Manchester – Page 10 – Modern Mooch

Barmouth Street – Bradford Manchester

Posted on February 11, 2017April 10, 2019 by modernmoocher

Once again I am following in the footsteps of Rita Tushinghan and the Taste of Honey film crew, this time my research has lead me to Barmouth Street, Manchester.

To the east of the city centre, Bradford Park School was the scene of the opening scene, Jo’s netball match. The school is now long gone, now the site of a much enlarged public park, as can be seen from the map above.

Shelagh Delaney, author of the original play on which the film was based, can be seen fleetingly in this opening scene, appearing momentarily over the games teacher’s shoulder.

I have found one archive image of the school, as the scholars prepare for the annual Whit Walks, this along with many other community traditions and conventions, have all but disappeared from the streets of the city.

This was once a tight knit community, surrounded by industry, full employment and a short lived period of post-war growth and optimism.

A corner shop on very corner, though by the time I worked as a Mothers Pride van lad in the late sixties, many were already on their last legs. A lethal cocktail of closing factories, incipient supermarkets, and an urban renewal programme, which lead to slum clearance, would change the character of the area forever.

I am indebted to the photographic work of T Brooks who seems to have spent much of the mid Sixties documenting the streets, his pictures are now kept here in the Manchester Image Archives. Sadly I have found no further reference to him or his images, but have nothing but admiration for all those who pass unnoticed amongst us, camera forever poised.

Central to the social and sanitary life of that that community were the Barmouth Street Baths and Washhouse, where citizens would swim, wash, dry, iron, chat convivially, and surprisingly – play bowls.

Now long gone, along with the provision of local authority nursery care. There were similar low level pre-fabricated buildings dotted all over the city. Built quickly and cheaply, to provide for a growing population, of largely working-class families, with no shortage of work opportunities.

This was a time of great social change, a time which the film attempts to anticipate -a more diverse, and hopefully more tolerant time, a time of possibilities and opportunities for all.

Holt Town Manchester – Part One

Posted on February 9, 2017February 10, 2017 by modernmoocher

1785 Established by David Holt, and described as the only known example of a factory colony in Manchester, that is, an isolated mill complex with housing for the workers.

1794 Mills advertised for sale following the bankruptcy of David Holt and Company.

Things, as we know, have a tendency to come and go – ’twas ever thus.

A whole history of the area can be found here.

River Medlock Holt Town

The area has seen a transition, in some two hundred year or more, from a leafy rural idyll, to smoke choked industrial hell and back again.

Pollard Street

Photographs from the Manchester Image Archive.

In 2014 I visited the site of the former Distillers Company, later Air Liquide UK, production had ceased. The factory was just about standing, litter and detritus strewn, unloved and unwanted, temporary home to the homeless.

The Industrial Revolution has been and gone – bye bye.

There are plans for redevelopment, couched in the terms of the professional new-speak of the new urban renewalists.

The international design competition for Holt Town looked for a solution to the dilemma of providing a sustainable, distinctive, high density family-led residential community in close proximity of the Manchester regional centre.

Promising open green spaces and housing based on the traditional European perimeter block model, not a mention of a mill.

Possibly lasting a little longer than David Holt’s dream, and subsequent manifestations.

The Mancunian Way

Posted on February 7, 2017July 13, 2022 by modernmoocher

The burnt out carcasses of cars are now hastily improvised cloches, following the annual cataclysmic courgette shortage.

Almost everything is made of Graphene, and a robot has taken your job.

The lucky ones are comfortably ensconced in custom built eco-pods, watching implanted Tarkovsky flicks around the clock and eating tasteless gloop.

Or Ultra-HD projections from the past.

Turn on.

Tune in.

Drop off.

Walk the Mancunian way – history buffs and tech heads can take a look here.

Photographs from the Manchester Image Archive

A Taste of the North

Posted on February 7, 2017October 13, 2020 by modernmoocher

Where is the North and what does it look like?

It’s up there somewhere isn’t it, a dark elsewhere, a mythological other place.

I was curious, searching for clues.

I began in a nearby place in a faraway time, my first reference point, the film adaptation of Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey.

Set in Salford by Salford born teenager Shelagh.

A teenager becomes pregnant by a black sailor. She leaves her feckless mother and her flashy new boyfriend to set up her own home. She moves in with a young gay man, who helps look after her as she faces an uncertain future.

