108 arches to Ardwick: the view from below

22 02 2013

Arches under the viaduct near Piccadilly station.

Arches under the viaduct near Piccadilly station.

Trundling into Manchester Piccadilly on the train from Stockport is my normal way into the city: a mundane ride along the top of one of Manchester’s many Victorian viaducts. From this view from above, the city is distanced: readable, if strangely dislocated; not quite providing the sense of exaltation of seeing the city from the top of a high building, but nevertheless reassuring you that this city – of run-down factories, container storage areas, mean housing and distant hills – is understandable because seen from a secure, elevated viewpoint. Down below is another matter. Walking this route – tracing that same railway line from below – is exhilarating for different reasons – it feels transgressive, a bit dangerous perhaps, certainly mucky and murky: this is the 108 arches to Ardwick.

1. Arches fronting Temperance Street.

1. Arches fronting Temperance Street.

Ardwick – the area immediately south-east of Piccadilly station – was, until the mid-19th century, a pleasant Manchester suburb, with 18th-century houses and villas clustered around Ardwick Green (some of which, along with the Green, still survive). As the city spread its industry and cheap housing over the area in the mid-19th century, it became much like any other inner-Manchester suburb: a dense conglomreration of brick-built factories, terraced housing and warehouses. The railway arrived in the 1840s, cutting a vast swathe through the area on an elevated viaduct northwards to its destination at Piccadilly. From Ardwick station, that viaduct expands and is joined by others, gaining in height as its sweeps in a graceful curve towards its terminus – ordered into a disciplined cavalcade of arches, each numbered like a series of identical shops or houses (1).

2. Blind Lane

2. Blind Lane

3. Pittbrook Street

3. Pittbrook Street

4. Chapelfield Road

4. Chapelfield Road

5. The second viaduct over Temperance Street.

5. The second viaduct over Temperance Street.

Here, down below, are streets that are forgotten: Blind Lane (2) leads only to a mechanic’s workshop; Pittbrook Street (3) stands empty under the first arch, perhaps better known by its former name; Chapelfield Road (4) further down the viaduct cuts a cavernous and threatening route through it. Alongside the viaduct all the way to Piccadilly is Temperance Street – an immediately Victorian name that conjures up images of discipline, order and brow-beating sermonising. But what a name for this street! Lined on both sides by the tremendous brick walls of two parallel viaducts, you certainly feel cowered into submission, tiny in the face of such overwhelming forces (5). On the walls either side, trails of water leave a rich patina of moss, saturated brick, rust and sprouting Buddleia (6), while overhead is the base of another viaduct that slices through the main one at a seemingly impossible angle, its giant metal structure emphasising its savage symmetry (7). It all reaches a visual climax in the last hundred yards before Piccadilly, as the viaduct widens and passes over a busy road, creating a tunnel of vast proportions, rent in two by the viaduct above (8) and entered at one end through an expressionist portal of concrete ribs (9).

6. Patina on Chapelfield Road.

6. Patina on the viaduct walls fronting Chapelfield Road.
7. Underneath the second viaduct spanning Temperance Street.

7. Underneath the second viaduct spanning Temperance Street.

8. The split viaduct over Ashton Road.

8. The split viaduct over Ashton Road.

9. Expressionist concrete entrance to the Ashton Road tunnel.

9. Expressionist concrete entrance to the Ashton Road tunnel.

After this, entering the civilised chaos of Piccadilly station is like walking back into another world – reassuring – yes – but also somehow mysteriously changed. What riches there are in this short walk that is all but invisible from the train above!


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, Manchester, railways, ruins, underground space, Victorian

Cottonopolis

3 02 2013

Paul Dobraszczyk, Cottonopolis, 2013, charcoal on watercolour and chalk and ink, 50x70cm

1. Paul Dobraszczyk, Cottonopolis, 2013, charcoal on watercolour and chalk and ink, 50x70cm

In this painting (1), I wanted to represent my recently-adopted home city: Manchester. Like all cities Manchester is, at least in part, defined by its textures: its surfaces and colours. And, for this city, that surface is brick and that colour is red. Yes, brick is used all over the country, being, perhaps, the most common building material, but here in Manchester it is somehow uniquely synonymous with the city as a whole: sodden and almost infernal on the frequent rainy days; warm, rich and earthy when the sun graces the sky. And if you look closely, Manchester’s seemingly monotonous brick is really a rich spectrum of red hues and subtle shapes: from the uneven hand-made bricks of its earliest warehouses (2) to the variegated patterns of its later flamboyant Victorian buildings (3).

