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.

Manchester: Something Rich and Strange

I'm pleased to be a contributor to a new book, Manchester: Something Rich and Strange (edited by Paul Dobraszczyk and Sarah Butler), published by Manchester University Press with a beautiful cover by Simon Buckley (Not Quite Light). Aiming to get under the skin of the city and offer alternative perspectives beyond the usual, tired narratives, writers, artists and academics have each taken a series of words as prompts for short essays. I have written about 'Newspaper', 'Loop', 'Co-operative', Sculpture' and 'Statue'. 

Manchester: Something Rich and Strange is currently available for the bargain price of £7.79 (usual price £12.99). Buy here.

Listen to a short extract of me reading from my piece about the Loop lines, former railway lines converted to walking and cycling routes.

Manchester University Press · Loop by Natalie Bradbury

I also recorded a short video on the Fallowfield Loop talking about my contribution.

Guest lecture, Bradford School of Art, Wednesday 31 October - Woman's Outlook: A Surprisingly Modern Magazine?

I'll be returning to Bradford School of Art on Wednesday 31 October to do another lecture in its Random Lecture series. The lectures take place at 12 noon in the Dye House Gallery; all welcome.

I'll be talking about my research into the twentieth-century co-operative women's magazine Woman's Outlook, published by the Co-operative Press from Manchester between 1919 and 1967, which combined political campaigning and information with domestic tips and knowledge.

'Woman's Outlook' book chapter in 'Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period'

I'm really delighted to have a chapter about the twentieth century co-operative women's magazine Woman's Outlook in the new collection Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period, published by Edinburgh University Press (I'm also really pleased that the book features an image of Woman's Outlook on its cover!).

This blog is one of the places where I have explored my interest in Woman's Outlook, a magazine for the campaigning women of the co-operative movement, which was published by the Co-operative Press in Manchester between 1919 and 1967 and combined information about political and social issues with domestic tips and advice. The chapter is based on research into the magazine in the National Co-operative Archive in Manchester, which holds a complete set of the publication.

To find out more about the book and other contributors, visit https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-women-039-s-periodicals-and-print-culture-in-britain-1918-1939.html.

Fallowfield Loop damson gin

In the 1960s, Dr Beeching paved the way for the reduction of the British rail network, closing small village stations and branch lines and catalysing the ascendancy of the motorcar as the dominant mode of transport in Britain*.

Some of long-closed lines are now reopening, after decades dormant. Others, their tracks removed permanently and their station buildings now converted into shops and supermarket cafes (as is the case with the former suburban Manchester stations of Levenshulme and Fallowfield), offer cyclists miles of dedicated bike path free from the traffic and aggressive motoring that increasingly chokes our towns and cities.

Manchester’s Fallowfield Loop stretches around eight miles, looping around the south and east of the city. Beginning in inner-city Openshaw in east Manchester and ending in leafy Chorlton in south Manchester, it undulates through the former industrial dormitories of Gorton and Levenshulme, passes picturesque Debdale Reservoir, skirts the boundary of Stockport at Reddish, and cuts through studenty Fallowfield and leafy Whalley Range.

The Loop has the feel of a linear park, offering a backdoor view of the city and its patchwork of official and unofficial green spaces. The Loop itself is an underacknowledged green space. In spring and summer it’s overgrown with branches forming a green tunnel, although in autumn the slipperiness of the accumulated layers of leaves can be treacherous. In winter, the foliage drops right back to reveal numerous back gardens, allotments, recreation grounds, school playing fields, overgrown brownfield sites and industrial land reclaimed as country parks. It links up with other traffic-free routes, too, from the Ashton Canal, with its miles of recently resurfaced towpath, to former branch canals such as the Stockport canal.

The Fallowfield Loop has become a place of community activism and communal litter-picks. It’s also a place of memorial, to young people who have killed themselves. Recently, it’s become a site of protest, with large EU flags unfurled unmissably from road and railway bridges; when removed, they reappear again soon afterwards, imported en masse from China. Pro-EU graffiti sprayed along the path places the UK at the heart of the EU, and the Manchester bee motif is placed centrally within the circle of stars that represent the EU member states; it’s a reminder that Manchester, along with the neighbouring local authorities of Stockport and Trafford, which the Loop passes close-by, voted remain in the EU referendum, in common with several other northern cities. It’s also a place for creativity, from street art murals celebrating the city’s architecture, to hand-written personal declarations (and accusations – ‘Louis K has a tiny penis’). It’s a place to encounter culture, from bicycle theatre troupes offering outdoor Shakespeare performances to public artworks sponsored by the cycle charity Sustrans, which document and draw attention to the flora and fauna of the route. It’s a place of learning and instruction, for small children to gain confidence and practise their bike skills away from the road. It’s also a place for family time: on father’s day, it’s noticeable how the number of men with small children increases.

