All towns have ghosts, none more so than Scarborough.
High atop a castle topped, wind whipped promontory, lies Anne Bronte, overlooking the harbour below, wayward Whitby whalers wail, lost fisher folk seek solace.
Its walls ache with traders past, scissors that no longer snip, click-less shutters, unlettered rock and loaves that no longer rise.
Layers of sun baked, peeling paint on brick, rendered almost illegible.
As Alan Resnais would say Scarborough, mon amour!
The construction of the shopping centre and surrounding areas continued and on 21 May 1970 the new Salford Market officially opened. From 1971 onwards new shops inside the precinct itself began to open.
However, due to a lack of funds and a political scandal which saw chairman Albert Jones jailed for eight months construction of Salford Precinct was halted. The site had only 95 shop units compared to the proposed 260, the hotel and two storey car park were never built.
In 1991 the building was refurbished at a cost of £4 million, this included the installation of roofs across various walkways, making large swathes of the centre undercover. The shopping centre which at the time was known as Salford Precinct was renamed Salford Shopping City.
On 9 August 1994 the Manchester Evening News reported that Salford City Council was planning on selling off Salford Shopping City to raise money for local housing repairs, these plans split the ruling Labour Party council, one councillor telling the press that it would be like selling off the family silver.
In 2000 Salford Shopping City was eventually sold to a private company for £10 million in an effort to cut the council’s deficit. It was then later sold in March 2010 to Praxis Holdings for £40 million, the company stated that it wanted to invest in the precinct and link it to the new food superstore.
This is a tale of our times – 60s and 70s redevelopment designed and built in the rampant spirit of free enterprise and uber-buoyant consumerism, falling foul of an economic downturn, subsequent unemployment and shrinking retail spending. Property is ping-ponged between local authority and speculative developers.
Following the riots of 2011 pledges were made regarding the future of the site, plans are still afoot, as yet to be rendered corporeal. Although the area has benefitted from an influx of students and a refurbishment of housing stock, there is pressure on the prosperity of the precinct from thriving retail developments in nearby Manchester and the Trafford Centre.
The architectural core of the site has been retained, including the 23 storey Briar Court residential tower, though diluted by more recent additions, misguided post modern detailing that threatens the integrity of full many a post war development.
Once there was a river there, formed by the thunder of Irish Sea ice gouging a great glacial valley, bowling along boulders and millstone grit through phyllosilicate clays and sedimentary sandstone.
Then there wasn’t.
The Mersey, formed in Stockport as the Tame and Goyt conjoined, inconveniently filled with industrial grime and mire, then conveniently covered over in 1936.
Creating the thoroughly modern thoroughfare Merseyway.
The giant concrete culvert and bridge leaving the river cowering cautiously below.
Of time and a river – little stands still and the town is whisked briskly into the late Twentieth Century with plans for a pedestrianised precinct.
Completed and opened in 1965 the shopping precinct was concrete poetry in motion, incorporating the surrounding topography and extant architecture with grace and aplomb. Combining retail, restaurants and car parking facilities in a manner that critic Ian Nairn considered to be amongst the finest in the land.
We had travelators, integrated paving, street furniture, and lighting across several levels. A carefully considered whole, combining all that was best in modern design with style, élan and panache – along with Freeman, Hardy and Willis.
A clock tower, an Alan Boyson concrete car park screen and public art.
Would that it was still so, a variety of additions and subtractions have left Merseyway in architectural limbo, concrete legs akimbo across the river below, striding towards the future in a more than somewhat bewildered manner.
Yet we still continue cast our eyes upwards towards a clock that isn’t there, ride a non-existent walkway to the sky, try on an imaginary crop-top in C&A’s Clockhouse.
Photographs Stockport Image Archive
The Lansbury Estate, to the north of East India Dock Road, is the most important, largest and best-known council estate in Poplar. It demonstrates the different trends in post-war council house design and layout. The interest of the estate lies as much, if not more, in the story of its planning and construction, as in what was actually built. This is especially true of its first phase, which formed the basis of the Live Architecture Exhibition in the 1951 Festival of Britain.