2. The Merchant's Warehouse, Castlefield, 1820s

2. The Merchant’s Warehouse, Castlefield, 1820s

3. Warehouse on Princess Street, c.1870s.

3. Warehouse on Princess Street, c.1870s.

Fashioned from this omnipresent brick are Manchester’s buildings, particularly its industrial buildings from the days when the city was also known as ‘Cottonopolis’. World-centre of cotton textile production and marketing in the Victorian period, Manchester’s innumerable mills, warehouses and factories were once the defining visual motifs of industrialisation. For early-Victorian visitors to Manchester, like the German architect Karl Frederich Schinkel, the city’s mills that were concentrated in Ancoats presented ‘a dreadful and dismal impression’ of ‘monstrous shapeless buildings’ that Schinkel visualised in a kind of hurried fever in his 1826 sketchbook (4). Schinkel gave us the perennial Manchester motif (passed all the way down to Lowry): the massive utilitarian rhomboid dotted with innumerable but highly regularised windows; and the chimneys of course – a ‘forest’ of impossibly high ‘needles’, according to Schinkel, belching smoke incessantly into the skies over the city.

4. Schinkel's sketch of mills in Ancoats, 1826.

4. Schinkel’s sketch of mills in Ancoats, 1826.

Today, most of these industrial buildings and their chimneys are gone; or, if they remain, the smokestacks no longer smoke and the buildings are either half-ruined, empty or gentrified – ‘post-industrial’ in the literal sense of the word, frozen in an in-between state, no longer industrial but not yet something else. Yet, even this seemingly bygone industry is never ‘post’ – as we all know it’s simply been relocated elsewhere, out of sight, out of mind, halfway across the globe. Once, Manchester’s mills seemed to be literally taking over the world in a vast unregulated conglomeration, a kind of architecture that was dictated entirely by newly-industrialised capitalist production, one that threatened to reproduce itself in unending exact replicas across the face of the earth.

5. Old Mill, Ancoats, 1798-1801.

5. Old Mill, Ancoats, 1798-1801.

Yet, even in the blankness of Manchester’s surviving mills (5), I find a sense of honesty about industrial production that seems to have been covered over with what’s replaced it (the glass sheen of global finance). It’s as if the regular, repetitive windows on the surviving mills in Ancoats speak very precisely and transparently about the nature of capitalism itself; each window casts a light on the machine and its workers; each are identical cogs in a wheel; each are bound by the same brutal scientific rationale.


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Categories : architecture, cities, Manchester, shapes, Victorian

Dreaming spires: Victorian chimneys

3 01 2013

1. Robert Rawlinson's fantastical array of industrial chimneys as seen in The Builder, 25 April 1857, p. 23.

1. Robert Rawlinson’s fantastical array of industrial chimneys, The Builder, 25 April 1857, p. 23.

‘A tower is the creation of another century. Without a past it is nothing’ (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 25)

In 1853, The Builder pictured industrial Manchester ‘getting up the steam’ (2) - the city’s skyline filled with an almost impossible number of chimneys belching smoke and so tall that they dwarfed even Manchester’s church spires. Sublime – even Gothic – in their blackness, these chimneys were nevertheless strictly utilitarian in appearance: identical stacks of brick attached to equally stark mill and other factory buildings. Yet, only five years later, in 1858, The Builder pictured a new vision of industrial chimneys as a dreamscape (1). Assembled by the engineer Robert Rawlinson, these fantastical designs were chimneys that mimicked historical precedents, whether medieval Italian campaniles, Moorish minarets or the more recent clock tower of the Palace of Westminster. Rawlinson believed, in common with most Victorian designers, that history gave aesthetic meaning to structural form; according to Rawlinson, instead of ‘chimney’ being a ‘by-word for hideous structures’, it should be in tune with the models of the past that ‘have stood for ages as monuments of beauty.’

2. 'Manchester, getting up the steam', The Builder, 1853.

2. ‘Manchester, getting up the steam’, The Builder, 1853.

Yet, Rawlinson’s designs do more than simply dress up chimneys in attractive disguises; rather, they draw building into a potent kind of dream. As the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard has emphasised in The Poetics of Space (1964), towers are more than simply structures; rather, they are primal images of verticality that illustrate the verticality of the human being. So, in our dreams we always go up towers (whereas we always go down into a cellar). Towers are images of ascension, the endless winding steps inside them leading to dreams of flight or transcendence. Chimneys may not in themselves be fertile dream spaces; yet, because they’re designed solely to carry polluting fumes above the city, they are almost pure images of verticality. By cloaking chimneys with images of the past, Rawlinson joins the pure vertical expression of industry with a whole succession of former dreams of ascension. He also humanises the industrial by bringing it within the compass of the verticality of the human being: people may not be able to literally ascend chimneys but, cloaked in the former dream images of bell towers and minarets, they can now do so in their imagination.

