Japanese Pavilion, Piccadilly Gardens

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

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

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 By the time of the 1996 bomb, though, the sunken Victorian style ornamental gardens were seen as being both out of date and an unsafe no-go area populated by drug dealers.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Smiths' City

For many music fans, especially angsty teenagers, the miserablist group and Manchester are synonymous. Here's a guide how to find them in the streets around you.

The artist more commonly known as Morrissey, who was born Stephen Patrick Morrissey in Davyhulme in 1959, will be returning to the city in 2009 to play two sold-out dates at the Apollo. A concert on 22 May will mark the fiftieth birthday of the man who has sound tracked the lives of generations, first as frontman of the Smiths and then as a distinctive performer in his own right.

The Smiths' lyrics may be awash with references to areas of Manchester and its history, but Morrissey hasn't actually called the city home for a while. The bequiffed one left to live in the sunnier climes of first Los Angeles, and then Rome, over a decade ago.

The remaining Smiths still contribute a visible presence to Manchester's musical landscape, though, and the band's legacy lives on in the city, not least in the Star and Garter's monthly Morrissey and Smiths disco, which caters for both those old enough to have been there from the start and teenagers young enough to have not been born yet when the Smiths split up. This guide will trace the history of one of Manchester's most famous musical exports, which also roughly coincides with some key events and places in the development of Manchester.

1: Park Hospital (now Trafford General Hospital)

When Anuerin Bevan symbolically handed over the keys to this hospital in 1958, it marked the start of the NHS and free healthcare. Eleven years later, Morrissey, the man who would go on to change the course of popular music (at least in cult circles), was born in the hospital.

2: 382 King's Road, Stretford

Morrissey spent his first six years in Hulme before his family relocated to Stretford during a slum-clearance scheme. This unassuming semi was where the momentous first meeting between unemployed writer Morrissey and guitarist Johnny Marr took place in 1982, the culmination of Marr's search for a singer and lyricist to match his distinctly crisp Rickenbacker sound. It went on to be one of the great rock partnerships, although not always a happy one. Johnny Rogan's dense tome Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance is recommended for more reading on this well-documented topic.

Morrissey has since gone on to have a lucrative solo career, collaborating with established artists such as Nancy Sinatra. Marr is still at the forefront of new music, appearing on records by both the American band Modest Mouse and the Cribs in recent years.

Mike Joyce went on to play drums on Julian Cope's acclaimed album Peggy Suicide, as well as joining punk groups the Buzzcocks and Public Image Limited and touring with Sinead O'Connor.
The Smiths' bassist, Andy Rourke, is now a DJ on XFM.

3: Crazy Face, Portland Street

This innocuous looking wholesale clothes shop, situated close to Chinatown, was where The Smiths honed their unique sound. Mike Joyce describes its importance to the band: “It was the first time we ever played together as a band. I think it's a restaurant now. We had our offices there and Joe Moss, our manager at the time had his shop Crazy Face in the basement where he used to sell his clothes. We used to push all the trousers and jeans and tops to one side and just play there. We used to hang out there every day – it was a base for us. It was pre-Smiths, really – before we even had our record deal. Then he bought the upstairs, the second to top floor, and we used to rehearse there for about a year in 1982.”

4: The Ritz, Whitworth Street West
One of Manchester's major gig venues, the Ritz holds over 1,000 people, which is a scary proposition for any band's first gig. The Smiths made their debut here supporting the decidedly less catchily named Blue Rondo A La Turk on 4 October 1982. With a name like that, taken from a jazz tune by the Dave Brubeck Quintet, it's no wonder The Smiths made it big and Blue Rondo A La Turk seem to have been forgotten in the mists of musical history. To dwell on the name a moment, it's been suggested The Smiths was chosen as it sounds quintessentially, ordinarily English (which is ironic, as all of the band were of Irish descent).

Last year, Whitworth Street West gained a new Smiths association: Mike Joyce now hosts a weekly club night at the Brickhouse venue just across the road from the Ritz, named AlternativeTherapy after a popular Revolution radio programme he used to present.

5: Ancoats (or Ann Coates)
Manchester was a very different place when the Smiths were recording. The old mill area and birthplace of the industrial revolution is all about regeneration and expensive flats now, but in the 1980s it was a symbol of Manchester's decay. Morrissey may be famous for his moroseness, but at least he had a sense of humour: backing vocals on the tune Bigmouth Strikes Again from The Smiths' 1986 album The Queen Is Dead are attributed to Ann Coates, but are really just Morrissey's voice speeded up.

6: Strangeways, Southall Street
Although it's not officially been called Strangeways for years, HM Manchester Prison is still known by the name it lent to Strangeways Here We Come, the Smiths' final studio album, which was released in 1987. Morrissey's lyrics are often preoccupied with the city's most notorious criminals, notably the Moors Murders on Suffer Little Children from the band's eponymous first album.

7: Platt Fields Park, Mabfield Road
The Smiths' song Rusholme Ruffians, which is found on their 1985 album Meat is Murder, made the titular phrase famous, as well as the funfair that still takes place there. Morrissey's lyrics often focus on the mundane and everyday aspects of life, and the words to Rusholme Ruffians are typically bleak: by the big wheel generator on the last night of the fair, “a boy is stabbed and his money is grabbed and the air hangs heavy like a dulling wine”.

Incidentally, Rusholme is situated in south Manchester student heartland, which might well boast the highest concentration of Smiths fans in the city.

8: Salford Lads' Club, Saint Ignatius Walk
This redbrick social club is often the first port of call for many visiting Smiths fans, because it features on the inner sleeve of the iconic Smiths' album The Queen is Dead. It now has a Smiths room dedicated to the band. At the time, however, the club's committee were unhappy with its association with the group, fearing Morrissey's lyrics would lead young boys astray.