Originally outlined in the 1943 plan for London, replacing the bomb damaged homes of displaced dockers, the estate has weathered well enough, though changes in demographics, the ever greater engulfing tide of gentrification and the containerisation of all ports, brings a fresh set of challenges and changes.
Go east – I visited the V&A Micro Museum, which has become a focus for residents’ and visitors’ memories and projections of a certain uncertain past and future. Arriving by the Docklands Light Railway, I was immediately drawn towards my destination, by the prominent Lansbury Tower, its clock patiently ticking away the time to and from 1951. Welcomed by staff and fellow travellers at the Chrisp Street Market site we began our tour at the heart of the Festival area – further details of which can be found here at Municipal Dreams.
A mix of market, shops, Festival pub, warm cream London brick terraces and low rise, later tower blocks, schools, churches and open grassed communal areas. On a cold and getting colder late winter’s day, a smattering of residents went purposefully about their business.
Life goes on.
Next time everything’s going to be different.
There is little or no reference to this fine building on the whole world wide web – the wise people of Wikipedia tell us –
The Concord Suite was built in the early 1970’s to house Droylsden Council. The word Concord comes from the town’s motto Concordia, meaning harmony.
Today’s visit reveals the hard facts!
I’ve passed by for almost all of its life, marvelling at its white modular space age panels. The wide paved piazza frontage affords the lucky viewer a full appreciation of its futuristic whole, a giddy mix of brick, glass and concrete optimism. Civic architecture has never seemed so sunny.
The interior lighting is straight out of 2001, white organic and fully functioning – the upstairs function room is available for functions at the junction of Market Street and Ashton New Road.
I saw The Fall there for the first time in 1978, suitably shambolic and suitably feisty.
Renamed the Droylsden Centre on one side, it houses the regulation issue of charity shops and empty units. The main building is home to the Greater Manchester Pension Fund, soon to relocate to a new build across the road. The Concord will then provide a home for the workers leaving the now demolished Tameside Council Offices in Ashton.
The tram stops here.
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.
The man responsible for the majority of these archive photographs is Tommy Brooks of 56 Gransmoor Road, Higher Openshaw.
He is my hero, a member go the Manchester Amateur Photographic Society, cycling the streets of Manchester to produce a unique record of life in the Sixties.
The Manchester Image Collection is awash with his work.
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.
Here we are again wandering the pedestrianised precincts of Coventry – having previously travelled by picture postcard and archival image.
Back to the future.
Today much of the original footprint and well-built brick, stone, glass and concrete structure prevails, with more recent retro fitted additions.
The Gordon Cullen mural has been renovated and re-sited.
Commissioned in 1957 on the recommendation of Arthur Ling – it was made by Carter’s Tiles of Poole.
Sadly only one of the neon sculptures, remains illuminated – they may have been listed by Historic England, they have certainly given them a coat of looking at. I myself was approached whilst working away by a crack squad of precinct management, questioning my methods and motives. I reassured them I was a serious student of post-war architecture and they allowed happily to go about my business – assuring me that I was following in the footsteps of HE.
The elevated café, pierced screenwork, mosaics on the former Locarno, now Library and town clock are still every much in situ, Lady Godiva dutifully appearing on the hour, every hour with an ever attendant Peeping Tom for company.
The area is well-used bustling busy, with a smattering of empty units which are sadly typical of most provincial town competing for custom and prosperity on the high street.
When walking the streets of Welshpool, one often finds oneself outside.
Outside a launderette.
I paused.
The porch was decorated by the most enchanting mosaic, Vickery and Co.
Hosiers, Hatters and Outfitters.
Politely, ever so politely, I asked the two local lads if they would step aside from their porch perch one moment, I snapped.
And walked on.
Upon my return, nobody was here, I hurriedly occupied the vacant space, with the expansive volume of my incurable curiosity.
Here is what I found.
Life is full of tiny delights.
Newtown, a town of tiny delights, my journey through Wales by bike took me there.
None more delightful and surprising than the branch of WH Smiths, its exterior adorned with the most beautiful of signs, tiles and lamps.
Curious, curiously I explored further, the porch housed a newspaper and magazine stall with further tiled images.