Not all is benign – once or twice a year the ambush of women or opportunistic robberies make the deadlines, and mounted police undertake regular patrols. However, generally it’s a place of conviviality and sharing: if a cyclist stops at the side of the path, the next to pass will stop to see if all’s okay, and offer help fixing a chain or a spare inner tube.

Although cyclists benefit the most from a safe cycling environment uninterrupted by the frequent stops and starts of traffic lights, the Fallowfield Loop is also well-used by walkers, joggers, dogwalkers, students, and schoolchildren on their way to and from school, as well as shoppers just getting from A to B. It’s a meeting place, too, particularly for groups of teenagers.

These looplines are also fruitful places for the urban forager. Depending on the season, edible mushrooms, horseradish, strawberries, raspberries, cherries, plums, damsons, sloes and apples can all be found along the Loop, whilst in late-summer individuals and groups of people of all ages gather with an assortment of receptacles, from large yoghurt tubs to seaside buckets, Tupperware tubs and carrier bags, to gather blackberries, and offer hints on the best spots.

This year’s damsons were picked along the Fallowfield Loop, in a year that was unusually fallow for apples, yet plums and damsons of varying hues were in abundance.

* For a more detailed account of cuts to train services in Manchester see https://mancunian1001.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/the-reshaping-of-our-railways-1-before-beeching.

Review: What If Women Ruled the World?, Manchester International Festival

Premiering in the week that North Korea claimed a successful intercontinental missile test, and the columnist Owen Jones sparked a social media row by suggesting the British people should present large-scale public resistance if the President of the United States visited the UK, What If Women Ruled the World? feels scarily prescient and necessary for an art performance.

Rather than a hackneyed invitation to smash the patriarchy – although the need to replace established hierarchies is, unsurprisingly, a recurrent theme – What If Women Ruled the World? uses a creative platform to imagine a situation in which humanity is forced to start anew, and to learn the lessons of the past (and the present).

Israeli artist Yael Bartana’s commission for Manchester International Festival takes the ambiguous end point of Stanley Kubrick’s classic film Dr Strangelove as its starting point, positing a female-led world in which women outnumber men ten to one and asking what would happen next if the slate was wiped clean and we could start again – with women in charge.

To start with, the piece has an air of amateur dramatics about it – think stick-on-moustaches, exaggerated accents, women in drag and ‘survival kits’ containing lipstick and nylons alongside sustenance and weapons – but the piece convincingly navigates between fact and storytelling, entertainment and debate, information and polemic. It’s both historically grounded and contemporary, incorporating possibly the first literary reference to ‘covfefe’, to knowing audience laughter.

What If Women Ruled the World? comes into its own when the five actors in the war room are brought together with five women who are real-life international experts in their fields, ranging from economics and development to archaeology and feminism. The women discuss major and recognisable challenges facing the world outside – from climate change, the threat of nuclear war, pandemics and the depletion of natural resources to ongoing conflict and systemised violence against women. Behind them the Doomsday Clock ticks away, offering archival glimpses into natural and manmade disasters, with both personal and global impacts, as a rapidly deteriorating post-bomb landscape is alluded to, building a very real sense of urgency.

What If Women Ruled the World? is an invitation to imagine things done differently, and to ask questions of our actions and priorities as individuals, as city dwellers, and as British, European and global citizens. It starts with a lighthearted premise, exploring serious issues with personality and humour, but it’s a simplistic title for a piece that suggests not just overthrowing the patriarchy, but our entire economic, social and political systems and fundamentally rethinking the way we relate to each other and to the planet. At a time when socialist ideas such as equitable taxation and economic redistribution are apparently back in vogue, much of the discussion captures the zeitgeist, but ultimately, it serves as a warning about bigger dangers such as the power of individuals and the cult of personality. It poses not just the titular question, but asks who should be allowed a seat at the table of power, whose knowledge and expertise we take on board, and what measures we need to take to ensure those voices are heard.

What If Women Ruled the World? is at Mayfield, Manchester, until Saturday 8 July as part of Manchester International Festival. To book visit http://mif.co.uk/mif17-events/what-if-women-ruled-the-world.

The Shrieking Violet at Manchester & Salford Anarchist Bookfair, Islington Mill, Saturday 10 December

The Shrieking Violet will be sharing a table with small press Fold at this year's Manchester & Salford Anarchist bookfair.

The bookfair will take place at Islington Mill, Salford, from 10am-7pm on Saturday 10 December.

A limited edition black and white reprint of He's Leaving Home: The Shrieking Violet Guide to Hearty Vegetarian Cooking on a Budget will be available, as well as the Shrieking Violet Guide to the Public Art of Central Salford.