Two decades on, it seems the band have been embraced by the establishment. After revealing a fondness for the Smiths, Conservative leader David Cameron attempted to pose outside the club on a visit to Manchester last year. He was thwarted by local Labour MP Hazel Blears and protesters bearing placards saying 'Salford Lads not Eton Snobs' and 'Oi! Dave - Eton lads' is 300 miles'. Determined Dave got his picture in the end, even though a gloating Blears assured him “Not on my watch you won't, Dave” after an unsuccessful first attempt.

The club has been cash-stricken in recent years, and has benefited from Smiths-related fund raising activities aiming to get together money for repairs.

9: Southern Cemetery, Barlow Moor RoadMorrissey's bookish nature is evident on Cemetery Gates, from The Queen Is Dead, which takes place on a “dreaded sunny day” in Southern cemetery and name checks Keats, Yates and Wilde. Morrissey often borrowed phrases from films, books and plays, including Shenagh Delaney's Salford play A Taste of Honey. Pretty Girls Make Graves, from the Smiths' self-titled debut album, is a line from Beat author Jack Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums.

Morrissey's lyrics in turn went on to influence popular culture worldwide, a cult American punk band that formed in 2001 taking the song title Pretty Girls Make Graves as their name. Likewise Canadian author Douglas Coupland named a book Girlfriend In a Coma in tribute to the Smiths song of the same title.

10: The Free Trade Hall, Peter Street
The Smiths played at the site of the Peterloo Massacre twice, the first time in 1984 whilst promoting their debut album. It's here that the Smiths story comes to an end - their last ever Manchester gig was held at the Free Trade Hall in October 1986.

Herman Dune, the Deaf Institute, Saturday December 13

Often, a Herman Dune gig is a rambling event, loosely held together by the magnetic force of front man David Ivar Herman Dune’s slightly oddball personality. Tonight, he’s more subdued, more professional. He’s smartened up his act, wearing a tucked in shirt, tie, trousers and hat rather than the baggy, mismatched, primary colour clothes of old. The rest of the band have caught on to the new look; it’s almost as if there is a band uniform of hats and moustaches.

It's common to leave a Herman Dune gig feeling as if you’ve spent some time inside David Ivar’s sweetly upside down head, participated in his skewed romances and shared in his cartoonish take on life, but this evening's set is more focused, not at the mercy of wherever David Ivar’s easily distracted mind takes it. The only anecdote he has to share with us this time is an outing to Johnny Roadhouse’s musical instruments emporium down the road to buy a ukulele, which is later stroked expressively.

Herman Dune's fragile folk, built round David Ivar’s high, wiry, slightly vulnerable voice, is beefed up by the John Natchez Bourbon Horn Players, who add loud solos to Herman Dune’s quirky songs.

Next Year in Zion, title track of the new album, is a jaunty party tune, horns toot tooting. On a Saturday is one of the loveliest they’ve ever made, rasping horns borrowing heavily from Elvis’ Always on My Mind and backing singers the Baby Skins swooning in the background like fallen angels.

They still retain a sense of melancholy and rootlessness though, wood blocks clip clopping like horses hooves over Herman Dune’s characteristic trotting rhythm on the yearning My Home is Nowhere Without You. Drummer Neman, in a cap and waistcoat, looks like a weary traveller pulling out a saw at the side of the road for the evening's entertainment, hitting it theatrically with a beater for an expressive, rising and falling solo.

Ballad My Baby is Afraid of Sharks and a breakneck rendition of 1, 2, 3, 4 Apple Tree, horns substituted for wispy flutes, show they’re still searching for the perfect love affair.

ArtYarn knits the Shed Gallery, Levenshulme, a jumper for Christmas

There has been a growing interest in the home made over the past few years, even before the current credit crunch forced people to seek less costly goods and new forms of entertainment. Knitting in particular has enjoyed a revival and, far from being a solitary, spinsterish activity indulged in by lonely old ladies in rocking chairs, it's become more and more common to see groups sat knitting or crocheting in bars and clubs.

Inspired by groups across the world such as Knitta Please from Texas, and the textile artist Elaine Bradford, artists Rachael Elwell and Sarah Hardacre set up the guerilla knitting project ArtYarn six months ago.

Rachel, who is based at Islington Mill, attributes knitting's enduring popularity to the craze for all things “retro-vintage”. She says: “Knitting has made a big comeback in recent years, and people arebuying more handmade goods.”

ArtYarn, however, is separating knitting from its association with misshapen scarves and unwanted jumpers given by relatives who don't know what else to get you for Christmas and turning it into an “artistic medium”.

If you were at the New Islington festival at the end of summer, you probably saw ArtYarn's brightly-coloured 'tree cosies', tree-shaped garments adorning the trunks of trees in Ancoats. The duo also works in street art, 'yarn bombing' various cities, from London and Berlin to New York, by tying small patches of knitting to street furniture as “graffiti knitting”.

ArtYarn was invited to contribute to the Gaia project at this year's Liverpool Biennial, creating 'plastic bag bombs' out of yarn recycled from carrier bags found on the streets of Liverpool. Now, it's embarking on its most ambitious activity yet, knitting a jumper to cover the Shed art gallery - a small gallery run by independent arts organisation Pool Arts - at the Tonbridge Road Allotments in Levenshulme.

The project started with a joky remark that ArtYarn should make the shed a jumper to “keep it warm over the winter when it's closed”, but curator Alison Kershaw liked the idea. Each part of the shed was measured for panels of knitted patches created during public sewing workshops at St Lukes church, Longsight, and donated by the communities of Longsight and Levenshulme. Crocheted squares will tile the roof, pockets below the windows will hold flower boxes, and permanent knitted curtains will be installed.