3. The Abbey Mills pumping station as seen in The Illustrated London News, 15 July 1868, p. 161.

3. The Abbey Mills pumping station as seen in The Illustrated London News, 15 July 1868, p. 161.

4. Chimney of the Edgbaston waterworks, c.1870

4. Chimney of the Edgbaston waterworks, c.1870.

There are numerous Victorian chimneys that followed Rawlinson’s example: from those that adorned the extravagant Crossness (1862-65) and Abbey Mills pumping stations (3; 1865-68) in London, to the more diminutive but no less aestheticised chimney of the Edgbaston waterworks in Birmingham (4; c.1870), one of a pair of water towers that were thought to have inspired the title of J. R. R. Tolkein’s second book in his Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yet, perhaps nowhere was Rawlinson’s dream more closely realised than in Leeds’s Tower Works (5), where the steel pin manufacturer T. R. Harding brought together fine architecture into the industrial workplace in the form of three extraordinary chimney-towers: the first (right; 1866) based on the 13th-century Lamberti tower in Verona; the second (centre; 1899) inspired by Giotto’s 14th-century campanile for the Duomo in Florence; the third (left) a 1920s re-imagining of one of the numerous medieval defensive towers of San Gimignano in Tuscany.

5. Tower Works, Leeds showing the three chimneys based on Italian towers.

5. Tower Works, Leeds showing the three chimneys based on Italian towers.

6. Candle Tower (2009), Leeds, next to the Tower Works.

6. Candle Tower (2009), Leeds, next to the Tower Works.

This gathering of chimney-towers in Leeds’ Tower Works demonstrates that structures – even those with an essentially utilitarian purpose – can dream. For what else are these chimneys but towers brought into a new constellation of meaning, assembled from the fragments of the past, and born in the imagination? And even today, when our own megalomanic skyscrapers seem to abolish the kind of verticality that chimes with human being, there’s still a sense in which imagination still plays a part in the conception of some of our tall buildings: whether the Candle Tower (6, right; 2009) near the Tower Works (nicknamed the ‘leaning tower of Leeds’), or Manchester’s Beetham Tower (7, right; 2006) - a structure that, despite its sleek modernity, nevertheless still answers the age-old appeal of the tower, as seen in its early Victorian forebear on the Rochdale Canal (7, left).

7. Beetham Tower (2006) next to a early Victorian factory on the Rochdale Canal.

7. Beetham Tower (2006), Manchester, next to an early Victorian factory on the Rochdale Canal.


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Categories : architecture, cities, Manchester, ornament, symbolism, Victorian

Walking the girdle (part 2)

18 12 2012

1. Second part of the nine-mile walk around inner Manchester and Salford (shown in turquoise)

Second part of the nine-mile walk around inner Manchester and Salford (shown in blue)

1. Strangeways Prison from the east side

1. Strangeways prison from the east side

2. Broken picture found at the base of Strangeways prison wall

2. Broken picture found at the base of Strangeways prison wall

Part 2 of my circular walk around inner Manchester and Salford begins at Strangeways prison. With its 234-ft high ventilation tower, Strangeways is an extraordinary inner-city landmark in Manchester, but one that is nevertheless barely visible from the city centre. Of course, the presence of a prison – and a notorious high-security prison at that – in any city is troublesome, signifying as it does aspects of our society that we’d rather remained hidden. Walking up close to Strangeways (1) - an enormous complex made up of Alfred Waterhouse’s original 1868 building and new additions built after the 1990 riots – one is immediately reminded, in the most graphic of terms, what a prison is for: its blank 30-ft high brick walls an overwhelming visual symbol (and spatial enforcing) of incarceration. Circling these monstrous walls I found a broken picture frame containing an iconic photograph of New York’s Grand Central Station (2), one that probably adorns the walls of thousands of rooms across the world. In this photograph, sunlight streams through the high windows of the station onto a crowd of passengers below – a visual symbol of the dreams of liberation that once attracted so many to America’s iconic metropolis. Was this photograph some remnant of protest to the prison, resting as it did at the base of its immense walls? Or perhaps it was flung out of a high window above, a sign of abandoned hope in the prison that still has the highest suicide rate of any in Britain? Or maybe just a discarded object come to rest in a random place?

3. The ruined Springfield mill just inside Salford

3. The ruined Springfield mill just inside Salford

With these unsettling questions I headed away from Strangeways and across the invisible border that separates the cities of Manchester and Salford. Whilst both cities were built on the same industry – textile production – that was fated to oblivion, there’s a stronger sense of melancholy in Manchester’s lesser-known twin. Almost immediately there are ruins, such as the Springfield Mill, built in 1845 (3); ruins that are materially very different from those in Manchester. Where the mills of Ancoats seem to be awaiting some form of restitution, those in Salford seem beyond repair – cracked and crumbling and surrounded by a mixture of weeds and waste. And, walking through Salford towards Broughton and the river Irwell, the road is flanked by piles of rubbish, as if the geography of ruin has extended from individual buildings to whole districts.