Either publication would make an ideal Christmas present (to buy direct send £4 to Natalie.rose.bradbury@googlemail.com via Paypal with your address). Feedback on the first (sold out) print run of He's Leaving Home included:

"The cookbook is great! Cheap, vegetarian and and all simple/practical. I was surprised how many recipes you included also." James, Berlin
"Brilliant present, thanks!" Ed, Kent
"Just used your recipe for roast potatoes, was delicious - used the rosemary we found last night on a bike ride near Salford Quays. Can't wait to try the baked beans pie! Could I order one of your recipe books for my friend please? she's vegan too and is moving back to Canada soon so would make a great leaving present to remind her of English food!" Rae, Salford

Fold will be selling intelligent, thoughtful pocket-sized publications bringing together essay on topical political and cultural issues, by authors including Steve Hanson and JD Taylor.

For more information about stallholders and talks visit http://bookfair.org.uk.

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.

Introducing the Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of Books, Salford, opening Thursday May 8

Books are an integral part of our communications and culture, from education and learning to enjoyment and leisure, but the content within them isn't always finished with as soon as the last page has been turned. A new library and publishing project in Salford goes beyond the idea of books as a closed matter, where the author has the definitive last word on the subject, by placing publications at the heart of an ongoing conversation and dialogue around words, images and ideas.

Based at Islington Mill, Salford, in May and June, before it moves on to other venues around Manchester and Salford for the duration of a six-month pilot programme, The Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of Books is part reading-room, part-library and part publishing house, revolving around two-month cycles of collaborative residencies by artists, designers, writers and curators. Visitors will be invited in two days a week – each Thursday and Friday starting from Thursday May 8 – to browse a permanent reference library dealing with “books about books and books about collections of books”, as well as temporary libraries curated by practitioners from different fields, with the space also bookable by reading and discussion groups. This opportunity to read and share ideas will be complemented by information about the books as well as talks and other events which will provide a way to approach the ideas under consideration, as well as an exhibition or new piece of writing commissioned at the end of each residency. “It's a way of building up materials but it's also a feedback loop, rather than just regurgitating content,” explains artist Daniel Fogarty, a co-founder and director of the project. “Publishing takes in everything from the Sun newspaper to academic articles, so it's the perfect tool.”

Kicking off the programme is a library and series of talks selected by Manchester-based writer and promoter Marcus Barnett, which celebrate “all sorts of things relevant to what a 'DIY culture' could mean”. Selections include books published by Zer0 and Unkant, which Marcus describes as “shoestring operations run by really thrilling people who care”, with three books being launched during Marcus's residency: Robert Dellar's Splitting in Two: Mad Pride and Punk Rock Oblivion and Esther Leslie's Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (Saturday May 10) and Agata Pyzik's Poor But Sexy (Wednesday May 14). Marcus explains that each author covers “with palpable excitedness post-punk, communism, cultural clashes and exchanges”, and that “all want another, better world from the mire of the old based on creation and excitement”. For Marcus, part of the appeal of the The Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of Books was helping to address a perceived atomisation among different areas of DIY culture. “We're all in agreement that the type of people who create art, put on shows, play in the DIY music scene, write 'zines or read communist books are rarely in the same rooms and rarely deal with or socialise with each other, when generally speaking all of their creative output stems from similar desires of collective excitement and wanting things to be better,” he explains. Another event taking place is the second annual SPRING conference (Saturday May 17, £10/5), which brings together people from around the country to discuss the current status of leftist politics and provide another experience of the Left than “self-righteous idiot guys being smarmy at each other all day in empty rooms”. Among the speakers are Mark Fisher, Julian Stallabrass and Yassamine Mather, who Marcus describes as “really interesting people with colourful lives and perspectives”.

This bringing together of writers and artists, both from the local area and further afield, to forge connections between often disparate groups of practitioners and creators, is a key aim of the The Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of Books. “Artists and activists usually talk about things in completely different ways, so we hope they can have a more productive conversation,” explains curator, writer and co-director Lauren Velvick. “We're going to be facilitating dialogue and not just waiting for it to happen.” Designer and curator Robert Carter, the third director, added that is hoped that a crossover in interests can be found: “We want to attract an audience based on the content of the books and events, not on loyalty,” he explains. “The first curated library, chosen by Marcus, is about ways of functioning and thinking about things and making things work, so it's going to attract critical writers and people who are politically active – but we are going to be inviting the same people to come to an exhibition of Daniel's work later in the project.”

The Exhibition for the Life and Use of Books initially grew out of a feeling that the Manchester art scene was too 'predictable and safe', lacked an impulse for critical conversation (perhaps inevitably given that exhibitions are often attended, curated and written about by people drawn from a relatively small group of friends, colleagues and peers) and did not provide a place for these kinds of ideas to express themselves. “There is a lot of art in Manchester that is either very grassroots, or museum and gallery-based,” explains Daniel, “but there is nothing in the middle and nothing that is supportive of activity on that level – the Manchester art scene doesn't do a good job at reaching out to other people, groups and institutions. There is a lot of that kind of activity in London but it sometimes doesn't feel like it is an option for people up here. The Lionel Dobie project set a good precedent, but you got the same people there who went to all the shows. We're bringing a critical dialogue to Manchester that's not immediate in some exhibitions.” Lauren added: “We're not afraid to be more politically committed and go beyond art and theory. We're bringing in people from outside who can be more critical and who aren't completely ensconced in the Manchester art scene where you have to support each other.”