Rachael likes the“social aspect” of knitting, and estimates there are at least ten knitting clubs in Manchester, including the Levenshulme Knitters and the University of Manchester Knittingsoc as well as groups that meet at the 8^th Day Cafe and Odd Bar. She set up the popular Kings

Arms Knitting Club in September 2007, saying: “ I couldn't really knit – I could do the basics but I wanted to learn some new skills such as crochet. After pulling my hair out over knitting books and youtube videos I realised the best way is to learn from other knitters.”

Through word of mouth, the club swelled from being a select gathering of three knitters to attracting ten to fifteen knitters a week. Rachael says: “Some weeks we can't even sit down – it's absolutely packed out with knitters, both male and female, ranging from beginners who have never picked up a pair of knitting needles in their lives to people who have been knitting for 40 odd years.”

Conventional garments and baby clothes are popular, but there are also arts students who knit with videotape and other crafts such as embroidery are encouraged. The most unusual work being created is Mexican wrestling masks.

The club meets in the Snug, a small room off the main bar at the Kings Arms, so it's not closed off from the rest of the building. Regulars, artists from the studios upstairs or people there for plays and gigs can wander in and look at works in progress, such as a spectacular knitted chandelier that's covered with French knitted tubes.

The knitters fund raise for Breast Cancer Care, and ArtYarn has further politicised a craft often seen as sedentary or old-fashioned by creating a blanket from 1,400 knitted squares, donated from all over the North-West, for the Manchester Oxfam Maternal Mortality campaign. Each patch represents one of the women across the world who dies in childbirth each day. The blanket was displayed at Beluga bar during the Labour Party Conference as a “knitted petition”. Rachael says it was effective in drawing attention to the cause as knitting is something “most people can relate to”, whether through knitting themselves or seeing one of their family knitting.

The Kings Arms Knitting Club meets at the Kings Arms, 11 Bloom Street, Salford, M3 6AN, every Monday from 7-9pm.

The Shed jumper project will be launched on Thursday 18 December from 3-7pm with mulled wine, mince pies and knitting demonstrations at Tonbridge Road Allotments, Levenshulme, M19. There is a frequent 192 bus service from Piccadilly to Levenshulme. Get off at The Wheatsheaf on Stockport Road, turn left into Broom Lane, then take the first right into Tonbridge Road.

The jumper can also be viewed from Friday 19 December – Sunday 21 December from noon-3pm

www.artyarn.blogspot.com

www.myspace.com/knittingkings

www.poolarts.org

Reality Hack:Hidden Manchester, Urbis

It’s common knowledge that there’s a secret world underneath the city, a network of tunnels and underground rivers. Not many of us actually get to see it, though, so it’s a continual subject of debate and suggestion. Now, digital photographer Andrew Paul Brooks has turned what goes on below the surface into works of art. His camera acts as our eyes behind closed doors and in forgotten chambers, exposing the mechanics behind familiar facades. The pictures really draw us in, give us a sense of what’s actually like to be there, in the bits of the city that we’re closed off from, sites rotting away whilst everyday life goes on unconcerned.

We get into a pattern of walking the same old streets, past the same buildings and sights, forgetting about the possibility of anything existing on the periphery, outside our immediate range of vision. Brooks captures those “snatched glances into an open grate, through a broken hoarding, behind a door ajar”, that are often no more than that - tantalising at the time, but soon forgotten - with the help of Urban Explorers, a secretive, anonymous community that explores the hidden side of our cities. They put themselves as risk of death, arrest and unseen hazards such as asbestos, but Brooks’ photographs make it easy to see how their clandestine exploration could be addictive.

The space is perfect for the exhibition – the top floor of Urbis, overlooking a skewed window that's built into the sloping white ceiling. You can see the clock tower, grubby brickwork and ornate red metalwork of Victoria Station, with new, high-rise construction going up behind it in glass and steel. Standing on the mezzanine level, we can see all the way down to the bottom, our line of vision bouncing off the angles of the building.

‘Great Abel’ invites us inside the town hall clock tower. Light streams into the tower and our gaze ascends to a dizzying height, past worn wooden beams and warm bricks. Brooks’ photos are more snatches of overlooked memory than complete pictures, black around the edges like an overexposed negative. ‘Great Abel’ is a mere keyhole portrait swimming in a darkened background; stand back and it looks like a scrunched up can someone's crunched in the middle in preparation for throwing out to be recycled.

We look out over the toy-town of Oxford Street from behind the illuminated letters and silhouetted brickwork of the Palace Hotel, hung with glowing red cobwebs, in ‘Quiet Refuge’. We’re elevated to the same level as the stars in an opulent, over-cast sky purple with light pollution. The sight of a Magic Bus, reduced to the size of a collectible car, is almost comical in its triviality. In 'Keeping Time', we’re in the internal decay of the Palace’s clock tower, peeling and mossy. Our view descends the spiral staircase, looking down as if into a well. In another print, the dome of the Palace occupies a round area in the centre. Red-orange, yellow and lime lights fly off the dome haphazardly onto the walls around it, like being inside a Christmas bauble.

'Central Foundations' goes beneath the Great Northern Warehouse into the disused Manchester and Salford Canal Tunnel. Although it’s deserted, the picture makes us feel claustrophobic and crammed in, as it must have been during the war when the tunnels were used to shelter from the Luftwaffe. Similarly, 'Cathedral Steps' shows a tiled public toilets, eerily signposted 'Convenience Closed for Repair' on a shattered pane of glass. We can imagine what it felt like to walk down the crumbling staircases. 'Culvert Report' too descends into the underworld. A ghost figure is barely perceptible against the slimy walls, dripping with moisture. The river looks tepid and unhealthy.

We’re reminded that what goes on beyond our vision is just as important as what goes on in front of us. Things often seen as dry and unimportant are given colour: ‘Hidden Arndale’ is an underground road of red, yellow, blue and white pipes.

