In which they do not like being represented by fascists

If this blog was about politics we could rant on for hours but it isn’t. It is about Manchester.
However, two days ago, in our town hall, Nick Griffin of the BNP was elected to represent us at the European Parliament. The Manchester Zedders would just like to make it clear. Nick Griffin does not speak for us.

This lunchtime we stopped a woman with a Guardian under her arm who was happy to take this photo for us outside the aforementioned town hall.

This blog is about Manchester, and celebrating and exploring Manchester in all its beauty and diversity. On our travels, some the things we have loved about the city are Jewish toddlers walking on walls, Rastas on bicycles, the avuncular man in Hunters curry house, chats with taxi drivers who speak three languages, shops selling Lithuanian beer. We like that our friend John from Bangladesh became a UK citizen this year and we would like his beautiful children to grow up in a city that celebrates the rich patchwork culture of its people.

Our journeys into Manchester’s history show it to be a city whose canalways have been dug by Irish workmen, a city which welcomed Jews fleeing Pogroms, a city whose statue of Abraham Lincoln ‘commemorates the support that the working people of Manchester gave in the fight for the abolition of slavery during the American Civil War. By supporting the Union under President Lincoln at a time when there was an economic blockade of the southern states the Lancashire cotton workers were denied access to raw cotton which caused considerable unemployment throughout the cotton industry…’ A city with a thriving gay community.

It is because we feel Britain is enriched by the diversity of this city, and cities like it, that we are signing the Hope not Hate petition. If you want to send a message that the BNP does not speak for you, please join us in signing the petition.

Billy Bragg quoted Joe Hill at his Hope not Hate gig saying, “Don’t mourn, organise”. I say “Mourn all you need to. Then organise” Make your voice heard and then do something which makes your city, this society, better. Understand someone more, volunteer, speak to your neighbours and don’t let these fascists win the debate about what being British is all about.

HOPE not hate
Celebrating modern Britain
This was not a party political broadcast. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

In which they walk the Mancunian way

By Liam

We don’t mean by this title that we have begun to swagger like scallies while wearing anoraks and showing off our Northern Quarter haircuts. Oh no. We decided that we should walk the route of the A57(M), the Mancunian Way, which runs along the bottom of the city centre.

This is either a sincere tribute or blatant plagiarism of John Davies, the vicar who introduced me to the concept of psychogeography. John took a sabbatical to walk the length of the M62, from coast to coast. He blogged about it and published it as a book. So we set out to follow in his footsteps, in quest of our own nearest motorway, all 3.02 miles of it.

I hoped to do an interesting psychogeographical map for this, turning Manchester city centre into a face with the Mancunian Way as its mouth. Interestingly, this just didn’t work, but I am convinced that the Mancunian Way is where Manchester’s smile would be if it had one.

We do realise that walking under flyovers in the city centre is not how most people would choose to spend a bank holiday. But we’re the Manchester Zedders and we make our own entertainment.

So we met up at Piccadilly and walked through some grim old industrial areas, in the process spotting another gate to hell:

On the way to the start of the motorway, we found some extremely dangerous buttercups:

It was nice to discover that some other people had thought a motorway was worth making a fuss about. What a party this day must have been:

We spent some time getting ourselves to places no sane person would normally try to walk to, and looking at the bottom of the motorway. I bet you didn’t know that motorways are just made out of great big floorboards.

And I doubt many people have had this view while on foot:

Then we found that getting out of these places proved somewhat more of a challenge. Marie, the Trespasser Extraordinaire, spotted an arrow and insisted that we risk life and limb to cross the sliproad and follow it:

We disappeared into some bushes and found ourselves in the grounds of some university building. Not expecting people to come in off the motorway, the authorities had not seen fit to provide an easy way out of the grounds, so we wandered randomly for some time before escaping over a fence.

At some point in the wanderings, I realised that a quite staggering amount of my field of vision was filled with concrete. You know when something is so titanically ugly that it becomes kind of beautiful? Well, this didn’t quite get there.

Concrete experts are rightly very pleased with the Mancunian Way:

Marie wishes to know more about the Concrete Society. Do they have some legal responsibility or are they just enthusiasts?