I have compiled a series of photographs of the film’s locations.

The film’s release in 1962 broke new ground in terms of its matter of fact depiction of contentious and sensational subject matter. My interest in this instance rests with the visual image of the North that it created.

Larkhill Road Edgeley Stockport

Shot almost entirely on location in black and white by cinematographer Walter Lassally, we are treated to dark treeless vistas, cobbled streets, industrial areas almost perpetually in decline, bleak canals and terraced homes.

As shown in these archive images of the 1950s, illustrating locations that would subsequently be used in the film adaptation.

There is a comprehensive list of locations here at Reel Streets

Cambrian Street Holt Town Manchester

Phillips Park Gasworks Manchester

Director Tony Richardson was a product of the British Free Cinema movement, which had previously produced short, sharp documentary and drama work, driven by a leftist outlook and using a restless, immediate approach, aided by the new lightweight cameras and faster film stocks. This is an ethos and methodology that would be carried over into the feature productions of the Woodfall Films company.

Rochdale Canal Manchester

The film was shot in the flat, low, even light of the Winter which heightened the mildly desolate character of the landscape, though ostensibly Salford set many of the locations are in nearby Manchester and Stockport. An early long and free flowing title sequence and establishing shot, is a bus tour around Central Manchester, a city centre which at the time was still graced by a thick accumulation of dark industrial emissions and miasma.

A soot blackened Queen Victoria mute and imperious in Piccadilly Gardens, the freshly blooming cranes of post-war renewal tentatively appearing in the background.

The skyline punctuated by factory chimneys, the tight huddled streets of terraced houses chuffing billowing great grey clouds of smoke – a view familiar in the work of LS Lowry.

Barton Bridge

Trafford Swing Bridge

Stockport Rail Viaduct

Phillips Park Gasworks

The location of the home that Jo sets up was ironically the stage set workshop of the Royal Court Theatre (the very theatre where the play was developed and produced) in London – that most northern of cities.

There is a brief respite from this milieu, through a picture in picture sequence based on the image of a suburban bungalow – which along with the coming age of mass motor car ownership, offers the promise of escape.

A giddy day trip to Blackpool represents the temporary release from a contrasting and constricting world, a trip which for Jo emphasises the divide between Mother and her lover.

So we the viewers are left with a cloudily clear, black and white world, a pervasive construct that the North and Manchester is eagerly beginning to casually shuffle off.

Where streets are no longer paved with Eccles Cakes and whippets are hip.

Identity through landscape and location can both define and constrain, but that landscape, its representation, and the identity that it produces are all mutually mutable.

Take some time to watch and rewatch the film, freeze frame where are we?

Who are you?

Pifco – Manchester

Posted on January 7, 2017January 6, 2020 by modernmoocher

It began with a ray gun.

Following a thread, a tenuous electrical link that brought me back home, to an all too familiar household name.

A name that has illuminated, vibrated, mixed, measured, massaged, warmed and dried our lives for over one hundred years.

But what does it mean, where does this stuff come from, what’s it all about Pifco?

Pifco of Failsworth, also of Pifco House, 87 High Street, Manchester.

1900 Company established by Joseph Webber to sell lighting appliances and accessories.

1902 Public company formed as Provincial Incandescent Fittings Co. Ltd.

1911 The Filani Nigeria Tin Mining Co was incorporated as a public company.

1949 Name changed.

1954 Incorporated Walls Ltd, of River Street Birmingham, as a wholly-owned subsidiary to manufacture medical lamps, kettles and small cookers.

1957 The last of the mining assets were sold.

1957 Filani Nigeria Tin Mining Co changed its name to Pifco Holdings Ltd and acquired all of the issued share capital of Pifco 1961 Manufacturers and distributors of electrical appliances and accessories.

1970 The Regent Cotton Mill, in Failsworth was purchased by Pifco.

1984 Agreed to acquire Swan Housewares from BSR International, but later the deal collapsed.

1987 Acquired House of Carmen, maker of heated hair rollers; the other important brand was Salton.

1991 Purchased Russell Hobbs Tower.

2001 Salton Group, a US company making domestic appliances, acquired Pifco.

So Provincial Incandescent Fittings Co. Ltd.