4. An abandoned mill and Strangeways Prison behind, from the Broughton bridge over the river Irwell

4. Abandoned mill and Strangeways prison behind, from the Broughton bridge on the river Irwell

On this bright, crystal-clear day, finding the river Irwell seemed like a revelation – like discovering the hidden heart of both cities – where the seemingly ever-present brick of Salford’s closed-in streets suddenly opens out to reveal new vistas – the towers of abandoned mills rising in aesthetic unity with those of Strangeways beyond (4). Yet, the path along the banks of the Irwell is empty, the monotonous low-rise housing of modern Salford hidden behind newly-planted rows of trees.

5. Former docks at the junction of the river Irwell and the Manchester Ship Canal

5. Former docks at the junction of the river Irwell and the Manchester Ship Canal

Heading across the zone between Manchester and Salford, there’s an even greater sense of opening out, but here created by the vast waste-grounds that used to contain some of the terminal docks that turned Manchester into Britain’s third largest port when the ship canal to Liverpool was opened in 1894 (5).Now, these former docks are, in contrast to those at Salford Quays, filled with large expanses of rank grass and the signs of fly-tipping, their organic messiness contrasting sharply with the cluster of shiny buildings that ornament Manchester’s skyline beyond.

6. Railway viaducts marking the border between Salford and Manchester

6. Railway viaducts marking the border between Salford and Manchester

7. A portal to another world?

7. A portal to another world?

Further east, I cross that invisible line back into Manchester, but here between two giant railway viaducts that divide the two cities – a genuinely unsettling and claustrophobic place made up of very dark caverns under the arches (6), some of which bear the visual marks of bottom-end habitation (filthy mattresses, empty bottles) and graffiti that suggests that others might be the entrances to an infernal place below (7).

8. New housing in Hulme

8. New housing in Hulme

The final stretch of the girdle heads across Hulme, its once dystopian housing-block ‘crescents’ of the 1960s now replaced by community-designed housing that marries individuality – an eccentric curve here and there – with the rather-more repetitive requirements of mass housing (8). A short step across Higher Cambridge Street completes the circle – the stark, almost brutalist brick of the university buildings softened to an almost lovely orange colour by the last rays of the winter sun (9).

9. The University of Manchester's Cornbrook building in Booth Street West

9. The University of Manchester’s Cornbrook House in Booth Street West


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, landscapes, Manchester, maps, railways, ruins, tourism, Victorian

Walking the girdle (part 1)

4 12 2012

1. The nine-mile walk around inner Manchester and Salford (shown in green)

1. Nine-mile walk around inner Manchester and Salford (shown in green)

2. 1844 map of Manchester and Salford included in Engels's 'The Condition of the Working Class in England'

2. 1844 map of Manchester and Salford included in Engels’s ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’

In 1844, Engels described industrial Manchester as being planned as a series of concentric circles: an inner commercial core surrounded by a ‘girdle’ of working-class quarters about a mile wide beyond which were the middle-class residential districts (2). In this way, Engels argued, wealthier people from the outer areas might come in and out of the city on its roads ‘without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and to the left.’ This ‘hypocritical plan’, as Engels called it, has persisted to this day, with the majority of the city’s thoroughfares being like spokes of a giant wheel, enabling easy travelling in and out of the city. And just as in Engels’s day, the further out from the city centre one travels, the more salubrious the surroundings become, today Mancunians reach all the way out to Alderley Edge in rural Cheshire, with its vast gated mansions: home of the footballers and their wives.

On a very cold but sparkling day in November, I decided to walk Manchester and Salford’s inner ‘girdle’, as a kind of alternative way of apprehending the topography of both cities – a counter to the frustration of generally only knowing the city as a series of linear routes in and out (1). The areas through which this walk passed – Salford, Hulme, Ardwick, Ancoats – were all just outside Manchester’s city centre and, although most of the housing was relatively new, still very much had the character Engels first observed in 1844 – that is, ‘unmixed working-people’s quarters’.

3. Cast-iron columns bases at Plymouth Grove

3. Cast-iron column bases at Plymouth Grove

4. Bricked-up factory in Ardwick

4. Bricked-up factory in Ardwick

5. Textile warehouse on Hyde Road, Ardwick

5. Textile warehouse on Hyde Road, Ardwick

So, after taking my usual linear bus ride from the suburbs to the University, instead of heading to my office I walked eastwards towards Ardwick, in a counterclockwise direction, passing the half-redeveloped Plymouth Grove pub with its late-nineteenth century ornamental cast-iron columns by the Glasgow founder Walter Macfarlane, now rusted into rich golden hues (3). Heading westwards, Ardwick is a surprise, an old industrial area that’s still working, with textile factories still hanging on despite the tumbledown bricked-up brick buildings (4), one of which still bears the imprint of its several generations of owners, its signs overlaid as if deliberately preserving the building’s history (5). Continuing west, a great railway viaduct thickens towards Piccadilly, its enormous brick arches a sign of how Manchester’s Victorian railway (unlike London’s) ploughed its way directly through the inner city, straddling the working-class housing with apparent disdain (6).