Our fellow Manc blogger Lost in Manchester has also recently blogged about concrete and the Mancunian Way. Great minds… Lost also mentioned this – the blind slip road that goes nowhere:

I really really wanted to get up there but I’m not quite that stupid. And we didn’t have a ladder. We love things that go nowhere. Roads, stairways, old railways, pointless walks. If it’s better to travel than to arrive, this sliproad is damn near perfect. Perhaps it goes to all the Manchesters that could have been but never were.

There were various points of interest during our illicit university visit:

a slogan for Zedders,
odd sculptures made of old industrial stuff,

Killer Mickey,

and the biggest fire escape ever.

From this point, we entered into a period of criss-crossing back and forth under flyovers and through scary underpasses, trying to follow the line of the motorway and being repulsed as unworthy due to our lack of vehicles.

This chimney is small but that hotel is far away.

It was quite noticeable that there were far fewer quirky and whimsical things happening around the motorway than in most of the bits of Manchester we’ve drifted through. For obvious reasons, people really aren’t encouraged to hang around there, so it’s all a bit barren and empty. Another reason was brought home to us when Marie asked ‘Can you hear thunder?’ and I pointed out that no, we were just standing 15 feet below a busy motorway.

Someone’s decided, though, that while the underneath of a motorway might be no place for proper people, it’s good enough for skateboarding and footballing teenagers.

Marie liked to see that lush, verdant Astroturf sticking out here like a sore thumb, and think of people determinedly using this space, against all the odds. I just worried about their poor wee lungs and eardrums.

We also spotted this:

Handy to have somewhere to put your students for the summer, but I’d be worried about folding my little brother down to put him in one those boxes.

Some charming architect had decided that the ‘grim concrete’ ambience of the whole area would be complemented perfectly by a deliberately rusty building:

There was more life as we crossed the Oxford Road, where there was a nice second-hand book sale going on. We challenged each other to buy appropriate books. I got a very academic book about Victorian cities, but Marie won by buying a book that looked so boring it became a work of art. The second-hand book man asked if we were History students. We said no. He looked confused. (Marie has spent most of the time while I’ve been writing this reading me choice excerpts from her book. I think we should both get out more.)

We calculated afterwards that the bookstall was in the 100th square we have zedded, so we have retrospectively declared this a centenary celebration.

As we got further out, into Hulme where people have to live near the motorway, it got a bit more interesting:

The subway smiled at us.

There was half a canoe full of plants next to an astoundingly overgrown community garden.

We weren’t sure what this sign was telling us. Walk out onto the motorway? Don’t walk out onto the motorway? Look out for idiots walking out onto the motorway?

We walked over a pretty footbridge

and saw some pretty  lights that made a shape like a flower.

There was a good view from the footbridge, with proper Manchester landmarks: the G-Mex and the Beetham Tower. Our friend Bazza could tell you exactly how many bricks there are in the G-Mex if you were interested.

We followed some men with a dog along here, which only felt slightly dangerous, and enabled us to see this incongruous picture:

Finally, we found the end of the motorway:

And an amazing photo opportunity:

This one will be the cover of our book when some insightful and forward-looking publisher discovers us.

We did wonder, though, what bike had left this mess:

Then we headed back to the Oxford Road, where normal people were doing sensible bank holiday things and attending a music festival. We got to see the Lithuanian Tori Amos and everything. But we digress. On the way we saw an impressive old bit of canal:

and some baby gooses:

They wouldn’t let us get past so we had to take an alternative route, where we saw a building that appeared to have regurgitated its insides onto the pavement like last night’s old kebab:

Which was a nice contrast with the sign below. I’m not sure a tree-lined street is really such a new thing for Manchester, but I’m all in favour of having more of them.

And we will close with a quote about the state of Lancashire’s roads:

‘Our wayes are gulphs of duste and mire, which none Scarce ever passe in summer without moane.’

This was Richard James of Oxford in the seventeenth century, and we stole it from Marie’s book, Lancashire by JJ Bagley (Batsford, 1972). Things have changed a little since then.

Vital statistics
Map:

View Larger Map

Location: The Mancunian Way
Date zedded: 25 May 2009
A to Z: page 95 squares F5, G6, F6, E6; page 94 squares D6, C6, B6, C5, D5
Getting there: A short walk from Piccadilly station
Squares this expedition: 9
Running total: 105

In which they do not see any castles

by marie

Our target for this zedding was Marie Street, not as far as I am aware, named in my honour. I had also noticed that near Marie Street there is Inghamwood Close – probably not named in honour of our friend Wood Ingham – and Symon Street – probably not named in honour of my old colleague Symon with a y. But it is enough for us that they are there, so we headed off to page 82.