The first six months of the project are very much about “a series of experiments to uncover unknowns” so the founders can encounter new people and ideas and “find out what kind of platform we want to make for artists and writers”, before a framework is found for the future of the project. Although one inspiration is London's X Marks the Bokship, which Rob says “created a type of accessible, common space where the material published occupied the grey area between exhibition, magazine, live event and thing you put on your shelf”, the organisers admit they don't know what's going to happen and say it's a case of trying out a number of different things and seeing what works. As Rob explains, “you can't just adopt a model from London and bring it to a different city. Its an excuse to do something different outside all the noise of London.” Lauren adds: “We will set set up a few boundaries and things that are definitely going to happen and the rest is just left to chance and who turns up. Quite a few people have already said they're looking forward to it and have been looking out for something like this.”

There will be an opportunity to get involved in the library at a Hackathon at Islington Mill (Saturday June 7). Also in June, Daniel will have an exhibition at nearby Artwork Salford (Thursday June 19-Thursday June 26), coinciding with a publication looking at design language. Later in the summer the second temporary library will be drawn from the collection of Manchester-based publisher Michael Butterworth and his science-fiction imprint Savoy Books, bringing together visual art and writing to discuss questions around creativity. Alongside this will be a residency by artist and designer Ann-Marie Milward, who uses weaving to translate sound and text into visuals. The final curator will be chosen following an open call.

As the project progresses, it is anticipated that it will move from pure text to more visually-engaged work, with Rob explaining that “people are becoming more sensitive to graphicacy – the visual equivalent of literacy” as people increasingly read online, and that the project is hoping to understand how shifts such as this affect learning. The Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of Books aims to strike a balance between publishing digital and physical material, with Rob observing that even in the digital age publishing is more important than ever. “I know a lot of people who access material online but print it before reading it, he explains. “Everyone has got their own private publishing and editing process and journal, even if it's just bookmarking pages and links. Everyone organises their own collection of books in a way. We are creating a physical space, not just an online archive, and physically our presence will inform that process.”

The Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of Books can be visited by appointment in the first floor common room at Islington Mill, James Street, Salford on Thursday May 8 and Friday May 9, and will be opening on the following Fridays and Saturdays throughout May and June. For more information about how to visit and get involved contact info@lifeanduseofbooks.org, visit www.lifeanduseofbooks.org or follow on Twitter @ECLUB_.

Keywords feature: Art Culture and Society in 1980s Britain at Tate Liverpool

I was recently asked to write this feature for the Skinny about a new exhibition which opens at Tate Liverpool this week (Friday February 28). It was a last-minute commission, and it would have been nice to have spoken to more people involved in the exhibition, but it was good to have an excuse to read more Raymond Williams as his books Culture and Society and the Long Revolution, along with his essay Culture is Ordinary, which concern the development of culture and social change, were among the best things I read last year.

Keywords: Art Culture and Society in 1980s Britain

In 1976, a book was published which offered a new way of understanding and using language, defining and interpreting familiar and inter-related words such as culture, art, revolution, family and society. Written by cultural theorist Raymond Williams, Keywords is a social, historical and cultural guide to the evolution and meaning of everyday words we often take for granted. Taking Keywords as its starting point, a new exhibition at Tate Liverpool continues the conversation Williams sparked around language more than three decades ago. Artworks from the 1980s, the decade in which the book's ideas found particular resonance among a generation of artists responding to upheavals in society, are juxtaposed with a selection of words from the book in a specially-designed exhibition space by artists Luca Frei and Will Holder. Aiming to enhance the visual and conceptual legibility of the artworks, the installation will encourage visitors to ponder the complex and often charged relationship between what they see and the language which can be used to describe it.

“The impetus of the exhibition came from conversations we had about the book with artists making work in the 1980s, who said that at the time they were beginning to be influenced by the growing field of cultural studies and by books such as Keywords as much as by art history,” explains Gavin Delahunty, Head of Exhibitions and Displays at Tate Liverpool and curator of Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain. “Keywords is a good read and an easy, not over-academic way for people to engage with key ideas about culture and society. It is one individual's attempt to unpack complex words and what they meant for him and his time, which provides a tool and filter for people to understand the world around them.”

The exhibition uses artwork and language to present a very complex and diverse moment in both British history and British art. “It was an extraordinary decade where there were so many shifts in culture and society that continue to have an impact today,” explains Delahunty. It was also a confusing time. On the one hand was the affluence of the City of London, but elsewhere in the country miners' strikes, the Liverpool riots and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were taking place. “A whole raft of social issues were bubbling to the fore,” says Delahunty. “The old histories were being dissolved and disintegrated, creating a fragmented moment which we have tried to capture in the exhibition.” 