Brooks’ camera imbues the everyday or utilitarian with a new patina of magic. An overflow tunnel of the Ashton Canal shines in an ethereal light. It’s luminous in wintry colours: blue, red, green and white like an idyllic fairytale grotto. The picture centres on a fuzzy halo of brilliant light, and we’re drawn in, to the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

Whereas Brooks’ other pictures focus in on tiny, undervalued snippets of our city, 'Angelic View' reminds us of its magnificence. Perched on a corner of the Town Hall, an angel looks our over the Manchester stretching into the distance like the heavenly creatures that safeguard Berlin’s citizens in Wim Wenders’ wistful film Wings of Desire. The detail of the green, yellow, and brown grandeur of the brickwork, and the patchworks of light that is the Beetham Tower contrasts with the vastness of a sweeping, blurry sky.

'Big Humpty', which is abstract like a painting, with bursts of fiery red and a spurting green river, shows a tiny person in a tunnel of the River Medlock, and reminds us just how small and insignificant we are in relation to the great city.

Perhaps the biggest appeal of these pictures is that they portray places that are undisturbed and underexplored. Looking at them acknowledges our childlike fantasies of escaping the crammed city for somewhere where we are free from scrutiny and can truly be ourselves, and explore unconstrained. Somewhere to get lost.

From Space - Islington Mill Shop

From Space

Where is it?
142 Chapel Street
Salford
M3 6AF

www.islingtonmill.com
Open Wednesday -Saturday 11am-6pm
Late opening Thursday until 8pm

History From Space is the new shop opened to showcase the work of artists and designers based at Islington Mill. Mark Carlin, a former musician, co-runs the Mill with fashion designer Bill Campbell, who bought the building in 2001.

Carlin describes the Mill as an “artists’ led project”, based in James Street just off Chapel Street. Although best known to the outside world as the starting place of the Ting Tings and local music fans as a gig and club night venue, it now hosts over 40 studio spaces, which are full of “all manner of small businesses and artists” and “people who make individual products”. These include ceramicists, clothes-makers, creators of designer furniture and lighting specialists. Carlin explains: “There are lots of people who make stuff at the Mill, but that’s not really what it’s known for.”

The Mill is also home to film makers and theatre, as well as the 'self-led' Arts Academy. Carlin says the shop is “a bit of an experiment, like everything else”. The shop isn’t in the Mill itself, because “there's not really space” with the art gallery and recording studio. Though also tucked away in Chapel Street, its location is“a little bit closer to town” than the Mill and just a short walk from Deansgate.

Who shops there? Not just art collectors - anyone can own a small piece of the Mill. Carlin says: “Some of what's on sale is quite expensive, but there are items that are only £1. You can get t-shirts for £10, going up to prints for £500 and clothes at £300.”

What does it sell? Carlin sums it up as “a mixture of fine arts and digital arts prints, fashion and books”. The Glasgow based art books publisher Aye-Aye books has a space at the Mill and links to the art academy. The promoter Comfortable on a Tightrope is also selling fanzines and pamphlets.

If you want something to hang on your wall, art ranges from large canvasses to small pastel life drawings and pencil nudes. Joe Barker has made whimsical acetates in blurry black and white, whilst David Williams photographs nature close-up in glowing colour. Andrew Brooks, who has an upcoming exhibition at the Urbis, is selling photographic prints of the Salford skyline. Tragen Design has contributed a shelf and a striking oval mirror with a wooden frame.

Fashion fans will love Andrea Zap's garments made of vintage fabrics combined with new materials and unusual finds, as well as textiles by the wonderfully named company dontbitchstitch.
T-shirts publicise the band Hotpants Romance, and there are CDs on sale by artists on local DJ Andy Woods' record label, Pronoia, which is based at the Mill.
Ceramics are well represented. Liz Scrine has made fantastic, large scale pieces, including a sculpture of two towers, and a large, tree-like candle holder which is accompanied by ceramic rats and cheese and entitled ‘Stop the Rate Race’. She’s also selling leaf tiles and fold-up ceramic screens. Crackpots offers unique, Cubist influenced ‘thoughts bowls' and ‘goodie barrels’ stamped with provocative statements. Beverly Gee makes quirky ceramic pots festooned with twigs.

Why go there? Carlin hopes people will be attracted by the unusual space itself, and the “rough and ready aesthetics of the building”.The shop is staffed by volunteers from the mill, providing an extra area to work in. Carlin says: “People can come in and see something that is going to be sold, as it’s being made.”

Carlin says “90 per cent of the products aren’t available anywhere else”. He explains: “A lot of the work is practical and useful. It can sit in people’s houses, but it’s not just off the shelf IKEA stuff.”

There's an added, seasonal bonus - mince pies, as well as charming hand-made Christmas cards that are heavy on glitter.

Future Carlin describes From Space as a “temporary store” - the building is owned by neighbouring Britch architects, who have given permission for it to be used for a year before it is redeveloped. He says it’s a “project-led” shop and there will be “things happening in it”.

Artists’ groups, both local and from further afield, will be invited to get involved. Artists will be asked to respond to the space and see what they come up with.

Verdict Far from being run of the mill.

The Peace Tax Seven

The great American politician, writer and inventor Benjamin Franklin famously said “In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes”, and they're something most of us would like to get out of.

Peace Tax Seven, however, a group of conscientious objectors, is using tax as a political protest by withholding the proportion of their taxes they calculate goes towards war and military activities. To pay tax towards military activities, they believe, is akin to a modern form of conscription, and is “morally equivalent to fighting a war”.

The group ranges from a toy designer and company director to a Welsh Buddhist, accountant, author and film maker. Birgit Völlm, a psychiatrist and researcher at the University of Manchester until earlier this year, explains: “War costs a lot of money, and my money was supporting that.” She finds it worrying “how easily countries can get involved in war”.

