Walled Up Places
They walled up spaces we began to find in Ancoats were places of the ordinary everyday activities of a working industrial city and suburb; places to eat, move, pee, produce, and they were unexpectedly highly charged and somehow extraordinary by consequence of what had become of them. As people in the area began to hear about these found spaces, their arrival in people’s consciousness seemed to add a new layer to Ancoats. Knowlege of these spaces changed immediately people’s sense of what the area had been and what it could become. Their impact on the psyche of Ancoats owed as much to the stories and myths that began unfolding around each find, as did the experience of witnessing the spaces personally. Additionally we began to recognise that these places seemed connected to one another somehow, they were a series, a set. Each was a discrete site with its own character and story, but collectively they created a network of connections to one another and became more than the sum of their parts. So we agreed on a simple plan, and the Peeps project was born. If these walled up spaces could be experienced from the public realm, ie as you walk through the streets, then we should work together to make something of them.
Artist’s Tale
The Last Walkway
Artist’s Tale
The Hair on the Back of Your Neck
Artist’s Tale
The Tipping Point
It was only a few months into the project, I was just settling into the studio and getting my bearings, when I was rudely awoken one dawn by an almighty crash. As I looked bleary eyed out of the studio window onto Murrays Mill, I saw sewing tables, then machinery, then boxes that spilt their loads into a plume of buttons, needles, belts, labels, neck ties, school uniforms as they hurtled towards the ground. Next it was rolls of fabric, then the trolleys, then the doors, then the partition walls, and then I picked up my camera and got over there. In Manchester this is known as ditching; a team of men some characterised by their unemployability as unskilled labourers, were armed with crowbars and clubs and were stripping out the building floor by floor. A giant hole was knocked out down to the floor of each of the eight levels, and the contents of each mill floor was carted to that end, everything was then hurled out into the courtyard until the mill was stripped bare, then they moved to the next floor. I introduced myself to the foreman of this and the other sites where ditching was soon underway, and armed myself with my camera and grabbed a box of red patent leather belts. I went into battle, dawn to dusk saving what things I could as I moved along with my camera and note book, by tying a belt around things otherwise headed for the skip, trying, often in vain, to stay one floor ahead of the ditchers. With a sudden jolt the regeneration process had shifted into action. Ancoats was at its tipping point, it was also turning itself inside out and stripping itself bare. Artist's Tale
The Cutting Room
A few cutting and pattern rooms remained in Ancoats at the outset of the regeneration, one in particular, the last to be cleared to make way for development, was quite remarkable. It had been built into the attic of Royal Mills. The cutting room was vast and bright, and one end had been given over to a small locked room as a pattern store. A fire had wrecked the roof and now mature trees were growing in the space. In the pattern room the plasterwork had long since been washed away exposing the brickwork but the patterns, made of a waterproof velum, remained vivid hanging from the walls. The patterns and the patina of the brick wall almost merged in the light of dusk and so I went back to photograph this space on midsummer’s day and had to wait until late into the evening for dusk. While I waited I was aware not only of butterflies and birds but also of a rabbit. Artist's Tale
Definitely No Rubbish Here 