We salute you, so much joy emanating from Failsworth Manchester, making the world a warmer, drier, brighter, cleaner safer place.

Always at never less than entirely reasonable prices.

A true friend to the nocturnal cyclist.

Christmas cheer for all!

Those little things that lighten the wearisome load of the daily beauty regime.

The minor essentials of our everyday electrical lives.

The seemingly frivolous rendered material.

We can all sleep ever so easily abed at night, in the simple knowledge that Pifco is still out there working just for us/you!

Nighty night.

Precinct – Ashton under Lyne

Posted on September 7, 2016November 5, 2019 by modernmoocher

Possibly my first brush with modernism and modernity, the shopping precinct in Ashton under Lyne. Typically in the mid Sixties, British towns reinvented themselves as space age retail experiences, in stark contrast to their middle aged, Middle Aged market centre, market centred identity.

Out with the cobbles and stalls, in with the travelator, frothy coffee, concrete and a pedestrianised, undercover, all weather, super convenient haven of heavenly fun!

And lo, it came to pass, let construction commence.

Simply add a few decorative embellishments courtesy of the Direct Works’ pavoirs.

You have built it and now they will come:

Little did you know you had created a punk rock icon.

Featured on the cover of fanzine Ghast Up #3 – many thanks to MDMA

Many thanks to the Tameside Image Archive

Ashton Moss – Expo 2025

Posted on September 3, 2016September 3, 2016 by modernmoocher

Why are we here?

A heady cocktail of capital, coal, cotton, cultivation, commerce and cricket created you.

The end of the age of celery heralded the construction of a new landscape of consumption.

Spoil and soil from the cuttings of the M60, added to by Etihad detritus created an elevated mound some hundred feet in height, across an area of seventeen hectares.

Where are we going?

Playing golf has been permanently postponed, the proposed light industrial units were knocked back by local authority planning officers, and residents’ objections.

So let’s get off to the Expo!

I took myself off there, take a look around, get a feel for the place. Currently the province of rebel dog walkers and guerrilla gardeners, I was informed that the rights of way are regularly blocked by an employee of Cordingley’s Estate Agents, who closes the gaps in the perimeter fencing, subsequently photographing his wiry handiwork. The gaps are then promptly reopened and walkways reestablished.

Short eared owls have been spotted.

I was told of the legend concerning Peg’s lantern – fearing for the well being of her son, Peg wanders the dark lanes in search of the errant offspring, later found drunk in a ditch.

This area is a locus of deep, deep energies and histories, monkey with it at your peril.

These are observations from a hill:

Ashton Moss – Leisure and Light Industry

Posted on September 3, 2016September 3, 2016 by modernmoocher

Absolute disgrace the food was disgusting and we’re we was sat it stunk of urine.

Never again will I go.

Welcome to the modern world, once home to the world’s finest celery, now home to the world’s worst online reviews.

The area, under cultivation for over a hundred years was bulldozed to one side, and left in a heap. The M60 arrived wiped its feet on the greensward and awaited the expected redevelopment.

Welcome to the brand new shiny nowhere, the dual carriageway expanse of Robert Sheldon Way carries you away to a strikingly inevitable array of chains, human bondage has never appeared so clean and bright.

Muse developments:

Good design is required as a key aspect of pursuing sustainable development indivisible from good planning. Good design involves seeking positive improvements in the quality of our built, natural and historic environment, addressing the connections between people and places.

Ashton Moss – The Past

Posted on September 2, 2016April 20, 2021 by modernmoocher

To the east of Manchester and the west of Ashton sits The Moss.

This map of 1861 shows an area criss-crossed with lanes, ditches and field boundaries.

A world that survived into the 1980s, captured here so beautifully by Brian Lomas, prior to the building of the M60.

Photographs from – Tameside Image Archive

Then came the railways:

With an attendant ghost:

And telecommunications installation

Its location on the south east corner of the Lancashire Coalfield, and the burgeoning demands of the Industrial Revolution saw the further development of mining in the area.

As the demand for coal outstripped the output, a deeper mine was opened in 1875, at Ashton Moss. This new pit had its own railway branch and canal arm for efficient transportation of the coal. In 1882 a second shaft was sunk – at 2,850 feet, the deepest in the world at that time.

