Maxine Goulding, Miles Platting Group Manager: "The new Beswick Library is gorgeous. We love it!"

I remember, a few years ago, Beswick Library was here on Grey Mare Lane, not that far from where we are now.

Yes, that’s right. We used to be in what was formerly The Bobbin Pub right next to the precinct. I’m sure it would have been the local for many of our customers at one time. It wasn’t a very large building but it had a lovely feel to it and we had a very successful homework club.

The old library was formerly The Bobbin Pub

We were very sad to come out of there in 2006 but, because it was a regeneration area, many of the houses were coming down, the shops were closing and we were losing customers.

From there you set up the East City Library in what is now The Manchester College campus at Openshaw. That must have been a big step.

Oh yes, we moved into this wonderful, large ground floor space that we shared with the college library. We thought it was gorgeous. It was a big change for us because it’s a college and a public library and although we still have many residents using the library, most of our customers are students.

Because we have plenty of space we are able to put on more activities and we enjoy lots of partnership projects like getting involved with the students’ end of year shows. The college has been great and we’ll still be at the East City Library as well as the new Beswick Library.

Working in a regeneration area surely brings its own challenges?

The new library shares the building with the East Manchester Academy

We’re very much a part of the regeneration story, fully committed to the social and cultural regeneration in east Manchester. It’s a new way of working because now we are collaborating with all kinds of partners. I attend ward meetings, youth meetings, health forums, Valuing Older People meetings: we’re using other people’s skills and resources to achieve a common goal. Communities are changing very rapidly and our libraries are changing with them.

We have to work particularly hard in east Manchester to encourage people to use the library. Many still have a traditional view of what libraries were like: all dusty books and ‘quiet please’. But things are very different now and as soon as people walk through those doors they understand that difference.

Our outreach work is essential. We get out there and tell people what we’ve got to offer and work with hard-to-reach groups to encourage them to use the library. For instance, we’ve run drama and sound recording sessions to promote the Manchester Book Awards and we’ve had artists working with youth clubs on art projects in the libraries.

The light pours into the new library

And now you’re back in Beswick with this wonderful library alongside the new East Manchester Academy.

We were always going to come back. We’ve been involved with the design of the building from the very beginning and we’ve worked closely with the Academy promoting the school and the library together. We’ve got the same customers.

I just love it. The space is amazing and with the light pouring through those tall windows, well, it’s just a wonderful building.

We’ve got community meeting rooms and a community space for larger events as well as all the services we now offer throughout the city.

Of course we’ve got all the computers and – what some people don’t realise – we’ve got staff on hand who can help. So, even if you haven’t used a computer before, you can book one-to-one sessions and be taken through the very basics by our friendly staff.
It’s a lot less daunting than booking on a college course.

Then there’s the story sessions for the little ones and a chance for parents and carers to have a cuppa and a chat. We hold lots of advice sessions on a variety of topics so residents don’t always have to travel to get the help they need, and then there’s the health information point, the parenting advice books and now even ebooks…

What do you find most rewarding?

I love working in east Manchester because I feel we have been making a real difference. Being part of the regeneration effort is very exciting.

Many homes still don’t have internet access and we can offer all that – and more – here. We’ve made a huge impact with our homework clubs and now that we share the building with the Academy and we have extended opening times, we can build on that success even further.

Click here for opening times, facilities and lots more.

Numerous computers as well as books and community information

Children's and teenage books are upstairs

Stairs and a lift link the two floors

Beswick Library: something for all ages and abilities

Billy Jones, left, amongst the Over 50s Forum enjoying the Fringe workshop

I’d intended to drop in at The Stirling Centre in Newton Heath and take a few snaps of the very first event of the 2010 East Manchester Food and Drink Fringe Festival. Sure enough tables were being laid out for the Fringe’s ‘How Does Your Garden Grow’ workshop but there was already a flurry of activity across the hall as members from the Over 50s Forum were busy painting plant pots. I wasn’t expecting two events for the price of one!

