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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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

Braising steak, brisket, mince meat, rib-eye steak, boneless loin, it’s all flying out of Bernard Kelly’s butcher’s stall at Newton Heath Market.

“You’ll want a bit o’ fat with that, won’t you?” Bernard suggests to Mary from Collyhurst, one of his regulars.

“Oh, yes please,” she says, and then to me: “He’s taught me the secret of cooking beef, he has.”

Mary does most of her shopping at markets and prefers them over the high street shops, but she’s disappointed with her favourite market. “It’s gone downhill here since all the changes,” she says. “We used to have cobblers and a watch repairer, there were lots more stalls.”

To avoid the market closing, Manchester City Council took over the site last year with plans to refurbish it. Hoardings around the outside still proclaim a new, improved market. The whole place was closed down for a couple of months whilst old stalls were replaced but business never bounced back. Some traders left altogether and, most crucially, many customers changed their shopping habits and have not returned.

Ali Shafqat with his son: family-run for 25 years

“People don’t like change, do they?” declares 25 year-old Moazum Ali, from the hosiery stall their family has run since Moazum was born. Judging by the number of customers on this damp Wednesday afternoon, it seems they don’t.

Well wrapped-up, local resident Rose is enjoying a cup of coffee and a cigarette with her friends in the café’s gazebo at the other end of the market. Rose has been a regular for 30 years.

“Back then every stall was taken,” she recalls. “The place was hammered, absolutely hammered.”

“What sort of things could you get?” I ask, although I’m pretty sure of her answer.

“Everything. Everything from a pin to an elephant. Now we’ve no shoe stall, no fruit and veg. We’ve only got one knicker stall now. Oh, we used to get our knickers off a lovely fella…”.

Dorothy Lees: "It'll be one of Mancester's best markets again."

I leave Rose and her pals to their lingerie reminiscences and have a chat with the café’s owner, Dorothy Lees.  “I’ve been here for 20 years,” she tells me. “It was a brilliant market then. I used to queue up at 5.30 in the morning and was lucky if I got a stall even then. Gradually, over the last 18 months, traders have left and this is what we’ve ended up with.”

But now the remaining traders have agreed with the council to form a co-operative and, from this month, will be running the market themselves. “It’s the best option for us,” says Steve Hopwood, from behind the rails of his ladies’ fashions. “Then it’ll be up to us what we do. For a start we’re having a car boot sale every Sunday starting at the end of the month. 6am ’til 1pm. Put that in your article.”

Steve Hopwood: "We'll be having a car boot sale every Sunday morning."

“I will,” I promise.

Despite the upheaval, there is lots of optimism for the future. Tricia McElwee has been on Newton Heath for just three years and her handmade, personalised cards and silk flowers have been selling well. “I tried Hyde and Rochdale markets before here,” she says, “and this is the best place. What I do is completely different, and I’m very reasonable.”

“People love markets, don’t they?” says Dorothy. “They love a bargain and the personal service. I think if we can get the custom back then it’ll be one of the best markets in Manchester again.”

Tricia McElwee: selling well at Newton Heath

With all this determination and enthusiasm, I think she may be right, but don’t expect to see the elephants back again.

Newton Heath Market on Droylsdon Road is open on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.
Car boot sales start on September 27th 2009 at 6am.

If you are interested in taking a stall call Dorothy on 07899 807697.

Now, nearly 25 years on, Charlie is back with his camera, about to embark on a sequel.

East: How did the first project develop?

Charlie: Originally it was very much about the road itself, but, after working on it for a short time, it was clear that the changes on either side of the road were more interesting.

Behind the roadside buildings it was like a stage set: new housing estates were springing up and whole areas were being re-landscaped. All this against the backdrop of the cotton mills. That became the focus for the project.

East: How did you go about it?

Charlie: I’d do a lot of walking. I’d pick an area and explore it for half a day or more. At first I’d use the camera as a notebook, so nothing gets too precious, too early. Then I’d go back to particular areas and re-photograph them with a large plate camera – you know – the type with a cloth over your head.

Recently I re-discovered a box of work prints from the first project that didn’t make it to the final exhibition. They’re fascinating, like a story book.

East: So, what’s changed in 25 years?

Charlie: What’s been a real shock to me is the housing in Miles Platting, at the Manchester end. There are swathes of houses that are now boarded up which were pretty much new 25 years ago. Whatever they were trying to do then clearly didn’t work.