The New Rocher pit closed in 1887 and Broadoak pit closed in 1904, after which time Ashton Moss pit was the only coal mine still in operation in Ashton. Although it produced 150,000 tons of coal a year in the early 1950s and employed over 500 men, Ashton Moss colliery closed in 1959 and part of its site is now the Snipe Retail Park on the boundary with Audenshaw.

Seen here in this painting by local artist David Vaughan.

Colliery lamp token.

Northern Mining

This tight little island of land was a contrasting mix of the agricultural and industrial, home also to the urgent demands of a leisured and growing working class.

The area boasted two motorcycle speedway tracks.

One located on the Audenshaw side, just behind The Snipe pub.

And one in Droylsden at the Moorside Stadium – home to local legend Riskit Riley:

The stadium later to become a horse trotting track, known locally as Doddy’s Trot

The Moss has also provided a home for Curzon Ashton football club

And Ashton Cricket and Bowling Club.

The cricket and the football have both survived the building of the Orbital Ring Road, and the development of the site as a light industrial, retail and leisure park.

The roar of Riskit Riley is heard no more.

Ashton Moss

Posted on August 31, 2016September 2, 2016 by modernmoocher

Ashton Moss is an area I have known for some fifty years or so, my grandfather was a collier at the Ashton Moss Pit, I worked trains around the triangle of rail that encloses the area – I returned some time ago to take a look at what remained of a once fertile area.

This area of low lying, deep peaty bog, just outside Ashton-under Lyne, was drained in the mid 1800’s to grow some of the best crops – It was world famous for its celery but also grew good cabbage, cauliflowers and lettuce, with cucumbers and tomatoes grown in glasshouses. The ground was apparently fertilised by marl dug from local banks or pits, and by dung brought by horse and cart from the elephant and tiger enclosures at Belle Vue Zoo, down the road.

Four brothers of the Kelly family came from Ireland shortly after the Irish potato famine of 1840’s, settled on the Moss and still have a descendent selling fruit and vegetables on Ashton Market today.

The Moss is also where Bill Sowerbutts, of Gardener’s Question Time fame, learnt his trade. Bill’s first memories were of his Father’s smallholding on the Moss, which had been bought from a market gardener called Tommy Knight in 1892.

http://kindling.org.uk/digging-around-ashton-moss

The celery is long gone, the land now in use as a retail leisure park, intersected by the Manchester Orbital ring road, a Metrolink tram track, several dual carriageways and the existing rail network.

Its passing does not seem to be matter of record save for this archived account of 1989.

I read today of plans to set the 2025 World’s Fair there.

In January 2009 it looked like this, heaps of spoil, recently relocated slag heaps, frozen lakes and puddles, rough tracks, barely preserved rights of way and restricted access.

Ashton under Lyne – The Dustbin Demolished

Posted on August 1, 2016 by modernmoocher

For over thirty year you have weathered the storms of public ignominy.

The unloved Dustbin – repository of Tameside Council’s officers and offices.

Last time I was here you were there.

Then along came the ‘dozers.

Vision Tameside has left you in tiny pieces.

– poked out your eyes and stamped you into the ground.

Needwood Close – Collyhurst

Posted on June 17, 2016June 25, 2016 by modernmoocher

Deep in the heart, just on the edge of central Manchester, there exists a dilemma.

Once a place of full employment and home occupation, time has not been kind to Collyhurst. Work is scarce and the area blighted by a reputation for crime and social problems. Yet it sits by an area of inner city wealth, economic expansion and a growing professional class.

The plan is to expand this growth outside of the fringes of city and into north Manchester, since 2008 this has been the stated aim of the local authority. Tram stops, academies, and retail parks apart, change seems slow to arrive.

There is a chronic shortage of public funding and seemingly an absence of private capital and speculative development – life is elsewhere.

In the mean time there are properties tinned up awaiting a new dawn.

Needwood Close is one such example.

Collyhurst

Posted on May 20, 2016July 24, 2019 by modernmoocher

It’s the end of the road, for the middle of the street.

Needwood Close Collyhurst is closed.

An area that has suffered the slings, swings and arrows of failed PFI bids, absent partners and putative city fathers.

2012

After missing out on £252m of state investment when the Government cut the Homes and Communities Agency budget, Manchester is now trying another approach to deliver the much needed regeneration of Collyhurst.