Liz Lomas from the Forum explained: “Every year the city council’s Valuing Older People programme puts on a fortnightly Full of Life Festival to celebrate older people and encourage more participation in the community. One of the themes this year is ‘Grub and Gossip’ and that’s what going on here. We’ve got herbs and seedlings and packets of seeds which will go into the plant pots once they’re painted.

Esther Parnell: "The last time I painted was with the grandkids!"

There was plenty of gossip going on as the pots were decorated: “The last time I did anything like this it was colouring-in with the grandkids,” said Esther Parnell as she added another petal to the red rose she was painting on her ceramic pot. The grub came in the form of a splendid buffet provided by Liz’s colleague, Brenda Austen.

Once the pots were filled with compost and seedlings and the participants had had their fill of sandwiches and mini sausage rolls, it was time to turn to the Fringe Festival event staged by community artist, Michele Hawthorne.

“We were looking for something relatively easy and yet creative to make,” says Michele, opening bags of laurel, rhododendron, conifer and holly branches out onto the table. “We’ve got some plant pots with wooden stems already prepared and we’re encouraging people to use their imaginations and create a living decoration that should stay alive for several weeks.”

This group don’t need much encouragement and within minutes the table was full of green-fingered enthusiasts.

Community artist, Michele Hawthorne, gives some tips to Forum member Caroline Crerar

Caroline Coates, the Cultural Regeneration Officer from New East Manchester is here too. She’s responsible for putting many of the Fringe events together over here in east Manchester. I ask her what she’s looking forward to most in the weeks ahead. “There are 20 events during October and it’s hard to highlight just a couple but I think the cooking demonstration with locally grown food at Emerge’s Learning Garden (next to Smithfield Market) on the 9th will be fun. And then there’s the World Food Event staged by Adactus Housing on the 30th at Miles Platting Library. Here local residents will be cooking food form all over the world, so that should be amazing to watch… and amazing to taste!”

See the Food and Drink website: http://www.foodanddrinkfestival.com/events/east-manchester/
See east Manchester’s what’s on listings: http://www.east-manchester.com/whats-happening/index.htm

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Field Worker Amanda Crummett, centre, with the Young at Heart Group and their art mentors

The Young at Heart Group – set up more than two years ago and ‘adopted’ by Keele University’s CALL-ME research programme – flung open the doors of their community rooms on Gortonvilla Walk this week to show off their creativity.

Matty Wade: "It's my design on the T-shirt!"

Each member displayed a finished print mounted and framed on the walls with other limited editions on sale to raise funds for future projects.

The silk screening techniques were taught by artist Ian McKay and his son Andrew as part of the M12-11 arts project, set up in 2005 of offer creative opportunities to east Manchester groups and residents.

“I’ve enjoyed every part of this project,” says Matty Wade, who accompanies his partially-sighted grandmother to the group and whose design features on the group’s T-shirts. “We all took a vote on which image should go on the shirts and the group chose mine. That made me very happy.”

Eighty-five year-old Maggie Wade was, at first, reluctant to join in the group’s activities: “When they came to ask me if I’d like to join I told them I could only see light and shape and I’d never to able to manage. We started with pottery and I thought I’d never to able to do it but, with the help of these people, I’ve managed. I felt as if I was past it at my age, so it just goes to show.

“They’re starting keep fit classes on Wednesday so I’ll come down to that too!”

“Some older people hardly go out at all,” says club secretary, Audrey Hurley. “So this group has given them a chance to have a cuppa and a chat as well as make some fantastic art. We all enjoy the laughs when we get together.”

“CALL-ME is part of a longer research project aimed at improving the quality of life for older people,” explains Keele University’s Professor Michael Murray. “With our partners, we’re providing opportunities for older people in disadvantaged areas of Manchester to socialise. Here the Young at Heart group have produced some amazing artwork but mainly it’s been about people coming together.

Our field worker, Amanda Crummett, has been able to support the group to apply for funding, recruit a community artist and develop this project. We’re really pleased with the results.”