6. Railway viaduct in Ardwick

6. Railway viaduct in Ardwick

7. Former synagogue on Pollard Street

7. All Souls church on Every Street

8. Abandoned tower block in Ancoats

8. Abandoned tower block in Ancoats

Across the thundering Ashton road, one enters the Medlock river valley, a green oasis in Manchester’s monolithic red-brick cityscape, and a reminder that, like many other cities, Manchester’s fortunes were originally bound up with its rivers. Onwards through the edges of Beswick, a sleepy suburb in the Medlock valley, crowned on the Ancoats side by an abandoned church on Every Street – its fantastic array of turrets challenging the utilitarian brick buildings around it (7). Entering Ancoats past the Bank of England pub and over the Ashton canal, one suddenly emerges into another world – a contested landscape of waste ground, ruined factories, angular post-modernist tower blocks, and 1970s working-class housing. As one resident told me, Ancoats is now a battleground: some of the residents have been forced out, their properties compulsorilly purchased and demolished to make way for gentrification that hasn’t yet happened. Here, older 1960s tower blocks stand in limbo, condemned for demolition but subsquently purchased for £1 each by the developers Urban Splash in the property boom of the late-1990s. Now too expensive to either demolish or redevelop, these tower blocks remain as petrified ruins (8).

9. The early 19th-century mills of old Ancoats

9. The early 19th-century mills of old Ancoats

10. Textile warehouse on Thompson Street, north of Ancoats

10. Textile warehouse on Thompson Street, north of Ancoats

11. New Co-op headquarters building in central Manchester

11. New Co-op headquarters building in central Manchester

Over the Rochdale canal is old Ancoats, created at the end of the 18th century as the world’s first industrial suburb, and still characterised by its enormous, utilitarian brick mills and warehouses that summon up images of the industrial revolution, with its din and smoke (9). Yet, today, this part of Ancoats is silent and spotless: a closed world of private apartments, offices and deluxe recording studios. With its tightly-packed grid-like streets, cobbled for over two hundred years, Ancoats here is less contested, more fully embracing of a new kind of exclusivity that’s so characteristic of former industrial quarters in many other British cities. Out of Ancoats across the busy Oldham Road, one enters a desolate former industrial area, the factories and warehouses given over to end-of-the-line textiles (10), with the futuristic shapes of the city’s new generation of skyscrapers rising up beyond (11). With the towers of Strangeways high-security prison looming in the distance, I head towards the half-way point around the girdle (part 2 to follow).


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, everyday, Manchester, maps, railways, ruins, Victorian

Palaces of commerce: Manchester’s Victorian warehouses

14 11 2012

Warehouse (c.1865), 1 Central Street, Manchester

Manchester is a city known for its cotton mills, but it is its textile warehouses that remain the distinctive element in its street-scape and make it unlike any other city in England. From the mid-19th century onwards, the marketing of textiles came to dominate Manchester’s economy. For this reason it is the commercial warehouses, built by the manufacturers, wholesalers, independent merchants, traders and packing companies during the century after 1840, that are the most potent visual symbols of the city’s Victorian character.

Warehouse buildings of the 1820s and 1830s had little architectural pretension and they tended to follow Manchester’s mills in adopting a strictly utilitarian approach. As trade further accelerated and the city’s merchants became wealthier, the architectural style of warehouses changed, the merchants aspiring to premises of more impressive appearance to reflect, to potential customers, their growing stature. From the 1840s, they achieved this by adopting the Italian palazzo style, inspired by the 14th and 15th-century architecture of Florence, Genoa and Venice. The palazzo style was justified primarily on associational grounds: Renaissance street architecture in Italian cities were seen as developing in line with their expansion as centres of trade, just as Manchester was in the mid-19th century.

1. Edward Walters, warehouse (1855-56), 36 Charlotte St, Manchester

 

A typical surviving early example is Edward Walter’s warehouse fronting Portland and Charlotte Streets, built from 1855-56 (1). The windows here are indicative of the function of each floor of the warehouse – the large windows on the first floor light the main showroom, while the top-level windows are both smaller and more numerous as this is where the lightest and most delicate goods would have been stored and inspected. Each storey is boldly defined by a stone string-course, as are the lines of the window arches, and the parapets on the four corners of the roofline serve to emphasis the vertical dimension as well. The clear visual emphasis on ‘massiveness’ here is in keeping with the projection of an image of strength and solidity, but it also reflects wider principles in Victorian architecture at this time, which were dominated by the influence of John Ruskin and his writings on architecture.