As reported by Manchester Confidential

2014

The masterplan is part of Manchester Place, a joint initiative between Manchester City Council and the Homes & Communities Agency that looks to create a pipeline of development-ready sites to help the city meet its ambitious target of creating 55,000 new homes by 2027 as set out in the Manchester Residential Growth Prospectus.

Manchester Place will work with investors, such as Manchester Life, a £1bn, partnership between Manchester City Football Club and Abu Dhabi United Group, the privately owned investment company which also owns Manchester City Football Club, to bring 6,000 new homes to east Manchester over the next 10 years.

As outlined in Place North West

2016

Hartfield Close – Manchester

Posted on May 19, 2016November 3, 2025 by modernmoocher

It’s not unusual.

To discover something, whilst looking for something else.

For me, it’s almost a way of life.

I was in the area to look around the nearby Brunswick Parish Church.

Just around the corner was Hartfield Close a low, white two-storey terrace of six homes, each with a small fenced garden to the rear, facing onto a large open grassed area, backed by further housing.

It was difficult to discern whether they were empty or inhabited – two seemed to have residents. Curious in a city with a growing population and a demand for vacant property. Are they in limbo, between redevelopment, refurbishment or CPO?

They have ben offered to the market within the last year.

At a value way below comparable properties, currently they seem to be adrift in an uncaring world, a tiny lost island of Municipal Modernism.

They deserve a little care an attention.

We all do.

Eastford Square – Collyhurst

Posted on May 6, 2016April 5, 2020 by modernmoocher

Once there were homes, postwar social housing.

Once there were jobs, a measure of prosperity.

A settled community.

Time has not been kind to North Manchester, successive slumps, double-dip depressions, economic downturns, and centrally imposed recession hurts.

The local authority steps in, from 2009 the fate of Eastford Square is sealed.

Regeneration.

Spells demolition.

One wing is already gone, the maisonettes are tinned up.

The Flower Pot Café, still fully functional, fed me well for £2, Lee the proprietor is living on borrowed time though, hoping for relocation within the new development.

Other businesses have not survived the transition, awaiting CPO and who knows what.

The square is blessed with a concrete sculpture, whose fate I hope is secured, somehow.

Possibly by William Mitchell – possibly not.

This as ever, is a time of change, I hope that the area and its current inhabitants live to tell the tale, rather than fall victim to the tide of gentrification, forcing them further afield.

O Romeo Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

Manchester – Brunswick Parish Church

Posted on April 22, 2016May 8, 2018 by modernmoocher

You don’t have to go far out off town to discover the unfamiliar familiar.

Tucked betwixt and between Chorlton on Medlock and Ardwick, is Brunswick, so near and yet so far, from the booming cosmopolis.

At its heart, a solid brick modernist church, built to serve the new social housing estates that surround it. Bold curves, angled interlocking volumes, an warmly lit interior space with a dynamic timber roof, and a dramatic arc of tiered seating.

Perhaps you’ve never passed by, perhaps you’ve never noticed.

Operating as a community centre and place of worship, it continues to serve the area well.

I was given the warmest of welcomes by the staff and clerics, thanks.

Simon the vicar says: Please don’t get us grade two listed.

Pop in set a spell.

http://www.brunswickchurch.org.uk

Burnage – Garden Village

Posted on March 23, 2016July 10, 2020 by modernmoocher

Spring’s in the air, let’s take a walk down leafy lanes, far from the traffic’s roaring boom and the silence of my lonely room – well not that far.

Burnage.

The housing estate of 136 houses known as Burnage Garden Village, a residential development covering an area of 19,113sqm off the western side of Burnage Lane in the Burnage ward. The site is situated approximately six kilometres south of the city centre and is arranged on a broadly hexagonal layout with two storey semi-detached and quasi detached dwelling houses situated on either side of a continuous-loop highway. The highway is named after each corresponding compass point with two spurs off at the east and west named Main Avenue and West Place respectively. Main Avenue represents the only access and egress point into the estate whilst West Place leads into a resident’s parking area.

The layout was designed by J Horner Hargreaves. Houses are loosely designed to Arts and Crafts principles, chiefly on account of being low set and having catslide roofs.