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Photography workshop in the beautiful Clayton Vale. Photo: Len Grant

I was surprised anyone showed up at all. This was the big one: England versus Germany and it seemed every other house in east Manchester was sporting a massive St George’s flag or half a mile of bunting. Many had both.

But as our own kick-off arrived there were many eager snappers fingering their dials and knobs ready to capture the beauty of the Vale.

Billed as being totally non-technical, I firstly extolled the virtues of ‘looking at light’, imagining the sun as one massive photographic light that could be either on, off or many variations in between.

Getting a different viewpoint. Photo: Elliot Brown

The committed participants also heard my recommendation for ‘moving about’, looking for the best viewpoint and not being content with the view of a scene that first presents itself. It sounds incredibly basic but it is consistently overlooked and can make a good photograph even better.

I remember my photographic education – such as it was – took great leaps forward when my evening class teacher encouraged us to start taking pictures in a sequence rather than looking just for that killer shot. So my workshop participants were sent off to take a series of images, of any subject matter, that might be the beginning of ‘story-telling’, or at least thinking about they wanted to say with their photography before lifting the viewfinder to the eye.

Congratulation to all involved. It was a constructive afternoon for photography if not for English football. Here are some of the results.

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“Have you done all this Grandma?” Two year-old Sophie Ledward, admires the handiwork of GVA member, Rita Oakley.

Our ’Ouse is inspired by the exposed wallpaper revealed in the once private interiors of half-demolished houses scattered around east Manchester. “It was the condemned terraced houses of Beswick that first gave me the idea,” says the group’s lead artist, Ian McKay. “Those exposed living rooms and bedrooms signify the area’s transformation and I thought it would be good way to record people’s memories of the past.”

Each member of the group has chosen images, or drawn their own pictures of treasured childhood memories. Family pets, long-demolished cinemas, gas lamps, cups cakes, clogs and even the pit heads at Bradford Colliery have all been featured in this day-long exhibition.

The accompanying text by each of the artists, all Gorton residents, offers another strand of reminiscence. Noreen West recalls, “…clogs that mother had bought with the Divi she had saved from the Co-op. They were green, that’s my favourite colour, and they laced up at the front.”

Margaret Greenhalgh remembers her father, an engineer, taking the whole family to visit the pit in 1941. “He made sure his four girls were aware of Manchester’s vast, diverse industry: something to be proud of.”

Elsewhere Freda Wallwork writes about her inspiration for her ‘vanilla slice’ wallpaper: “I worked at Sharples Brothers as an apprentice confectioner in the 1950s… We had a small kitchen for our lunch breaks, very like the one in the underwear factory in Coronation Street. We were a very happy, but busy, group of friends.”

As part of this 13-week project the group were invited by the Whitworth Art Gallery to view their current wallpaper exhibition and were able to ask questions of the gallery curators. Back at their base at the Angels in Gorton the group set to work creating their individual designs using traditional woodcut printing processes.

Without pausing for breath Gorton Visual Arts is now working a mosaic about the Beyer Peacock railway engine works in Gorton. “The factory was at the bottom of our street,” recalls the group’s oldest member, “and every day I’d watch as thousands of men streamed into work. Until we started on this new project, I never had a clue what went on behind those high walls.”

Wallpaper exhibition at Whitworth Art Gallery

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In a previous life this aircraft hanger of a building stored microwaves, TVs, copies and printers for Sharp, the multi-national electronics corporation and one-time sponsor of Newton Heath’s most famous sons, Manchester United. Now it’s The Sharp Project, where shipping containers provide accommodation for fledging media companies and cavernous spaces lots of scope for TV drama sets.

Last week The Sharp Project on Thorp Road was ‘invaded’ by a graffiti-art group who, for three days, painted and spayed an immense mural across a warehouse wall that may once have been stacked high with video cassette recorders.

Agents of Change, a collective of artists who, like a disparate rock band, come together to produce spectacular artworks before dispersing across the world to do their own projects. One member of the group, Remi, has sandwiched Newton Heath into a travel itinerary that includes San Francisco, New York and Madrid.