After failing to work how to catch a bus to Marie Street at Shudehill bus station, we wandered through the warehouses of Strangeways and Cheetham Hill. We stoped to take photos of the prison because I have heard you can be arrested for that and forced to delete them. No one stopped us but it appealed to the trespasser in me.

We found a Eastern European shop. The man who owned the building challenged us as to why were taking pictures of it, ironic when I’d gotten away with it at the prison. The shop, is apparently named “Homeland” in Russian which struck me as bad marketing, I was under the impression that the most of Eastern Europe hated the Russians like the Scots hate the English? Our Lithuanian consultant, however, says the word will understood by Slovaks, Poles, Czechs, etc, etc and maybe we don’t care about the Russian name if they sell our food.

We saw some beer, some once lovely buildings and this sign…

Some enigmatic graffiti

Radical feminists had infiltrated the area.

Liam interrupts to add: We also saw the sign below, prohibiting the use of ladders. We were a little puzzled by this, but shortly afterwards we found the reason. An intimidating young hoodie was propped up against a ladder further down the road, drinking beer. We got the impression he might have given us a go on his ladder for a fiver, or maybe the first one would be free… Cheetham Hill has obviously decided to deal with its gangs and ladders problem by instituting a zero-tolerance policy.

Just say no

Marie again: Nearer to our target we found an interesting wall. And here is the magic of zedding. The wall was there all the time, being interesting and charming and we would never have seen it had we not taken into our heads to go and look and Marie Street. The wall told stories, embedded in its bricks were stories. The first told of the Lancashire custom of Whit walks, and local memories of participating in them. The second told of the Manchester Salford wall, built so the well-to-do property owners of Manchester would not be able to see the terraced housing put up by local pawnbroker on the Salford side. A woman remembered her husband writing their initials on the wall when they were teenagers, and them remaining there till the wall was destroyed in the Blitz (Nice to know Manchester had a Berlin wall before that monstrosity in Piccadilly Gardens). Other panel told of cabbage island; which used to be on a lake nearby and was the site of some man’s cabbage patch, lit by candle light when people skated on the frozen pond. And yet another told of Broughton Zoo where there was a polar bear who climbed up a pole. In the middle of Salford, a polar bear! One thing I love about the wall is that, the with exception of the existence of Broughton zoo, these stories appear not to be googleable, they are real and local memories which are tied to their sense of place. I’m almost sorry to release them into the wild.

Marie Street was not as good as Purcell Street. Symon and Inghamwood were also unspectacular.

There was a nice little play area near Inghamwood Close that was too small to be on the A to Z but still defiantly existing. We sat there and ate cake.

We were then off to Castle Hill Viewpoint which I had spotted on page 81 square G3. I wanted to walk past the cluster of synagogues on Northumberland Avenue. As we did so Liam asked “So what do we expect to see from Castle Hill Viewpoint?”
“Castles, duh!” honestly some people, I didn’t expect to see elephants did I?
“Ah yes, how silly of me”
The synagogues themselves did not capture our attention. I was pleased to to see a little boy walking along a wall, tallit hanging out of his waistcoat, one little hand holding on his kippah, the other refusing dad’s hand but but keeping it out close just in case. Looking like he had arrived from another time, another age, but at the same time looking like little boys who have always liked to walk on walls.

Up the road we found ourselves descending into a country park. This is Weird for Liam who is used to having to leave Birmingham and go up to the Lickey hills in order to see grass and trees and Birmingham itself like a great beast at the bottom of the hill. Here, a few miles from the city centre, there are hidden pockets of the countryside.

There were sculptures…

…and a place were the river Irwell looked quite nice.

Sorry to report, that after wandering up and down we saw no sign of either Castle Hill Viewpoint or any Castles. We did find a bit of hill, which may or may not have been Castle Hill Viewpoint, but did have a rope swing so we had a go.

And then we went back to the former Cheetham Hill town hall for Curry.