2. Travis & Mangnall, Watt’s Warehouse (1851-56), elevation from Chorlton St

3. Cast-iron staircase in the interior of the Watt’s Warehouse (1851-56)

In the 1850s, some warehouse designers, such as Travis and Mangnall, who designed the Watt’s Warehouse in Portland Street (2), began to move away from the Palazzo Style. Now the Britannia Hotel, the Watt’s Warehouse was a vast building built for S. & J. Watts, the largest wholesale drapery business in Manchester. His enormous warehouse – 300-ft long and nearly 100-ft high – is more eclectic in its architectural style. The general outline resembles the Fondaco dei Turchi in Venice, but each of the six floors is given a different treatment, ranging from Italian Rennaissance to Elizabethan and culminating with wheel roundels in the roof towers. Inside, the warehouse had four large internal wells and a system of circulation which segregated customers, staff and porters. The original sumptuous cast-iron staircase is preserved (3), with its cantilevered bridges spanning the six floors, all made out of richly ornamented cast iron.

4. Dugdale’s Warehouse (1870s), Princess Street, Manchester

5. Corner view of Charles Clegg’s warehouse (1869) at 101 Princess Street, Manchester

From the 1860s until the turn of the century, Manchester’s warehouses proliferated in a wide variety of architectural styles, the best preserved now clustered along Princess Street. A high proportion of these warehouses were by the architects Clegg and Knowles, with Charles Clegg the leading designer, and all are roughly the same height of four or five stories with almost no gap between the frontage and the street. Of the many surviving examples, we have Dugdale’s warehouse from the late-1870s, in a loose Gothic style with an open arcaded parapets and tall chimneys (4); Charles Clegg’s 1869 warehouse at 101 Princess Street in an immaculate Renaissance style with brick with sandstone dressings (5); and 74 Princess St, built in 1880 in the Scottish baronial style by the architects Corson and Aitken (6).

6. Corson & Aitken’s warehouse (1880) at 74 Princess St, Manchester

Many of these Victorian warehouses have now been converted into flats, hotels or restaurants, their former use now difficult to detect from the outside. Yet, such is their number and sheer bulk that some inevitably remain in a kind of architectural limbo, either part-occupied or awaiting redevelopment. In an early warehouse by Edward Walters on Charlotte Street (1855), a group of tenants have only very recently redeveloped its interior. On my first visit in early 2012, amidst piles of rotting wood and the original cast-iron columns, were traces of the building’s last tenant – the textile retailer, Lilian Stewart Ltd, who, like many others in Manchester, gave up the business in the 1970s (7). With the company’s name still seen on one of the doors (8), the space suddenly became imbued by the still-living past, filled with unexpected possibilities and stories waiting to be told. However, on returning six months later, that space was already transformed into a whitewashed shell in preparation for its new life as a luxury apartment.

7. Interior of Edward Walter’s warehouse (c.1855) at 34 Charlotte Street, Manchester, in early 2012.

8. Interior of Edward Walter’s warehouse (c.1855) at 34 Charlotte St in early 2012.


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, Manchester, ornament, ruins, symbolism, Victorian

Study seminar on ruins, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

17 10 2012


Apocalypse Now: Thinking about Ruins and Radiation

Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

Wednesday 28 November 2012, 2-5pm, free

A study session organised by me (Dr Paul Dobraszczyk) exploring contemporary perceptions of ruin that also engage with the current exhibition of works by Jane & Louise Wilson at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester.

To book a free place tel: 0161 275 7450 or call in at the reception desk at the Whitworth Art Gallery

Speakers and topics will include:

Jane & Louise Wilson (artists)

Chernobyl, Pripyat and the death of the city Dr Paul Dobraszczyk (University of Manchester)

Why ruins? Why now? Professor Tim Edensor (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Getting a grip on time slip: decay fetishism in an age of austerity Dr Bradley Garrett (University of Oxford)

On the psychoanalysis of ruins Dr Dylan Trigg (Husserl Archives, École Normale Supérieure)

Ruins and radiation Dr Jeff Hughes (University of Manchester)

Pripyat from the terrace of the former Pollissa hotel

Since 9/11, ruins have come to occupy a central place in visual culture: as images of the aftermath of acts of terrorism or the resulting war on terror; the ruin of the housing market after the recent financial crisis; or a post-apocalyptic obsession in cinema. This session will examine contemporary notions of ruin and ruination, engaging directly with an exhibition of photographs and films of the ruined Chernobyl site by Jane and Louise Wilson, and calling on a diverse range of ruin obsessives from the fields of philosophy, science, cultural geography, art, and architectural history. Signifiers of both civilisation and barbarism, creativity and destruction, ruins call into question the solid, the enduring and the permanent, representing as they do either the end of the old or the beginning of something new. We seek to learn from this challenge presented by ruins, whether they be created by the constructive but often brutal processes of modernisation, or their opposites – the forces of destruction, both natural and unnatural, real or imagined.