Some of the tower blocks are still there, and the mills, or bits of mills, of course. But the big companies – Sharp, Pifco, Ferranti – appear to have closed down.

After 25 years of change I’m finding it quite hard to find some of the original locations from the first view but when I show local people the photographs, I do get a lot of help and I’m pleased to say there are still plenty of people with sharp memories and tales to tell about how it was and what has happened since.

I would like to build on this experience by working with local community groups and I feel there is more activity on that level than there was in the mid-1980s. It’s these groups I’d like to work with on this new project.

East: That will be a different way of working for you?

Charlie: Yes. Originally I’d work in relative isolation, maybe just chatting to the people I met along the way. This time I want to get much more involved with local community groups and with nearby schools. In this digital age, we are all photographers and I want to give everyone to opportunity to contribute something to this project.

East: So what questions will you be asking residents?

Well, I’d like to know what gives them a ‘sense of place’. What’s important to them locally? Is there a building or a feature – however strange or simple – that gives character to their surroundings?

I’d like to hear as many views as possible which is why I’m spending the next two years on the project. Any ideas or suggestions to help get me started will be gratefully received.

Follow Charlie’s project on his blog here, or email charlie@nanholme.demon.co.uk.

East: What is the Sharp Project all about?

Sue Woodward: The Sharp Project is Manchester’s answer to the demand from the creative industries sector to create a new home for digital businesses. This warehouse, once home to Sharp Electronics, has 1/4 million square feet of space which we are going to convert into affordable, easy-in, easy-out space for these businesses.

Sue Woodward: "In the digital age, this is the next industrial revolution."

East: Why do we need that sort of facility?

SW: Manchester City Council has asked the creative services sector what they need to develop in what is becoming one of the biggest growth areas for the economy. And this is the outcome. We will provide flexibility for new and existing companies to use our facilities and space to suit their needs. In film-making in particular, sometimes you have 20 people working for you but the next week you might only have 250. We will accommodate the requirements of the companies that use us.

East: So, will there be more programmes like Casualty 1909 made here?

SW: Absolutely. We’re going to combine traditional drama with brand new digital skills in a very original, modern way. Not only will there be more programmes like Casualty 1909, where we can offer an unrivaled amount of space to create sets, but we’ll have opportunities for new companies to come to the project. The conversion includes bringing in shipping containers with glazed fronts that will act as ‘pods’ for new start-ups. Studios and high tec facilities for animation and computer-generated imagery will be on hand and all of this will benefit from ultra high speed connectivity to the rest of the world.

Impressive sets built at the Sharp Project for BBC's Casualty 1909

East: What do you mean by ‘connectivity’?

SW: There are three ‘big pipes’ that connect the UK to North America. These literally run under the Atlantic Ocean and can transmit huge amounts of data quickly and cheaply. Two of them go to London and the South East and, luckily for us, the third is linked to Manchester Science Park. So we are a hop, skip and a jump away from something that can give 100mb/sec  – and eventually unlimited bandwidth – connectivity to global markets. If you think about it, Manchester built its fortunes on the ship canal – it brought the beach to the city – so that we could reach global markets. In the digital age, this is the next industrial revolution.

From start-ups to full-scale TV and film production, there is space available

East: What’s in it for the people of east Manchester?

SW: It’s not just about the building, it’s about how we interact with further education colleges and the academies programme. Close by is One Central Park with Manchester College and the University of Manchester and from next year there will be a brand new academy for east Manchester. We’ll forge close links with schools and colleges and make sure young people take advantage of the opportunities we’ll have here.

East: Isn’t the Sharp Project just going to end up competing with Media City?

SW: There’s an arc of opportunity for Manchester. Media City will be the high end, high profile, centre of excellence. But what it will need is a skilled pool of labour in the locality and that is what the Sharp Project will provide. We are the ‘growbag’ that will supply the digital labour market with talent. We will allow young people to come here, to start up, to fail, to start again, to prosper. Media City is at one end of that arc and the Sharp Project – the ‘growbag’ – is at the other.

The Sharp Project in the old Sharp Electronics warehouse

Sue Woodward is regarded as one of the most influential figures in North West media circles. She was managing director of ITV Granada between 2004-08 and wrote the creative bid for Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture. For the Commonwealth Games in 2002 she was creative director, responsible for the opening and closing ceremonies, and in 2003 was awarded the OBE for services to broadcasting and the Commonwealth Games.