the CIS tower to a new, purpose built premises. Manchester University wants to sell off the former UMIST campus, home to many innovative buildings such as the Faraday Building - many students at the university are unaware North Campus even exists - and students will cease to study at the affectionately named Toast Rack in Fallowfield by 2010. Moberly Hall, the former refectory building, which Maureen praises for its 'lovely angles', is already on its way out.

The Manchester Modernist Society’s love of the mark modernism made on our city goes far beyond buildings, however, encompassing design classics such as the K8 Telephone Kiosk. Maureen said: “There are only four of them left in Manchester now as we don’t use payphones anymore. They are listed buildings but they’re in a terrible state. It’s sad.”

Their passion even extends to Manchester’s own Highway in the Sky, the Mancunian Way, with its flyovers and roads into nowhere, a built monument to utopianism and post war optimismMaureen explained: “There’s lots of interesting bits of history that aren’t buildings too. For example, the Holloway Wall, which is rather forlorn now.”
The society acknowledges it may not be able to save the buildings that are already condemned to be replaced, but hopes to raise awareness of them before they go forever through specially commissioned artwork and screenings of old films. There will also be talks and debates, walks and social events such as outings to other cities.

Maureen cautioned: “There will be virtually nothing left if we’re not careful. People always do just want to pull things down that we now think are national treasures. The city council thought they could sell or get rid of buildings on the quiet but we’re acting as their voice. We need to get together into a critical mass to try to save them.”

She concluded: “Even if we can’t save buildings, we’d like to have a celebration before they go.”

http://www.manchestermodernistsociety.org/

Join the facebook group here.

The CUBE website has a brilliant guide to Manchester's buildings, broken down into area/ theme/ architect, with an extensive building by building guide to its modernist architecture.

Manchester Confidential has often sung the praises of modernist buildings too, from the Holloway Wall to the UBO.