Abandoned funfair in Pripyat


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, Manchester, ruins, war

Meta-ornament: railway tracks

4 10 2012

Tracks on the southern approach to Manchester from Stockport

According to Walter Benjamin, railway tracks had a ‘peculiar and unmistakeable dream world’ attached to them, one that, for early railway travellers, was related to their unprecedented straightness in the landscape, their geometric alignment, or in their wider convergence into networks. Early railway prints in the 1830s and 1840s (1) emphasized the sharp linearity of railway tracks, cutting through the landscape with unprecedented geometric precision; while contemporaneous travellers were transfixed by the seemingly infinite recession of parallel tracks.

1. T. T Bury’s view of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway over Chat Moss, 1830

 

                                2. 1898 film from the front of a train in Barnstable

As recorded by Edward Stanley in 1830, when he witnessed a locomotive approaching from the far distance, train tracks seemed to compress space and time and usher in a new form of perception; Stanley thought the parallel tracks made the engine seem to increase in size ‘beyond all limit’ as it came nearer, eventually ‘absorbing everything within its vortex’. A similar fascination came at the end of nineteenth century, when railway tracks formed some of the earliest subjects for film: that is, in the ‘phantom ride’ (2), a term used to mean a film that looks from the front of a moving railway engine along the tracks themselves. Here, the novel view of the camera (one that was seldom experienced in ordinary life) combined its ‘subjective’ view with an inaccessible position that laid bare, through an unwavering emphasis on the endless perspective of the parallel tracks, the disembodied consciousness of the railway journey.

3. Railway maps of England in 1850 (left) and Britain in 1900 (right)

If railway tracks suggested a new kind of machine aesthetic, defined by extreme linearity and a corresponding overturning of ‘natural’ perception, then the conglomeration of tracks into networks seemed to produce revolutionary new patterns – or ‘meta-ornament’ in the landscape. In its early decades, the new railways spread at a seemingly exponential rate across Britain, from just under 100 miles of track in 1830 to over 6,000 by 1850 (3; left), rising to 19,000 by 1900 (3; right). Yet, their growth was far from ordered, the consequence of unregulated competition among private railway companies, and for some, the resulting network was perceived as alarmingly chaotic. Punch pictured its own ‘Railway map of England’ in 1845 (4), at the height of railway speculation in that decade, with the English landscape of the near future enmeshed ‘in irons’, with no ordering principle to the layout. Left unregulated, the railway companies would, Punch argued, eventually create so many tracks that ‘we shall soon be unable to go anywhere without crossing the line’.

4. Punch’s ‘Railway map of England’, 1845

For others, the speed at which the railway network spread across the country was nothing short of miraculous: The Builder arguing in 1852 that the railways were ‘preparing the world for a wondrous future’ when they would unite the whole of humanity ‘as one great family’. Later, when a new railway was constructed between Buxton and Bakewell in 1876, The Builder argued that the iron tracks enhanced the picturesque landscape through which they passed by adding a ‘new element of what may be called the mental or moral picturesque’. In contrast to John Ruskin, who bitterly opposed the building of the new line, The Builder perceived ‘a kind of mystery’ in the track’s ‘windings and burrowings’ through the soft landscape which, taken as a whole, were strongly suggestive of the ‘bond of civilization that connects us’. If Ruskin lamented the railway’s tendency to obliterate beloved landscapes and their traditional cultural forms in its gigantic network of lines, The Builder had the opposite reaction: railway tracks became picturesque precisely because of their connectivity, that is, the way in which they created, through ‘the triumph of science’, new geographic and social networks that had a high moral purpose.


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Categories : film, iron, landscapes, Manchester, maps, ornament, railways, shapes, symbolism, Victorian

The industrial sublime: Castlefield, Manchester

22 02 2012

1. The Castlefield basin and the Great Northern railway viaduct (1894).

In a rather secluded quarter of Manchester’s city centre lies Castlefield, a dramatic urban landscape that has become synonymous with collective images of Victorian urban industrialisation. With its tangle of waterways and railways, suspended on many vertical levels, it is almost as if the built environment here were deliberately created to make the human seem tiny and insignificant (1). Each successive vertical level represents a new phase of industrialisation: on the ground (and sometimes below the ground) are the canals – the Bridgewater and Rochdale – completed by the beginning of the 19th century; suspended above these, in a dizzying, seemingly unplanned formation, are the railway viaducts (2), built in periods of development in the 1840s, 1870s and 1890s, and characterised by massive brick arches in the earlier viaducts to enormous tubular steel columns in the Great Northern viaduct (1894).

2. Castlefield basin: the junction of the Bridgwater and Rochdale canals with an 1849 viaduct (centre left), a steel viaduct from the 1870s (top left) and the Great Northern viaduct from 1894 (right).