Keywords also aims to showcase the work and ideas of artists who did not necessarily receive widespread recognition at the time but reflected the increasing plurality of voices in the art world. Through provocative and challenging visual and performative acts these artists helped change not just ideas around what belonged in the art gallery, but the vocabulary which was used to describe it. “In the 1980s one of the huge changes was that new voices were starting to be introduced into the art world, often drawn from what had previously been seen as marginalised communities,” explains Delahunty. “Artists were immersed within powerful new movements based around Second Wave feminism, race, sexuality and ethnicity and wanted to point out the historical and social imbalance, which wasn't representative of the diversity of the UK.”

To help the audience engage with the work and messages on display the curators went through the whole of Keywords and chose thirteen words to show alongside the artworks, looking for both their frequency and their resonance today. Among the words chosen was 'materialism', which Delahunty points out “was associated with the 1980s catchphrase 'greed is good', but is also a word that is in people's conversation at the moment and is linked to our understanding of the world and morality”. Another is 'criticism', which Delahunty links to the critical approach artists used to protest gender stereotypes and the invisibility of black and female artists in the 1980s. One word which was quickly agreed on was 'liberation', which Delahunty says is related to the development of identity politics. “A whole generation of artists were making art addressing questions of ethnicity, gender and sexuality, against a backdrop of the horrors of the British colonial past,” he explains. “There was a whole new generation of artists who were touched by that.”

The energy of the 1980s and the desire for artists to tell their stories comes across strongly in the exhibition in a series of very powerful visual statements. The curators asked artists active in the 1980s which artworks they considered to be game-changing at the time. Although several of the artists they came up with are not household names, and some of the artworks in the exhibition haven't been on display in decades, they have had an enduring influence in the art world. These include work by socialist feminist artists such as Rose Finn-Kelcey, as well as Helen Chadwick's provocative 'Carcass', last shown in 1986; this is a work which Delahunty says has “stimulated and inspired so many artists”. Displaying 'Carcass' is a logistical feat, comprising a column filled with food waste which will transform into a living sculpture as nature takes its course over the lifespan of the exhibition. Another key work is Sunil Gupta's 'London Gay Switchboard', which is grounded in the near-hysteria of the 1980s AIDS climate. The work, initially shown on a slide projector but now updated to a digital format, depicts the central information point which helped thousands of men and women access expert information on the virus. “It had a huge impact,” explains Delahunty. “It shows the day-to-day aspects of the work at the gay switchboard as well as people going out socialising. It demonstrates how, in a time of confusion and fear people still had time to hang out and be friends and get on with life.” If one work sums up the exhibition, it is Donald Rodney's multimedia sculpture 'Visceral Canker', which uses coats of arms depicting aspects of slavery, bloodlines and former colonies to speak of Britain's colonial past.

The keywords incorporated into the show do not directly correlate with or illustrate the artworks, but rather provide a 'jumping-off point' and stimulus for thought and discussion. They ask questions such as 'could you apply the word 'violence' to this artwork, or are they worlds apart?' As Delahunty explains, “the exhibition is more about slippages of language and how it changes over time, just as artworks evolve over time.” He adds: “We live in a world with a strong desire to contain life within language, but artworks can't be reduced to single words. They are complex, nuanced and textured and constantly changing and mutating.”

This is very much in the spirit of what Raymond Williams intended to show with the publication of Keywords; he hoped that the book would provide a starting point for ongoing discussions and prompt further collections of words and meanings. The exhibition at Tate Liverpool perfectly demonstrates this potential. Keywords has been reprinted to coincide with the exhibition, and is as relevant today as ever as language continues to evolve to meet new times and new contexts. As Delahunty says, “The book is so open-ended it still allows the freedom to have conversations about what words are, how we use them and how we make sense of them in everyday situations.”

For more information visit www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/keywords-art-culture-and-society-1980s-britain.

Between Two Rivers review

Where the wide Ohio river meets the vast expanse of the Mississippi stands the city of Cairo (pronounced Karr-o), Illinois. You would expect a settlement near two rivers to thrive and for a time it did, as a steamboat port, its prosperity reflected in its fine colonial-era architecture. Cairo could have become one of America's biggest cities, yet today it is derelict and all but abandoned by its population.

Between Two Rivers, a new documentary by Manchester-based filmmakers Nick Jordan and Jacob Cartwright, sets out to tell the story of how Cairo has become a city whose only viable option for the future may be as a museum for a forgotten industrial past. In 2011, during the course of filming, Cairo made the headlines as the US army blasted holes in a Missouri levee, controversially drowning fertile farmland in a bid to save the city from destructive floodwaters. The film ponders on what in the city is worth saving, reminding the viewer that Cairo may have been spared this time but that its future is still far from certain.