As to the Castle Mystery, a crenelated house was built in the loop of the river (maybe in square F5) in 1826. and later demolished to make way for a racecourse.

Liam interrupts to add: In my book, Jabez Clegg spends a day at the races at that very racecourse. Which was very exciting for me.

Vital statistics
Map:

View Larger Map

Location: Cheetham Hill, Strangeways, Hightown, Higher Broughton, Kersal Dale
Date zedded: 12 May 2009
A to Z: page 94 squares E2, E1, D1; page 82 squares C6, B5, A4, B4; page 81 squares H4, H3, G3, G4, F4, G5
Getting there: Bus down Cheetham Hill from Victoria station (we think)
Squares this expedition: 13
Running total: 96

Blogroll

By Liam

We’ve started to get noticed! A few other local bloggers have mentioned or noticed us recently, which is lovely.

Thought it would be polite to mention some of them here:

The Manchizzle – Manchester culture

Mancubist – Manchester art, media, culture and stuff

Manhattanchester – adventures of a Mancunian in New York

Rainy City Stories – interactive literary map of Manchester

Lost in Manchester -’Brief encounters with the weird, wonderful and plain ordinary’

Check out the expanded and updated collection of links down the side too! Look at us, part of a blogging community.

A new Manchester quote

By Liam

‘When Pliny lost his life, and Herculaneum was buried, Manchester was born. Whilst lava and ashes blotted from sight and memory fair and luxurious Roman cities close to the Capitol, the Roman soldiery of Titus, under their general Agricola, laid the foundations of a distant city which now compete with the great cities of the world. Where now rise forests of tall chimneys, and the hum of whirling spindles, spread the dense woods of Arden; – and from the clearing in their midst rose the Roman castrum of Mamutium, which has left its name of Castle Field as a memorial to us.’

From ‘The Manchester Man’ by G Linnaeus Banks

Just started reading this for my book group. I’m hoping it will have lots of zedding interest, but even if it doesn’t, the hero is named Jabez Clegg. As well as being a great name in its own right, it’s also become the name of a grubby student pub off Oxford Street, which will be a nice image to bear in mind as I wade through a heavy Victorian novel.

In which they encounter a bunny waiting for a tram

by Marie

We weren’t really zedding when this happened but we thought you would enjoy it, dear readers.

We were coming out of the Lowry Theatre, having watched His Dark Materials which was really very good.

I always feel strange leaving the Lowry. It is the job of theatres and cinemas to transport you to other worlds and I always get a little jolt when I return to the normality of the busy streets. The Lowry, itself looking like it has landed from space, spits you out onto Salford Quays, a weird slightly sterile environment with futuristic buildings and few signs of human habitation. It’s a place that that has been designed but not yet lived in.

We walked over the ship bridge, remarking that the lower decks would be a great place to launch a remote controlled boat. Ship bridge? I hear you ask. Well this isn’t the point of the story but it is a pleasing diversion: The Detroit Bridge’s original home and function was to allow rail access to Trafford Park but was moved to it’s present location 1988. The move required its flotation down the canal by pontoons and this required its registration as a ship. This enables me to to be factually correct when I tell people, “this bridge, it’s a ship, this bridge is” and it pleases me to do so.

We arrived at the tram stop with time to think about running for the tram but didn’t (as my knee is still sore from last week’s urban adventure). It was going to Special, anyway and we couldn’t decide if we wanted to go to special. Many trams in the city centre are going to special these days which is fair enough but didn’t help my feeling that I wasn’t quite back in my own world yet.

Waiting on the tram platform, I saw a small dark shape scampering across the road, I pointed. “An animal of some sort, a rabbit or a rat or something”
“Rabbit!” Liam scoffed “far more likely to be a rat”
“Suppose” I said shrugging, What’s the statistic, never more than 10 feet from a rat in the city “…still there tho, see that dark shape”
“Shall I sneak up on it?” Liam wondered. I encouraged this and kept watch for the tram.
Moments later Liam is back pointing and gesturing enthusiastically. “did you see that, did you see that?”
I hesitate, not wanting to admit I’d been too busy thinking how sad the play was, to watch him sneak up on a rodent.
“Wabbit!” he announces incredulously. “A wabbit! What’s it doing round here? it was quite a nonchalant rabbit, let me get quite close but then ran off. Wabbit”

We sit and wait for the tram discussing where our furry friend might be living in the urban moonscape that is Salford Quays. “They like sandy soil to burrow in, there’s nowhere round here that’s rabbit friendly. What on earth made you think it was a rabbit from first glance?”
“it just had a.. dunno..sort of… wabbitty.. way of moving.” I finish feebly before jumping up. “there it is!”