At the centre of the garden village and accessed by a network of pedestrian footpaths, is a resident’s recreational area comprising a bowling green, club house and tennis courts. The estate dates from approximately 1906 and was laid out in the manner of a garden suburb with characteristic hedging, front gardens, grass verges and trees on every street.

A rare and almost perfectly preserved example of Edwardian Mancunian suburban architecture, save a uPVC epidemic of identical doors and window frames. On a sunny day the variegated brick and render simply sings, like so many chirpy sparrows.

These homes are a variation on a theme, a fugue of tile, brick, pointy counterpointed gable, light and shadow – linked by scale, style and well laid wide concrete roads, filled with good intentions and cars.

Take a hike or bike south of the city, now that Spring is here.

Oxford Road Station – Manchester

Posted on February 26, 2016October 25, 2019 by modernmoocher

Where are you?

Neither here nor there.

Up in the air.

Betwixt and between.

Possibly on the way to somewhere else, stranded at Oxford Road Station.

Tucked in behind Shaw’s Furniture and The Tatler Cinema.

I love every curvy corner, timber frame and canopy, concrete spiral, empty kiosk and precipitous steps – I’m happy to be stranded.

It opened in 1849 and was rebuilt in 1960.

The station was opened as Oxford Road on 20 July 1849 by the Manchester, South Junction and Altrincham Railway . The station was the headquarters of the MSJAR from its opening until 1904. It had two platforms and two sidings, with temporary wooden buildings. To allow for extra trains in connection with the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857, extra platforms and sidings were built. In 1874 the station was completely rebuilt providing two bay platforms and three through platforms. Further reconstruction took place during 1903-04. From 1931 it was served by the MSJAR’s 1500V DC electric trains between Altrincham and Manchester Piccadilly.

The station had become dilapidated by the 1950s, and in connection with the electrification and modernisation programme of the Manchester to London line in 1960, the old buildings were replaced by the current structure by architects W.R. Headley and Max Glendinning and structural engineer Hugh Tottenham. It was designed in a distinctive style in concrete and wood with curves bringing to mind the Sydney Opera House.

Use of the station increased from May 1988 when the Windsor Link was inaugurated between Deansgate and Salford Crescent, connecting lines to the north and south of Manchester.

The station is a grade II listed building.

One of the most interesting and innovative buildings of the period, the most ambitious example in this country of timber conoid shell roofing.

Clare Hartwell – Pevsner’s Architectural Guide Manchester.

Further development awaits, widening the viaduct and lengthening platforms as part of the Northern Hub Project.

The defunct Platform 6 and lost awning to the left – Photo: 20 3 1971 Tom Burnham

Altrincham bound 931 Metro-Cammell MSJAR 1500 volt DC EMU – all withdrawn by 1971, when the line was converted to AC.

Screen Wall Water Feature – Manchester

Posted on February 25, 2016May 10, 2019 by modernmoocher

Breakin’ down the walls of heartache,

I’m a carpenter of love and affection.

So sang Johnny Johnson of the Bandwagon.

They were a permanent fixture at the New Century Hall in the late sixties.

Attached to New Century House, the Hall was an integral part of the extensive Cooperative Society property development in Manchester.

Much of that development now faces an ever uncertain future.

None more so than the adjoining screen wall.

Set to the north-east side of the building’s entrance forecourt is a concrete sculptural screen wall by John McCarthy with an abstract relief to the south-west side facing into the forecourt. The wall is aligned at a right angle to the building’s main entrance and has a shallow rectangular pool (now drained) set in front. The wall includes numerous openings from which water originally flowed into the pool, but the system is no longer in working order. The pool also originally incorporated small fountains.

Information from Historic England

At a time when the whole of the centre of the city seems alive with construction, refurbishment, gentrification and more quarters than you could shake a stick at, this forlorn and seemingly unloved gem stands, shrouded in shrubs.

I’m a carpenter of love and affection, who would not care to see, this particular wall:

Broken down.

Back to Beswicks

Posted on February 11, 2016February 11, 2016 by modernmoocher

You’re never more than a thousand yards from a main road, six feet from a rat, or a quarter of a mile from Beswick, one of many Beswicks.

Beswick was once a bustling mixed industrial and residential area of east Manchester, alive with back to back terraced housing, pubs, clubs, shops and people.