These tiles were made by Carter & Co. at their pottery works in Poole, Dorset in the 1920s. Commissioned by the retailer, they were installed in the entrance ways of a number of its branches. They were intended to advertise the wide selection of books and other items on sale, however their distinctive Art Deco style and the scenes depicted also expose a great deal about society at that time.
In subsequent decades, particularly during periods of refurbishment from the 1960s, many shops lost their decorative panels, either being removed or covered over. Only seven branches of WHSmith are known to have their tile panels intact, with a few surviving in private collections. Many tiles were rescued by WHSmith and these can now be seen in a museum housed in the Newtown branch in Powys.
The staff were typically helpful and accommodating – directing me to the Museum upstairs – just pull the rope to one side.
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?
Once part of a larger retail complex, embracing the Castle Market area – regrettably demolished in 2015, the Gallery Shops are themselves, but a wrecking ball away from nothingness.
Linked by walkways, once populated by a multitude of rosy-cheeked, cheery shoppers, independent units and stalls operated in what was the better end of the High Street.
Over time, like many modern city the axis of energy shifts elsewhere, to newer more shiny developments – leaving hollow shells, echoing only to the footsteps of long gone ghosts.
Oblivion.
Revolution.
Lift receiver and dial.
Formerly the site of a much larger, much busier Blackpool North Station – a time when trains arrived sixteen coaches long.
As seen in this archive film of the 1940s.
Cars and closures caused the station to withdraw up the road, to its current much smaller site.
Subsequently Fine Fare arrives with a fanfare of moulded plastic panels, and cast concrete walls.
Opened on May 22nd 1979 by the Goodies.
Superseded by Food Giant, Gateway, Dunnes Stores, Kwik Save and Somerfields – possibly others, currently Wilkinson’s Wilko Superstore and Age UK, retaining at all times the attractive integral car park.
Wilko is now to be relocated and the site redeveloped as part of the second phase of the £220m Talbot Gateway – whereby trams will link the promenade with the Station.
Possibly.
The tale is the typical mix of Council, Developer on/off, binary obfuscation, secrecy, smoke and mirrors.
Councillor Fred Jackson says:
“We are in talks with our development partner Muse but there is a confidentiality agreement so there is very little I can say.”
Whatever the outcome I do hope the panels are saved, having notified Historic England several weeks ago, I eagerly await their hurried and considered response…
In the meantime get y’self on the choo-choo to Blackpool North toot sweet, and have a gander at a fine Fine Fare plastic panel or two, before you can’t.
In the early 18th century, Oldham Street was apparently:
“An ill-kept muddy lane, held in place on one of its sides by wild hedgerows”.
In 1772, a privately owned track which is now known as Oldham Street was given to the public. The road took its name from Adam Oldham rather than from the place name. He was an acquaintance of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, which could account for the Oldham street location of the Methodist Chapel, opened by Wesley in 1781. Central Hall replaced the Chapel in 1885.
The area around Oldham Street became more affluent, with warehouses and shops, many of whose merchants lived within their shop premises. This is described by Isabella Varley, Mrs. Linnaeus Banks, a resident of Oldham Street, in her book The Manchester Man.
One Oldham Street shopowner mentioned by a number of writers is Abel Heywood, who spearheaded the mass distribution of books, supplying the whole country not only with penny novels, but also with educational books and political pamphlets. Heywood went on to become Mayor of Manchester.
The general well to do, mix of hustle and bustle, pubs, warehousing, grand stores, smaller specialist shops and services continued into the 1970’s. Woolworths, C&A, Affleck and Browns, Cantors, Dobbins attracted a steady flow of happy shoppers, I loved the mongrel nature of the mixed use architecture.
The focus if the city centre then slipped away to the newly built Arndale and pedestrianised Market Street.
Oldham Street awaited a new sense of place and purpose.
With thanks to http://www.manchester.gov.uk/info/448/archives_and_local_history/326/historical_photographs_of_manchester
Following my previous post on Market Street, using archive material from the 60s and 70s, I was prompted to record the current state of the street.