We both creep away from the tram stop, me trying to get my cameraphone to come back on. Night mode, cameraphone, don’t make me laugh. Can’t take a pic of a rabbit when it is sat a metre away from you, twitching its ears, nonchalantly eating the grass that grows between tram tracks. Eating the grass that grows in between tram tracks! is there no better place for you to live, my furry friend? Our wabbit scampers off under a gate and sits beside a fence watching us watching it for quite a while. We worry in case our wabbit is someone’s escaped pet but we conclude that from it small size and leanness it looks less like a hutch dwelling wabbit and more like an urban – live by its wits – sort of a wabbit. Eventually it disappears into some wastleland – wasteland we had already observed someone had gone to trouble of fencing in and putting electric wiring on the top of the fence. Maybe it’s just really important we leave the rabbits alone.

We sit and discuss whether wabbits normally live in urban areas and whether anyone will believe us. Liam says he is going to google “urban rabbit” when he gets in. “You are going to find a myspace account belonging to hairy young men making nasty noises with guitars, I fear” Some lights appear. “Here’s our twam” announces Liam and I wonder how long before the bunnification of our speech patterns will wear off.

Back on the internet. I’m no wiser about whether it’s common for rabbits to live in urban areas, except they do hang about by the Arc de Triomphe, they live on roundabouts in Gloucestershire and they burrow under bookshops in inverness

I think you will agree, this is not the most bunny friendly sort of place:

The events in this post take place on page 93. Bunnies can be spotted and trams caught from square F5, the lowry can be visited in square E6

In which they walk halfway across Manchester in the dark

By Liam

Since we started this weird hobby, we keep discovering new and exciting psychogeographical alleys to wander up. Manchester seems to be strangely full of people doing this stuff. So the latest new adventure was Urban Earth. The idea is to have people walk across big urban areas, taking a photo every eight paces and then stitching them all together into a big video montage of the journey. The routes are planned by some clever computer algorithm thing so that they take in a representative mix of the city’s affluence and deprivation. It’s all a bit strange and we approve.

So this last weekend, a bunch of people got together at teatime on Saturday on the North edge of Manchester, and walked across the city through the night, aiming to arrive near the airport in the South at sunrise on Saturday.  We joined in, but we were both a bit too lazy to do the whole thing. Marie made it to Blackley – very near Boggart Hole Clough – and I made it to the city centre, before leaving them to it.

It was a very interesting and different experience. Our fellow walkers were all lovely. The route took us through lots of quiet residential areas and strange alleys, even less likely places to visit than we would normally choose. The demands of taking a photo every eight paces and working to a schedule meant that we were moving along very briskly, rather than drifting whimsically wherever we fancied.

The really striking thing was the way people reacted. You’d have thought it wouldn’t be that unusual for a bunch of people to wander through the city streets on an evening, carrying rucksacks and reading a map. But we attracted crowds of kids and loads of people asking what we were doing. It was fun to tell them we were heading for the airport, but I particularly enjoyed telling little kids that we were going on an adventure.

It really brought home the fact that cities expect and enforce certain, limited behaviours and routines. Do something even slightly out of the ordinary, and you attract attention and discover exciting new things.

We can’t really do our usual meandering zedding report this time, but here are some statistics we gathered for your delectation, and the best of the photos I took. (You can see all our photos on Flickr.)

Angry dogs – 6
Derelict mills – 4
Curious children – too many to count

Start of the walk at Shaw


Subways

Chimney with frill

What does an abstract building look like, and what kind of services does it need?

Manchester Sunset

Walking over the motorway requires a cage

This made everyone giggle for some reason

Wonder what was happening in these warehouses at 11pm that required such bright lights?

Manchester Fort looked eerie and empty, but my wobbly hands and camera night mode have changed it into something else altogether

Why?

While I was taking this photo, a talking lamppost warned me to beware of car thieves. Scared the bejesus out of me

Reflections in the centre of the city

They scare me. The one on the left is smuggling peanuts and the one on the right is wilting

Fire exit? Where? Is this Torchwood or something?