It is no surprise to learn that both Jordan and Cartwright are painters; Between Two Rivers is a painterly, poetic film, evident from the misty opening shots of silhouetted trees, submerged in a desolate river, to languid images of ruin and urban decay. But the film is far more a visual metaphor for the death of the American dream (as in the aestheticisation of the ruins of Detroit); it uses both interviews and archive film, such as footage of 1960s racial tensions in the city, to question the social, economic and moral order that has prevailed in Cairo and expose the inequalities of the American experience. The film also challenges the reliability of memory, and the tendency to hark back to a golden age which may never have existed – or at least not for certain sections of society.

Cairo is like an island, a gateway between the American north and south that sits comfortably in neither. The city has historically attracted migrants from the margins of society, acting as a holding place for those who are too poor to move on elsewhere. There's a sense that Cairo's precarious situation cannot be attributed just to acts of nature, but that human attitudes and actions have contributed to its decline.

The filmmakers spent four years making Between Two Rivers, and getting to know a range of interviewees, from a former senator and congressman to members of a local soul band and a purveyor of fresh fish (who suggests she provides a lifeline to those subsisting on welfare). The most striking aspect of the film is the pride expressed by those who call Cairo home, and the hope they cling on to for the city's future, despite all odds. There are some people, at least, who are not going to give up on Cairo too soon, and Between Two Rivers goes some way to explaining why.

Between Two Rivers is currently screening at film festivals. To keep an eye on upcoming screenings visit www.betweentworivers.net.

Masculine, feminine: Shortlist and Stylist magazines

Every Wednesday morning, two free magazines appear on the streets of several cities around the country, including Manchester (as well as airport lounges and French Connection stores). Left in piles next to the Metro newspaper, or handed out by men in yellow jackets, they’re designed to be grabbed by workers on their daily commute.

Why two magazines? Well, with its bold title in an unfussy font and covers in primary colours featuring prominent men such as Alan Sugar, Gordon Gecko, Russell Brand and Fabio Capello staring you straight on, with some cover stars, such as Tony Blair, so important they’re further emboldened in black and white, Shortlist is aimed at attracting the eye of men. The strapline promises that inside you will find ‘News, Sport, TV, Cars, Movies, Style’ — the same subjects you might see covered in the ‘Men’s Lifestyle’ section of a newsagents. Stylist’s decorative font, italicised to give the impression it’s a bit more thoughtful, and backed up by a palette of pinks and lilacs, is meant to attract the female sensibility. Its sleeves show cupcakes, shoes, handbags, a puppy with floppy ears, and singers and Hollywood actresses staring pensively into the distance or looking down shyly. Inside, is ‘Fashion, Travel, People, Ideas, Beauty’.

The two magazines are produced in the same building, and published by the same company, yet their whole premise is that men and women are fundamentally different. Rather than looking at the interests men and women have in common and producing a magazine anyone could find interesting, they focus on heightening traditional male and female pursuits and exaggerating conventionally male or female attributes until the two magazines display complete parodies of what is ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’.

The magazines’ content is primarily concerned with selling a certain, ideal lifestyle — something for men, and women, to aspire to, which often harks back to recapturing the values of an earlier era. In Stylist, interviewees are praised for their sophistication, glamour and mystique, and for being enigmatic — in comparison with what the magazine regards as the ‘laddish’ behaviour of some women today. Shortlist talks admiringly of the ‘hard living charisma’ of Serge Gainsbourg and the glamour of the Rat Pack, emphasising timeless elegance, from Savile Row tailoring to owning a decent watch — ‘The mark of a gentleman’.

Shortlist is obsessed with the escapist themes of adventure, endurance, war and danger, from endless articles about drug lords and South American gangs to reports from war zones, instructions about how to survive in space and lists of the most dangerous places in the world to trade in. Shortlist is also heavily biased towards technology, and keeping up to date with the latest ‘must-have’ gadgets. Interestingly, Stylist has more emphasis than Shortlist on food and literature (although it does liken Philip Larkin, hilariously, to a ‘grumpier, smarter Bridget Jones’), but Shortlist makes more of music, covering newer, 'hipper' bands compared to Stylist's recommendation of mumsy music like Robbie Williams.

In case you’d missed what’s being sold to you, Shortlist backs it up with adverts for beer that promises adventure, deodorant that will ‘give you balls’, face cream that ‘wages war on oily skin’, phones aiding survival and endless adverts for cars, watches, clothes and the Discovery Channel. Stylist, in contrast, is primarily packed with adverts for grooming products such as shampoo and hair dye, IKEA furniture, clothes and the occasional car or rom com film.

Each magazine has a regular columnist with whom we’re supposed to empathise and sympathise. Danny Wallace’s column, in Shortlist, is one of the highlights of the magazine, a feature that rarely fails to make me laugh as he fails woefully at performing everyday tasks, from ordering a sandwich to securing the services of a plumber. His well-written column reads like a piece of creative writing exaggerated slightly for comic effect. I don’t believe for a minute that he’s as hapless as he makes out. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Dawn Porter, who was somehow given a column in Stylist magazine (which, thankfully, seems to have disappeared for the time being) despite being one of the least interesting women you can imagine meeting. Over the course of a few insipid paragraphs of fluff, Porter shares insights into her life such as being chased by a wasp, dying her hair and having PMT.