Völlm insists we should “all live according to our own conscience and do what we think is right.” She says: “A lot of people don't really think about what happens to their money, as it's not very noticeable.”

It is thought that 10% of the government's expenditure goes on the military and a third, or £88 billion, of the government's fixed capital assets belong to the Ministry of Defence.

The Peace Tax Seven suggests that money that currently goes towards war should be put into a “ring-fenced” Peace Fund and spent on “alternative ways of making peace, including negotiations and international development”. Völlm explains: “We also need to look at the underlying causes of war like inequality.”

Völlm points out “one hundred years ago people took slavery for granted and thought rights for women wouldn't change. People also had to go to war”. She remains optimistic, though, that “sometime in the future we will have the right not to pay for war”.

The Peace Tax Seven website is full of emotive language – 'rights' are 'violated', paying tax equates to 'paying for the government's killing machine'. It claims that 90 per cent of the casualties of war are civilians. Roy Prockter argues “every bomb and bullet kills twice”, saying there are “indirect victims dying of want while the world's wealth is wasted on weapons”.

As a doctor, paying taxes that go towards war is incompatible with Völlm's professional values: she cannot support something that “takes life away from people”, as the role of a doctor is to “help people and ease suffering”. Both Prockter and Völlm argue that the money would be better spent on fundamentals such as clean water and basic healthcare.

The Peace Tax Seven has the support of Quakers, Buddhists and Anglicans. Völlm became involved through Manchester's Quaker Peace Corps, and helped set up an International Conscientious Objectors Day in Manchester, which happens in May every year.

Manchester has a long radical history, and in 1980 became the world's first nuclear free city, creating the Peace Gardens and sculpture. Earlier this year, it hosted the 12th International Annual Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns, which brought together campaigners from America, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and Columbia.

Withholding tax is part of a history of creative protest that goes back to the American author, naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was imprisoned in the 1840s for refusing to pay tax towards the state of Massachusetts, because it advocated slavery. More recently, in America it is estimated there were 20,000 war tax resisters against the Vietnam war by 1970.

If the government didn't take any notice of the estimated two million protesters against the Iraq war, why would it listen to seven individuals withholding tax, rather than sending the bailiffs round?

UK court cases brought by the Peace Tax Seven have failed, but the group is currently raising £50,000 to take their case to Strasbourg, and defend its right to “freedom of thought, conscience and religion” as set out in the Human Rights Act under the European Convention of Human Rights.

The issue of the right to withhold war tax has been tabled as an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons, as well as a number of Private Members Bills, the last one being raised by John McDonnell in 2002. A number of MPs support the seven, including Jim Dobbin, Labour MP for Heywood and Middleton. Völlm is a member of the Green Party, which supports the protesters.

Few of us would go as far as to withhold our taxes, or could afford to, and it's not really an option unless you're self-employed, as it's almost impossible to withhold tax through the PAYE system.

However, the Peace Tax Seven opens debate on an issue it often seems we have little choice in, and puts moral pressure on the government. It also acts as a conscience for the rest of us.

If you want to do something, but don't want to go as far as withholding your taxes, visit http://www.peacetaxseven.com/ and sign the petition, distribute leaflets or write to your MP.

You can also join the organisation Conscience and fill in a 'Peace Tax Return' form which looks like a tax return form and can be sent to the Treasury to declare your objection to paying for war.

Völlm says the group appreciates emails, which can be used to show the government how much public backing there is for the cause. She also encourages members of the public to attend the group's trials to show their support.

www.conscienceonline.org.uk

Low, Club Academy, Tuesday November 18

I had severe trepidations about going to see Low at Club Academy, a utilitarian, impersonal cafeteria by day, and by far the worst of the Academy venues.

Low’s music is pared down to the point where it almost feels as if you are intruding to listen to it, as it’s based around the softness of Mimi Parker’s voice and the invisible, unspoken kindedness between her and husband Alan Sparhawk. It cries out for closeness, calls for a straining to hear what’s not stated but implied. It needs an intimate setting with no distractions.

This was a Christmas tour though, and no ordinary Low gig. Usually, singer Sparhawk’s level of interaction with the crowd is pitched somewhere between stern and untalkative and downright taciturn. Now though, jolly in a Santa hat, he looks relaxed, and jokes with the crowd, whilst bathed in a warm green light that softens the edges around Low’s sparse, often difficult sound.

The classic three piece is joined by an extra percussionist, a ukulele player and strings. Low have, unexpectedly, become a pop band in between now and their last tour. They cover Happy Xmas (War is Over) by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, as well as giving a surprisingly successful rendition of Little Drummer Boy.

Low had always threatened to become a pop band, and more conventional rock album the Great Destroyer is well represented. The band jigs about, enlivening the minimal set up of rudimentary drums, bass and less-is-more guitar, and the static tableau of stillness their songs often evoke.

The expanded sound is effective on Shots & Ladders a dense, watery epic that sounds like you’re listening to it through some great muffler like the sea. The melodies are distorted as if they’re so fragile they had to be wrapped in cotton wool. It comes to you from some other dimension, like reality gradually breaking into a deep dream.

Going to a Low gig can be an intense experience; this is more light-hearted, but the songs still sound like vessels carrying the inner weights of the whole band. Even carefree moments such as Last Snowstorm of the Year (which is, despite the title, Low at their most summery and jingly) have a certain sadness lurking at the back. The sliding, chromatic melodies of seasonal new single Santa’s Coming Over give it an eeriness at odds with the cosy traditional image of Christmas, although If You Were Born Today, Blue Christmas and One Special Gift are gentle and comforting as any carol service. The horrible Coming of Jah, however, tips the early celebration over into absurdity, with its calypso hooks, cod reggae beat and Sparhawk’s accompanying hand movements .

Everything is redeemed, though, when Low close by building up into their apogee, Canada, a propulsive chant of joy.