Their last project together, ‘The Ghostvillage Project’ involved changing an abandoned concrete village, built for but never lived in by oil workers and their families in Scotland, into an innovative art gallery.

This current project was part of last week’s FutureEverything Festival.

See the Agents of Change website.
See the Sharp Project website.

The Ten Acre Lane Sports Complex: a homecoming for FC United

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Back in 1878, the year that football referees first started using whistles, the workers of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway would play their home matches on North Road, opposite the carriage and wagon works where the players toiled together during the day.

Their team – Newton Heath (L and YR) Football Club – played in a strip of gold and green and subsequently joined the newly-formed football league in 1892 and, a decade later, were renamed Manchester United.

The rest, you might say, is history and to continue the clichés, history does have a habit of repeating itself. So, only last month, FC United of Manchester, the anti-Glazer club set up in 2005, announced its intention to move back to its ancestral home in Newton Heath. Backed by Manchester City Council and New East Manchester the supporter-owned club plans to develop a rundown sports centre into a 5000-capacity stadium with community sports facilities alongside.

See FC United of Manchester’s website

"We're looking for a permanent home for the work now," says Yvonne

Although I photographed Yvonne preparing for this show a couple of months ago I wasn’t expecting the riot of colour and energy she has put into these large-scale murals.

The panels are full to bursting with weird and wonderful characters that begin life in her imagination. “Music is my inspiration,” says Yvonne, who joined GVA as the community art group were completing their Belle Vue mosaic. “I feel free when I’m drawing and listening to music. Anything from the 80s and the images just come to me.”

Yvonne’s original drawings were projected onto the wooden panels and then, assisted by artist, Andrew McKay, Yvonne has transformed them into larger-than-life characters.

Yvonne's neice Rebecca gets up close

It was great to see so many friends and family descend on the GVA’s studio last night to celebrate Yvonne’s achievement.

“We’re looking for a permanent venue for the work now,” she tells me, “somewhere it can be enjoyed for a long time.”

Clayton Hall: once home to the Byron family and the Chetham brothers

East Manchester continues to amaze me. The diversity of what goes on here and the commitment of local people is astonishing. This last week I found myself taking photographs in Clayton Hall, the 16th century ‘moated’ hall concealed in the middle of the unassuming Clayton Park. Each of four rooms are now decked out in the late Victorian style to give visitors a real taste of history in east Manchester’s most notable historic building.

Come and see the sunken cold store, dining room, kitchen and outside wash house

Yes, I’ve seen this sort of thing before in National Trust properties and in museums run by local councils. But here in Clayton – with the trams lines being re-laid outside on Ashton New Road – this piece of historical restoration has not been put on by a team of full-time curators but by local volunteers from the Friends of Clayton Park.

Over the last couple of years these dedicated volunteers have sympathetically renovated four previously empty rooms into what is now a cultural high spot and an invaluable learning resource for local schools.

Small grants have paid for some of the items – the kitchen range was bought from ebay – but others have been donated by friends and relatives and, since the displays have been open to the public, from visitors supportive of the Friends’ work.

Experience a Victorian kitchen: no fridge or microwave here!

The Grade 2 listed hall is open to the public every third Saturday of the month between 1–4pm (so that’s this Saturday, 20th March) and children are particularly welcome. There’s an ID quiz so youngsters can identify items in each room and plenty of hands-on activities from helping out in the kitchen to ‘ironing’ clothes in the wash house.

As a backdrop to the National Curriculum the Friends are keen to encourage more schools to book visits and use the hall as a teaching resource.

To contact the Friends email info@friendsofclaytonpark.org.uk or ring Manchester Leisure on 0161 231 3090.

The Friends of Clayton Park website

Here’s a slideshow of the fun. Click to get started and don’t forget to turn the volume up on your computer.

Commenting on the success of the day, head teacher, Lorna Rushton said, “We enjoy a multi-ethnic school community here at Ashbury Meadow and so it’s really important to understand each other’s cultures. The children, staff and parents really enjoy this annual celebration and we all get a lot out of it.”