In her recent critique of contemporary feminism, One Dimensional Woman, Nina Power said ‘If the contemporary portrayal of womankind were to be believed, contemporary female achievement would culminate in the ownership of expensive handbags, a vibrator, a job, a flat and a man’. We can blame a lot of this on Sex and the City, which, in one of several Sex and the City specials, Stylist claims ‘shaped the cultural development of the 21st century’ and acts as a ‘champion of women…a platform for female independence, career success, a woman’s right to hideously expensive shoes…and made single life sexy’ (I couldn’t agree less with this description of Sex and the City — which focuses on superficial, self-obsessed, dull, needy women whose lives revolve around where their next man is going to come from). Stylist goes on to say that the biggest appeal of the women in Sex and the City is that they are ‘real’, managing to ‘tap into the pysche of modern, professional women brilliantly’, yet they are not like anyone I know or would ever wish to meet. It states that, unlike '99% of the female population', ‘men just don’t understand Sex and the City’ — ignoring all the women who, too, think Sex and the City is banal and shallow.

The biggest problem I have with Sex and the City (aside from its limited depictions of homosexuality and bisexuality) is the same I have with Shortlist and Stylist magazines — the distinctions they make between men and women, and the way they don’t even try to understand each other. The women in Sex and the City show little interest in anything outside men and each other; their level of political engagement is limited to sleeping with politicians, they have no heterosexual male friends and find it seemingly impossible to relate to men on any level other than sex — not that they want to. As Samantha says: “I’ve never been friends with any men. Why would I? Women are for friendships, men are for fucking.”

At the start of this century, David Gauntlett noted in Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction (one of many studies of men’s and women’s magazines) that the men’s magazine market is relatively new as it had long been thought that “‘real men’ didn’t need a magazine to tell them how to live". Today, however, Shortlist magazine seems hell bent on reclaiming manliness from a perceived social and cultural assault on male values and pursuits. It runs articles with titles such as ‘Why it’s ok to be a man again’, and Giles Coren defending the barbecue as ‘the last bastion of masculinity’. Despite this, there’s just as much pressure on men as women to look after their appearance, from protecting their hair on holiday to ten steps to getting the perfect beach body.

Shortlist and Stylist magazines are inherently conservative. Writing almost forty years ago, in a set of essays entitled Ways of Seeing, the critic John Berger said 'publicity is the culture of the consumer society' — advertisements are the images by which capitalism sustains itself, selling the public an idealised vision of themselves. It manufactures glamour, which is described by Berger as the 'happiness of being envied'. Publicity shows people who they could be and where they could be placed within society if they make the right choices (ie purchases) or, if they already hold that position in society, it sells them the ability to maintain that position — one which is, in the eyes of others, enviable. Shortlist and Stylist magazine, despite masquerading as serious magazines which are read for their content, are in fact just publicity for the dominant, accepted lifestyle. Those who read Shortlist and Stylist do so either because they accept that the lifestyles the magazines portray are something to aspire to, or because they already belong to the social group that can afford such a lifestyle. They see their values reflected, so their place in society is therefore reinforced and confirmed.

I don’t, however, think that either magazine is bad — they both have several features I enjoy, and in both magazines there are whole sections I flick straight through (sport in Shortlist and beauty in Stylist). Shortlist magazine’s ‘Secret Genius’ quiz page is fun for passing time, and some of the ‘Instructions for Men’, such as ‘how to avoid showing fear in a job interview’, are useful. Stylist magazine celebrates female achievements, holds networking events for female entrepreneurs and prints women’s responses to topical news stories such as the Marie Stopes TV advertisements. Its ‘Elsewhere’ page rounds up world news stories relating to women around the world, often focusing on the quirky and bizarre, which I would otherwise have missed. I’ve also cut out and tried several recipes from Stylist magazine (Shortlist too used to publish recipes, but stopped for some reason). ‘Work Life: A one-day diary, from morning latte to lights out’, which looks at the typical day of a different career woman each week, from school teachers to paramedics to zookeepers, is a good idea — although it almost always focuses on women in London and the south. I admired Stylist’s election coverage, which looked at each of the main parties’ policies, and how they affect women, in turn, and even hosted a women’s question time.

Furthermore, both magazines, albeit separately, try to address issues affecting men and women, such as depression, bereavement, work life balance, housework and fertility, and sometimes even offer new perspectives on much written about stories — what it’s really like to be raised by a teenage parent, the psychological impact on men of women waiting longer to have children, the mindset of female terrorists and mafia members, and what motivates women to ‘kiss and tell’.