A Long Exposure: 100 Years of Guardian Photography, the Lowry, Salford Quays

Photography, especially when it's presented in the bold contrast of black and white, offers heightened snapshots of what's around us. It often points out something that's obvious, but we might have missed the significance of somehow.

A retrospective of Guardian photography celebrates the newspaper's staff photographers, who were based at the Guardian's Manchester office. It starts with the Guardian's first staff photographer, Walter Doughty, who was appointed in 1908 and continues through the six staff photographers who came after him, ending with Neil Libbert. A historical aspect is given to the collection, which spans the twentieth century, by the inclusion of vintage photography equipment such as the Muirhead Wire Machine, which enabled photographs to be sent by fax.

Walter Doughty's photographs are strewn with the rubble of the early twentieth century, from memories of the first world war to the paranoia felt at the start of the second, which is encapsulated in a shot of Manchester road signs taken down to confuse the enemy. Doughty's photos encompass major events of the twentieth century including the 1926 general strike and early aviators. 'Irish Civil War Dublin 1922' frames a man's rear profile, stood in darkness, in a murky window pock marked with bullets.

Denis Thorpe, who curated the exhibition, closes in on fleeting facial expressions, from rollerskaters to a bride on her big day. Tiny children are caught unaware learning the violin with the Suzuki method, and mid-yawn whilst eating toast and soup. Thorpe's camera engages with both personal issues, such as the tiredeness of a weary miner, and important events like the 1990 Strangeways siege.

Tom Stuttard keeps an eye on the bigger picture, showing Chamberlain and Churchill in the 1940s, as well as everyday people and their eccentricities. A wonderful portrait depicts 'Mr and Mrs Bromley, Clock Collectors, Derbyshire, 1959' in bed, fenced in by their collection of clocks. An aerial view shows the road from Manchester to Sheffield blocked by snow.

Bob Smithies too represents the political side of photography with his photo of a jaded man in a Manchester DHS office in 1970, as well as documenting confrontations between police and strikers in the 1970s and 1980s, a recurring theme in the exhibition, which is also referenced by Don McPhee and Graham Finlayson.

Don McPhee's political portraits set Enoch Powell and Nelson Mandela out against a black background. Enoch Powell is particularly striking, his hands raised in front of him. 'Boxing Day Cowboys, Salford, 1973', however, is the type of token that can be found in any family album, zooming in on two serious little boys dressed as cowboys in a timeless moment of childhood.

Often, the most enjoyable photos are chance snaps which elevate everyday life as we know it to a work of art, such as Don McPhee's shot of two farmers at a Yorkshire shire horse sale, clad in tweed, Wellington boots and warm woolen cardigans. Standing facing each other, hands in pockets, the shape between their two protuding, well-fed stomachs resembles an egg timer or the Rubin vase optical illusion.

The exhibition shows how much has changed between 1908 and now, not just in photography – almost all of the photographs on display are in black and white – and the political climate of the country, but Manchester and Salford. Doughty's misty shot of St Ann's Square in 1921 is almost unrecognisable, as are the rundown Salford streets seen through the doorframes of derelict houses.

Taste of Honey, Royal Exchange Theatre, Monday 17 November

Unless you can afford the best seats, an evening at the theatre often involves sitting up in the gods peering down at the tiny players on stage below. A new production of Shelagh Delaney's slice of life play Taste of Honey, however, throws the conventional theatrical experience out onto the cold Salford wind.

DJ Jon Winstanley, who's providing a live soundtrack to the show, plays Northern Soul while we wait for the play to start, so it feels more like going to see a film at the cinema, complete with pre-movie muzak, than a formal trip to the theatre. By the time of the interval, I want to get up and dance.

My 'seat' is a doorstep, an extension of the set. My feet touch the smooth, green-blue slabs of the Salford street below, which are wet with glossy patches of rainwater. Other audience members sit on a sofa, and a dilapidated brick wall on the edge of the stage. I can see the grain of the floorboards, worn smooth at the edges, and the glow of the cellar lights going down into the street. I can make out the patterns of the wallpaper and curtains, as well as the broken banister and the frayed carpet that doesn't quite cover the floor. I'm in the thick of things before the play even starts.

When the players run on to the loud, brash blare of the Ting Tings, carrying their whole material lives in a wheelbarrow, the tenement comes alive, crackling with sexual tension and claustrophobia.

We can taste the weak coffee and feel the coldness of the two room flat. We smell the smoke of the cigars and cigarettes Helen's boyfriend Peter (Paul Popplewell), a shady upstart with an eye-patch, smokes. The dripping ceiling leaks into a bucket like a tinny clock beat of decay, ticking with the regularity of a watery metronome. A lone light bulb flickers. We shiver in solidarity with the characters, feeling the chill of a city where “there are two seasons – winter and winter”.

Sally Lindsay is the curvy, glamorous single mother Helen, a sexually voracious vamp with her blonde hair in rollers. An ageing alcoholic, she provides a contrast to her frumpy 15-year-old daughter, played by Jodie McNee, that would be tragic if it wasn't so humorous. Pinch faced and stick like, the mouthy Jo resembles Quentin Blake's scrawny depiction of Roald Dahl's precocious young girl Matilda.

Helen and Jo are on first name terms, and more like an antagonistic, longsuffering married couple than mother and child. Perpetually chattering Helen barely gives Jo a chance to speak, and they have very few moments of calm in which to really talk.

Taste of Honey is a play about relationships and power. It's almost a play of two bickering married couples; Helen and Jo, and Jo and Geoff. Geoff, a foppish, ginger haired art student played by Adam Gillen, is the play's main source of comedy, but also its main voice of reason. He cares for Jo when she becomes pregnant as the result of a then taboo mixed-race relationship. He steps into the nurturing role Helen should have had in Jo's life.