Check out the Urban Earth ning for photos and videos from other people who were there!

Vital statistics
Map: URBAN EARTH: MANCHESTER
Location: From Shaw& Crompton station to Deansgate
Date zedded: 18 April 2009
A to Z: (approximately) page 57 squares 1F, 1G, 1H, 2E; page 56 squares 3D, 4C, 5C, 5B, 6B, 6A; page 55 squares 6H, 6G; page 71 squares 1F, 1E; page 70 squares 1D, 2C, 3B, 4B, 4A; page 69 squares 4H, 5H, 5G, 6G, 6F; page 83 squares 1F, 2F, 3E, 4E; page 82 squares 4D, 5D, 6D, 6C; page 95 squares 1E, 2E, 3E; page 94 squares 3D, 4D
Getting there: train from Victoria station
Squares this expedition: 37!
Running total: 83

Fifteen minutes of fame?

Sitting at home recovering from doing half of Manchester Sunrise (proper blog about that later in the week), and found out to my delight that we’ve made it into the pages of the New Statesman. Looks like we’ll get a mention in a book too.

I particularly like this comment about online psychogeographers: ‘these bloggers tend to be collaborative and tentative, more willing to explore mundanity for its own sake. For them, the city does not yield up its psychogeographic secrets readily; sometimes a bus shelter is just a bus shelter, not a site of ancient or occult significance.’ 

Amen to that.

Liam

More Birmingham psychogeography

There was a big project in Birmingham where people spent 11 hours on the 11th of November riding around the number 11 outer circle bus route, producing art, blogging, photos, and so on.

 

There’s a psychogeographical report on it here.

October Walk with Loiterers

by marie

This isn’t really a zedding. There was no a to z. Liam wasn’t with me so I feel a bit unfaithful adding it to our blog. But somehow it was zedding, just as you can be following an a to z without zedding you can take the awareness that characterises zedding into a different form of exploration. The other Sunday I decided I would go and meet the nice people at the Loiterer’s Resistance Movement. Liam was in Birmingham so I headed off myself. In the the John Rylands Library Cafe I introduced myself “my name is Marie and I loiter” We went off to loiter in a group, before we left we were each given a word, we were to look for a secret that connected with the city and it’s people with our word. I had “yellow” which seemed to make yellow stuff more vibrant.

Us loiterers found a cage for cars and some people danced on it.

We stopped out side some offices and disobeyed a sign. I have some sympathy with whoever works in the office and has smokers chatting outside their window. I say get the smokers away from my kitchen window and back in the pub. Has anyone noticed how the smoking ban is changing the feel of the city, more people on the streets, more shelters outside bars, more mess in the streets as no one cleans up cigarette butts. How is it changing the atmosphere of your city?

We went into a soulless car park and looked at the view from the window where the lift stopped on the 20th floor. You couldnt see from the actual 20th floor in the big soulless room for cars which disappointed me. Liam and I discovered the joy of multi story car parks way before we discovered zedding. Go to the top of the car park by Birmingham Snow Hill station – it’s worth it.

Then we… er… loitered a bit. We stopped on the bridge for a while and told stories about the river.

We found a secret door, which is pleasing to loiterers. Through it I saw some boots, which are pleasing to loiterers, we also found a giant sycamore helicopter sculpture which one of the guys climbed.
.... ..

I choose to draw people’s attention to the yellow banana, because I had the word yellow. But I chose the banana rather the yellow signs I’d seen telling me to go somewhere, exhorting me to buy something, yellow things with no mystery and no soul. People had chosen to put the big yellow banana out of their window and we will never know why. And that’s about people making a city interesting, by being interesting, by creating moments of serendipity for other people, people making the city beautiful.

I had some other thoughts from the experience: How different it was to explore in a group. Liam and I don’t attract attention, no one wants to know what Liam and I are doing. We are anonymous explorers, we can get in hotel lifts and go to top floor for the joy of peeking out onto the city as the sun fades and the lights come on. Two people doing nothing doesn’t invite comment, when 20 people do nothing does it make it something?

And thoughts about public space and sacred space, how sacred space is public space and what does that mean for the explorer and those who hold it sacred? But that’s for another day.