Even for early Victorian observers, such a landscape would have been associated with the idea of the sublime, that is, feelings of awe, even terror, generated by massive structures, overwhelming spectacles and a feeling of insignificance in the face of forces beyond human control. In the mid 18th century, the sublime was usually associated with a Romantic response to nature – savage storms, rough seas, great mountains – but, by the early 19th century, it was increasingly ascribed to the new wonders of industry, such as the iron furnaces at Coalbrookdale, the giant cotton mills in Ancoats, and later railway stations, viaducts and trains. Today, we have a tendency to regard these kinds of structures as rational objects, planned only according to the dictates of reason and utility; yet, here, in Castlefield, they are given rhetorical flourishes by their Victorian engineers that accentuate their sense of power: castellated turrets on the viaducts, gothic arches in the iron bridges (3), and stripped-down Egyptian capitals on the enormous steel columns.

3. Castellated towers and gothic ironwork of the Manchester South Junction & Altringham Railway viaduct (1849) with an 1870s steel lattice girder viaduct behind.

Castlefield’s vertical structure also reflects a very different conception of urban infrastructure than our own. Today, urban utilities – railways, water pipes, sewers, telecommunication cables – are generally planned to be as invisible as possible, either hidden beneath the ground or enclosed in tunnels and embankments. In the early Victorian period, new forms of urban infrastructure were unashamedly visible: canals were driven through towns and cities, railways sped over houses on viaducts, giant sewers were even built inside embankments and bridges rather than under the ground. In comparison with the sealed-off infrastructure of today’s cities, there’s something liberating – even truthful – about Castlefield’s sheer visibility, one that brings the hidden mechanisms of urban organisation out into the open in a celebration of their layered complexity.

4. View of the original shipping holes in the Middle Warehouse, built from 1828 to 1831 and converted into offices and apartments in 1988.

Today, Castlefield retains its distinct atmosphere largely as a result of careful management. Designated a conservation area in 1980, after years of neglect and dereliction, it became the UK’s first designated Urban Heritage Park in 1982. Amid the overpowering industrial structures are more recent interventions: a group of bars and restaurants taking advantage of the waterside location and dramatic views; modern footbridges which mirror in miniature the forms of the viaducts above them; and careful conversions of the canal-side warehouses into offices and apartments (4). And it’s from here that the otherwise brazenly individualistic form of the 47-storey Beetham Tower (2006) suddenly becomes a mirror of a much older industrial structure with the same visual impact – an architectural conversation across time (5).

5. An early 19th-century factory along the Rochdale Canal with the Beetham Tower (2006) behind.


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, iron, Manchester, symbolism, Victorian

Hidden spaces: the Derbyshire Dales

25 01 2012

Cave Dale, near Castleton, Derbyshire

There’s probably no more dramatic contrast in the English landscape than that between the Dark and White Peak of the Peak District National Park; and all because of two different kinds of rock – Gritstone and Limestone. Divided by the Edale and Hope valleys, to the north is the Dark Peak – an area of high moorland, its hard Gritstone foundation chipped away by the elements into undulating wild plateaus of heather and peat and rocky ‘edges’; to the south, the White Peak – its bed of soft Limestone sunk into gently folded hills, farmland and hidden valleys, known as Dales. In contrast to the wild, windswept and barren moorland of the Dark Peak, these Dales are places of fecundity – steep-sided valleys carved by rivers and streams into self-enclosed worlds, protected from wind and cold.

Hay Dale, looking towards Rushup Edge, the boundary between the White and Dark Peak
Moss covering trees and a stone wall in Cressbrook Dale

On a map, the Dales are identified by the serpentine windings of watercourses, enclosed by narrow countour lines. In reality, they are almost hermetically-sealed environments, usually hemmed in by thick broadleaf woodland and a treacherous floor of uneven and slippery limestone, collected over time from the crumbling cliffs that fringe the upper slopes. With alluring pastoral names – Monks Dale, Millers Dale, Dove Dale, Hay Dale, Chee Dale – these valleys are places cut off from the elements, where moss covers wood and stone alike, where exotic birdlife flourishes, and where ancient trees gradually sink into decay.

Limestone cliff in Chee Dale
Monks Dale in Spring

It is perhaps unsurprising that these secret spaces were one of the most important sites for the birth of England’s industrial revolution. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the Dales saw the building of the first large-scale water-powered textile mills, such as Cromford (1771) and Cressbrook mills (1787). These provided the template for the hundreds of mills that would later define the urban centres of the industrial revolution: Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield. In these early days, production on this industrial scale needed fast-flowing water to power the steam-engines that drove the mechanised looms. It seems appropriate that the industrial revolution should have begun in these hidden worlds: the mills and factories almost shamefacedly emerging out of an otherwise agrarian world; their new kinds of workers housed in rustic cottages in the surrounding hills.

Cressbrook Mill, Cressbrook Dale, 1787


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Categories : architecture, landscapes, Manchester, maps

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