The play, written when Delaney was 18, may have turned 50 this year, but updating it to include Manchester and Salford pop hits such as the Ting Tings' obnoxious, catchy Shut Up and Let Me Go, demonstrates that teenage attitude and bravado doesn't change over time. Even though Jo's future looks set to recreate Helen's adult life of “work and want”, she's irrepressibly upbeat and boasts “I can do anything when I put my mind to it”.

Nor does the excitement of first love change over the years, providing hope against a backdrop of hardship and poverty. The characters sing and dance out their inner feelings to a cast of Manchester greatest hits that includes Oasis and Inspiral Carpets, Ian Brown, Happy Mondays and Northern Soul. It’s a form of escapist musical soliloquy: the characters can’t talk to each other - they’re too busy to listen. The songs of the Smiths are centre stage, the characters referencing famous lyrics such as 'I dreamt about you last night and I fell out of bed twice', and 'If a double-decker bus crashes into us, to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die'. It's a nod to the influence the play has had on popular culture, not least Morrissey's lyrics.

Fleet Foxes, Manchester Academy Two, Sunday November 9

Seattle band Fleet Foxes are sunshine personified, harking back to the golden days of West Coast pop and making bands like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young sound fashionable again. They might have sung about snow and winter on White Winter Hymnal, but the crammed academy got even warmer as the harmonies of Quiet Houses enveloped the crowd in shafts of summery warmth.

As four fresh-faced young men plucking harmonies out of the ether, Fleet Foxes don’t really seem of this time and place. A cold, rainy Manchester on a Sunday evening was abandoned for an early morning roll through the countryside. The soft, blissful melodies of Sun It Rises recreated the stillness of daybreak, while the band’s circular rhythm chug-chugged in the background mimicking the wheels of the first train of the day. A 1960s style guitar solo and bucolic banjo rung out of nowhere, like a sun starting to peep from behind hills and trees. A simple sequence of notes repeated, it was like a world tentatively taking its first steps at the start of a new morning. Chiming, silvery guitar caught like dew on spider webs.

Fleet Foxes combine this kind of fragile beauty - crisp one note guitar lines - with solid pop songs and familiar, clattering sixties-esque drum beats. Songs like He Doesn’t Know Why already sound like classics, and Robin Pecknold’s voice is a personality in itself. He’s hairy and sweaty, but classically good looking, angelic even, like he’s stepped out of a portrait from an earlier century.

Pecknold sung an echoing Oliver James by himself. Despite the starkness of the lyrics, the hope inbuilt in Pecknold’s voice, and an overexcited audience stamping along more or less in time, ensured it retained the aura of optimism that characterised the whole gig.

Of Time and the City

SOME films are works of art and others, like Terence Davies' new film Of Time and the City, are literary, almost poetic, works.

Veteran director Terence Davies narrates his new film, which ties in with Liverpool's year as Capital of Culture, in breathless, comforting undertones, like a much loved grandfather who's leaning over you to confidentially tell a bedtime story. While tinged with regret, in many ways Of Time and the City is very humorous.

The highly personal film, documenting Davies' return to Liverpool, his home town, starts by reciting part of Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and recalling Alfred Edward Housman's nostalgic words 'happy highways where I went and cannot come again'. Davies goes on to reference James Joyce, Friedrich Engels and Carl Jung, but never strays away from the ordinary people of Liverpool, for example looking into the lives of women doing laundry. He often focuses on the very young and very old, as those who stand for Liverpool as it was and how it will be in the future.

Twenty years ago, Terence Davies made a bittersweet, autobiographical film, Distant Voices, Still Lives, that was set almost entirely in the redbrick house he grew up in in the 1940s and early 1950s. Of Time and the City is similarly autobiographical, but places Davies' formative years, complete with burgeoning homosexuality and atheism, in a wider context: a Liverpool that was coping with poverty and rationing, and knew the value of 'happiness on a budget', an England that was giving street parties celebrating the lavish coronation of a new Queen and 'fossil monarchy' while the rest of the time it went without, and a world that was heading into the Korean war.

The film, which is set mainly to clips of classical music - from Liszt and Mahler to John Tavener - also serves as a tribute to the golden age of cinema and Hollywood stars, and Davies' love of classical music.

Of Time and the City is a poignant and emotional elegy to a lost Liverpool, one those places that we 'hate to love and love to hate', taking place almost entirely in a smoky black and white. Davies laments 'Where are you, the Liverpool I knew and loved? Where have you gone without me?'. Twenty first century Liverpool is so different that he's an 'alien in my own land.' As the Empire was on the decline, so was the Liverpool of old. Glimpses into house proud women cooking and scrubbing their front steps give way to images of demolition and vandalism.

The Liverpool in Of Time and Only City seems like a faraway land of cobblestones, trams, horses and carts and hire purchase, although in reality what we're seeing took place in the not so distant past. It comes across as a strangely old-fashioned place. Davies juxtaposes an idyllic scene of light rippling on a duckpond with a reminder that homosexuality was illegal until the second half of the twentieth century. Whereas the film jolts into early, ultra-vivid colour footage for the wedding of 'Betty and Phil' and the opening of the Catholic Cathedral (the building of which cuts through the film), the everyday life of most Liverpudlians remained starkly black and white.

Of Time and the City is remarkably coherent for a non-narrative film that is collaged from archive footage, and sweeps from everyday scenes of the docks and crowds watching Liverpool football club to swooping shots of the skyline. It's like we're watching a silent film – the music that accompanies the clips, from choral chanting to Ewan MacColl's 'Dirty Old Town', makes us feel as if we're cut off and peering in on history, outsiders trespassing on tableaux in someone's memory.

