I have made some progress in thinking about my project. I have noticed that my work at Preston, and perhaps before, has been influenced by my experience of living in a city. There are makers on my course, and in the wider field of ceramics, who base their practice on a sense of place. In many cases the places that inspire them are rural and naturalistic, in my case, the places I love happen to be cities.
My first love is Manchester. My grandparents made their home here about 100 years ago, my mother lived here all her life, and I have lived here for most of my life too I know exactly when my love of Manchester city centre began. I was aged eleven, and I had just started at my secondary school, so it would have been September.
I was going into Manchester on my own for the first time. My mum had arranged for a girl in the year above me, to show me the way to school. She was with two of her friends, she ignored me throughout the bus journey. At St Peters Square the girl told me to get off the bus, it was our stop. We got off the bus. The second year girls ran towards library walk, so I ran too. We plunged into library walk, the walls were enormous and steeply curved, it was much darker than in the square, we weaved in and out of the office workers. The girls turned right, I turned right. We ran through the portico of the town hall extension, there were people coming the other way, we moved from left to right to avoid them. We reached the kerb in Albert Square, taxis and buses flew past at speed, where to cross? That’s our bus she said. We ran full pelt across the narrow side road, we were in front of the town hall, where to cross? We ran to the middle of the square, past the underground toilets, past the memorial, we were half way across. We still needed to cross to the other side where the bus shelters were. We ran along by the kerb, until we were level with the stationary bus, then we waited and watched as the traffic whizzed past, and the bus queue shortened. A space in the traffic suddenly appeared, we flew across in front of the driver’s window, preventing him driving away without us, we jumped on the bus.
We scrambled up the stairs into the smoky top deck, and claimed the seats at the front of the bus. From the top floor windows the vastness of the town hall was clear, the huge front door, the windows with etched frosted glass,. We edged slowly down Cross Street and Corporation Street, laid out before us were some of the grandest buildings and streets of the city. To the right were glimpses of the banking district, the great width of King Street leading to Spring Gardens. To the left the old church in Saint Anne’s Square, the fancy shopping arcade, the grandness of the Royal Exchange and the Corn Exchange. Two hundred years of building on one street, the new retail and commercial buildings packed in next to the Victorian warehouses, the grand banks and the huge civic architecture reflecting the wealth and status of the industrial revolution and beyond. Below us the heads of people hurrying to work, moving at roughly the same speed as we were, the pavements at least three people deep in the rush hour, weaving their individual paths through the city.
This bus journey was only short, we would soon be at school. A few stops later half the girls got up, come on she said, this is the best stop. It wasn’t the nearest stop, we were four streets away from school, but it went past the corner shop that sold refreshers and ice pops.
The journey home was very different, it was easy to run faster than the bus through the crowded city streets. We got off the bus at Corporation Street in the north of the city centre and we ran to Chepstow Street in the south, a distance of about a mile. Every day we would take a different route depending on how crowded it was, how slow the traffic was, what the weather was like, whether there was a football match, and a dozen other factors. Before long one of my friends would join me on the journey, and we would explore the city and develop our own routes. Over the days, weeks, months and years I got to know the pathways of the city centre, the streets, the buildings, the shops.
On rainy days we sought out buildings with shelter, offices with porticos, shops with awnings jutting over the pavements, shopping arcades. We cut through the buildings themselves, the post office with its brutalist concrete mural, and the town hall extension, which used to have rows of wooden screens and desks, were particular favourites. On slow days we peeped into the buildings and tried to see what was inside. The Midland bank had a door at either end, this was a spectacular building designed by Lutyens, the inside was as impressive as the outside, the banking hall was all wood and marble, and very high ceilings with strange acoustics.They sometimes had someone standing near the door, and we were turfed out into the street several times. Jamie Oliver converted it to a restaurant.The most interesting thing about the city was all the little passageways, the short cuts, the former loading bays and access roads for the old warehouses.
When you get to know somewhere as a child, you are curious, you explore, you go off the beaten track. Each day provided variety, options, opportunities to explore. Years later I can still ‘see’ the geography of this city in my mind’s eye.
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