I’ve been reading Shortlist since it started in 2007 (Stylist is a far more recent addition to newsstands which hit the streets just over a year ago), for the simple reason that it has a sense of humour — it makes me laugh. Of the two, I’d say Stylist is the slightly better magazine — not, I’d like to think, because I’m a woman, but it has more consistently substantial, varied content than Shortlist which, as the name suggests, is full of lists of trivia aimed at a short attention span. Stylist has some good features, from a recent article about women graffiti artists to reports on the oppression of women around the world and pieces on serial killers and prostitution. The main criticism I’d make of both magazines is their homogeneity — the people and lifestyles shown within their pages are rarely anything other than white, affluent and heterosexual.

I don’t understand why, instead of patronising us with sexist, outdated notions of male and female interests, such as ‘a generation of women obsessed with shoes’, Shortlist Media can’t just produce one super magazine that will appeal to everyone, combining the intelligent, interesting, feature length articles and topical news stories of Stylist with the humour and factoids of Shortlist. I, for one, would definitely read it.

www.stylist.co.uk
www.shortlist.com

You might also enjoy my friend Olivia Singer's article about Stylist magazine and feminism.

Thomas Paine - Champion of the Common Man - at Salford Museum and Art Gallery

‘Government in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one’. These words, written by the political thinker Thomas Paine over 200 years ago, still ring true today, and a new exhibition about Paine’s life at the Salford Museum and Art Gallery reminds us of what we have learned from him. The words, which are among Paine’s best known, are taken from the book with which he made his name in 1776, the hugely influential Common Sense.

A foreword to the exhibition by Tony Benn sets Paine up as a ‘symbol of change’. Benn argues Paine’s dictum that ‘God did not make rich and poor. He made man and woman’ is just as true now, and points out that with the British political system in a time of great uncertainty today, we could do well to look again at his theories. We’re told Paine, who argued for an elected head of state, the welfare state and end in state involvement in trade, would be ‘shocked’ if he knew that there is still no world peace, and that Britain still has a monarchy, unelected peers and no written constitution.

In Rights of Man: Part One, Paine argued that ‘the idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges or hereditary juries’. His warning against a government that is ‘accountable to nobody and not trusted by anybody’ is just as relevant today, with growing calls for electoral reform and confidence in politicians plummeting with every new scandal and blunder.

Paine was a great advocate for the need for a written constitution, saying it should codify ‘everything that relates to the complete organisation of a civil government, and the principles on which it should rule and by which it should be bound’.

He would be dismayed that so many of his beliefs, which we take for granted today, were only achieved in relatively recent times: universal suffrage, free universal education, old age pensions and the abolition of slavery and the death penalty (the death penalty was only abolished in Britain in 1969, France in 1981 and still has yet to be ended in America).

Born in in Thetford, Norfolk, in 1737, the son of a corset maker, Paine took advantage of a grammar school education to become versed in reason and science and debate the ideas of the Enlightenment. The exhibition sets the scene of a grim eighteenth century life which was at the mercy of the wealthy and aristocratic. In Thetford, out of a population of 30,000, only 20 men could vote. Public executions were common, with the condemned having no right to defence. Unsurprisingly, Paine had a thirst for adventure and, after meeting Benjamin Franklin, set off for the New World, where he became a campaigner for revolution.

Paine was a passionate driving force behind the American and French revolutions, as well as an advocate of Irish Independence; in Common Sense, he claimed ‘we have it in our power to begin the world over again’. He convinced George Washington of the need for revolution, to end American’s governance from afar by the British monarchy, and even coined the phrase United States of America. He also spent time in France, where he wrote Rights of Man: Part One as a retort to the conservative thinker Edmund Burke’s attack on the French revolution.

Yet the exhibition, which is comprised of material from the archives of the nearby Working Class Movement Library, argues that Paine’s most important legacy is his championing of the rights of the common man; Paine said we should endeavour to ‘make our fellow creatures happy’, and that man should ‘respect his neighbour, to do as he would be done by’.

Paine wrote his books in plain English, and produced inexpensive editions of his works which became best sellers and were read aloud to the illiterate. As well as early editions, the exhibition displays cartoons and satire based on Paine’s work. Naturally, this spread of ideas panicked the establishment, who tried to prosecute Paine for libel.

The exhibition also displays works by Paine’s contemporaries, alongside writers and movements on which Paine had an influence, including Chartism and women’s rights. Paine was an inspiring individual: he was also an inventor, and the exhibition shows it wasn’t just his political ideas in which he was ahead of his time - he invented an innovative bridge, the design of which is still in use today.

There are plenty of fact sheets and lists of quotes to take away, as well as recommendations for further reading in the WCLM’s archives. As Veronica Trick, volunteer co-ordinator at the Library, said: “If our Library had a patron saint it’d be Thomas Paine. He’s so much the starting point, both chronologically and ideologically, for working class history.”

Thomas Paine, The Voice of the Common People
Salford Art Gallery
Peel Park
Salford
M5 4WU
Until November 22

http://www.salford.gov.uk/leisure/museums/salfordmuseum.htm

Working Class Movement Library
51 The Crescent
Salford
M5 4WX

www.wcml.org.uk