To the east is the Arndale, I chose to concentrate on the western elevation and the extant facades that chart a story from Victorian to Moderne – with a little rebuild, pastiche and grandiose Classicism in between.
See what you think, the sooty deposits have long been sandblasted away, much of the previous exciting noise and clutter, of above eye level signage ceases to shout, from just below the rooftops.
It’s a cleaner, leaner and possibly meaner world.
It always pays to look up – just don’t inadvertently bump into things.
The dissipated filling, in an Aldi and Tesco sandwich, a flat roofed, concrete and brick sixties shopping development, a precinct.
Small towns typically comprise of several retail developments, of various vintages, chasing diminishing returns, in ever expanding rectangles.
Stalybridge is no exception, once a bustling mill town, it sought salvation in a hedonistic mini-break by the River Tame, party industry.
Stalyvegas.
The bright lights of the society of the spectacle, now extinguished, burnt brightly in Bar Liquid, Club Rififi, H2O and Amber Lounge.
Walking the streets today, a meagre spread of shoppers, hardened daytime drinkers and lost souls.
Bids were made for a Portas Pilot, Mary contrarily resisted.
The Northern Powerhouse hits the buffers.
The Buffet prevails.
There there are 98 stops on the 192 route, between Manchester and Hazel Grove.
– I know because I walked them all.
Sunday morning roads relatively free of traffic.
Some stops peopled some not.
Zigzagging the A6 to record a consistent sequence.
The bus stops here.
I want it.
Historic England want it.
Hopefully you and the people of Sheffield want it,
– anyway it’s listed.
http://www.historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1393220
“1964 by George S Hay, Chief Architect for CWS, with interior design by Stanley Layland, interior designer for CWS. Reinforced concrete with Blue Pearl granite tiles and veneers, grey granite tiles and veneers, buff granite blocks, glass, and brick.”
The Liberal Democrat Council objected, saying
“It could be a major barrier to regenerating Castlegate.”
There is now the possibility of redevelopment as a creative hub.
It was a Co-op on the grandest of scales.
It has it all, public art, monolithic proportions and finish, bags of detail and scale in abundance. A fascinating building to explore and certainly one that fills my little heart with joy in superabundance
A building of period distinction, it deserves its preservation.
We do not require another patch of steel and wilfully wayward clad nowheresville non- architecture, replete with aspirational retail agogo.
Go see it soon!
Facing happily out to sea, hard by Hastings promenade, sits Arthur Green’s, former menswear shop of some considerable distinction. Currently operating as an antiques centre, the whole of the perfectly preserved, period interior is now listed by English Heritage.
A mosaic porch and glass lined vestibule, invite you into a palace of dark hardwood fittings, capacious drawers, glass fronted cabinets, and an ornately carved cashiers booth, all topped off and lit by crystal chandeliers.
Few such example still exist intact, their contents usually ripped out, ripped off and reinstalled in chi-chi overpriced, cosmopolitan boutiques – suits you sir?
I think not!
My thanks to the helpful and patient staff who informed and facilitated my mooching.
Take a walk along the front – pop in.
In the heart of Wales, former centre of the flannel industry, stands Llanidloes.
Through civic pride, love and local doggedness, the decorative shopfront prevails unabashed.
The finest selection of carved and moulded wooden filigree, hand painted signs, large open panes, tile work and the odd suspended folk-art sheep, adorn substantial Victorian properties, rich in the market town tradition of controlled opulence. A varied typology, the majority continuing to trade, the odd domestic conversion retaining its retail characteristics, whilst maintaining its modesty, behind tightly drawn net curtains.
Go take a look.
Should you, as I did wander down Northdown Road, Cliftonville, you will chance upon Pottons at 262.
By now however, ingress is more than somewhat inhibited.
It’s closed.
The most exciting and extant period fascia, once gave way to oak fittings and fixtures festooned with all manner of menswear, exotic and plain accoutrements, now inaccessible.
It’s gone.
A few sad remnants were on sale, administered in their final days by Lorraine, employed for 35 years in a family business, whose trade had once included made to measure, fine millinery and quality accessories for the discerning gent around town.
No more.
Modern Mooch 