The 'paradise' of tower blocks and new towns that were created after the war looks just as remote and detached as the leftover Victorian slum housing that was knocked down to make way for it. Davies uses footage panning over fearsome municipal architecture that shows the 'British genius for creating the dismal'. Whereas before, the crammed streets of terraced houses were alive with children playing in the streets and a sense of community, afterwards the overall impression is of desertion and emptiness, the new city skyline looking like an architect's model or toy town rather than an inhabited urban centre.

I'm not from Liverpool, and I've only been there twice, but I felt strangely moved by the film, which ends up amidst the bars and shops of modern Liverpool. For all its problems, we're left feeling in awe of Liverpool, in all its glamour and majesty, as the camera soars over the Liver Building for the last time.

Sounds of the Other City - the Salford Music Map

SALFORD and Manchester, two cities next to each other but apart. To the rest of the world, Salford and Manchester are indistinguishable. However, in case you didn’t know, Salford is a different city marked out by the River Irwell towards the west of Manchester.

Until the Industrial Revolution, Salford was more powerful than its more famous neighbour. We stole the Industrial Revolution from them, and now, says a new exhibition and map celebrating 50 years of Salford music, we’re taking credit for their music too. “You wouldn’t get Glasgow and Edinburgh mixed up”, says the Salford Music Map’s researcher, David Nolan, so why Manchester and Salford?

Salfordians tend either to try and escape the city or wear their civic pride as a badge of honour. Being from Salford is sometimes seen as a mixed blessing: think of the 'Salford-Cambridge tones of Anthony H Wilson' (as we're reminded of in Mark Garry's BBC commissioned poem St Anthony, which can be listened to in the exhibition).

Nolan, a music author and lecturer at Salford University decided it was time to “address the balance a bit and clear up a few facts” spread by a Manchester Music Map that was created in the 1990s. He says “nearly all the stuff that was on it was actually in Salford.”

Disappointingly, though, the Salford Music Map isn’t really a map but a line of locations - you won’t be able to use it to find your way around Salford or any of the venues.

The ‘map’ is not drawn to scale; it promotes Salford as a tourist destination for visitors from both the UK and abroad, but you’re probably not going to track down all the sites, which are miles apart. Nolan suggests you “invest in a car or a bus ticket”, but admits the Salford Music Map is “more of a thing to put on your wall”.

Smiths fans already have Phil Gatenby’s books, Morrissey’s Manchester and Panic on the Streets, which contain instructions for foot, car and public transport and make for a fun musical tour around Manchester and Salford.

Some of the stories on the map could do with further exploration in the exhibition. Who are the Kersal Massive, and are they really something Salford should be proud of? I was amused to learn that a successful In The City slot at the Kings Arms, probably the nicest venue in the whole of Manchester, let alone Salford, was responsible for letting histrionic glam rockers the Darkness loose on the world, and Mark E Smith could have had a successful career in shipping was it not for The Fall, but both stories are barely referred to in the exhibition. The German singer Nico, who has a section on the map, is virtually unmentioned.

The 3D map on display in the gallery looks like something primary school children would create, with a big, jagged yellow sun peering over it optimistically. A river made of wool winds its way through cut out bits of paper indicating streets and buildings, some of which have already fallen over.

The exhibition is more substantial than the map, however. There are star shaped sunglasses to dress up in, and a stage set up with instruments for future rock stars. There’s a recreation of a record shop complete with posters, fliers and 7”s, as well work by Ray Lowry - Salford-born cartoonist and creator of the iconic cover of London Calling by the Clash - who died recently. You can pick up a telephone and listen to the fuzzy tones of punk poet John Cooper Clarke.

The exhibition is most interesting when it documents the 'development of a dirty northern city', to quote Mike Garry's poem again, and the changing ways we listen to music. Some sites on the map consisted of long-demolished terraced housing, and artefacts include a 1960s reel to reel cassette recorder, jukeboxes, Walkmen and IPODs.

A timeline relates musical occasions to what was going on elsewhere in the world, and there are films of key players for the different decades, as well as a Salford music fan’s Teddy Boy suit.

Bizarrely for an exhibition celebrating Salford, though, there's a big section on the Hacienda, which despite its various locations was never found in Salford. Perhaps because Salford doesn't have a recognisable city centre, Salford bands made a name for themselves playing in Manchester.

It's not just Salford bands Manchester takes credit for, though: it's associated with lots of music that’s not strictly Mancunian. Doves are a Cheshire band, Badly Drawn Boy is from Bolton, Inspiral Carpets are from Oldham. The Charlatans, who the music map claims as Salford’s own, have tenuous claims to being a Manchester band, let alone Salford. Singer Tim Burgess grew up in Cheshire and now lives in LA.

The map aims to find the future sounds of Salford, following the success of the Ting Tings. Bands like the Beep Seals look back to the sixties for their inspiration and are new, but not particularly futuristic. Nor is jaunty, brass heavy ska band The Mekkits.

Salford's annual new music festival Sounds of the Other City is hardly a collection of Salford sounds, either. Fun and commendable as it is, and successful at bringing people into Salford who wouldn't normally go there, bands at this year’s event included the sublime David Thomas Broughton from Leeds, as well as Rozi Plain from Bristol and even a band from New York, Talibam!. For the real 'new' sounds of Greater Manchester in the 21st century, listen to bands like Cats in Paris, Denis Jones or Voice of the Seven Woods, who sometimes even play at venues in Salford like the lovely Sacred Trinity Church.

However, Nolan hopes the exhibition and map will get “people to cross over the river who normally would have just gone to Manchester”.

Quiffs, Riffs and Tiffs will be at Salford Art Gallery, Peel Park Crescent, until 28 October 2009. The Salford Music Map is free and can be ordered from www.vistsalford.info or picked up at the Salford Tourist Information Centre, the Salford Museum and Art Gallery and several of the venues on the map, including The Lowry, The King’s Arms, Salford Lads Club, Islington Mill and Salford University.