Marking the Turf
Stopping at DADI only to collect the keys for Brown Brothers Building or B3 I drive to the campaign HQ for Salford Labour. On a mission to physically mark out one corner of Manchester and Salford's Labour credentials.
We collect seven enormous Vote Labour boards from the meeting room at the back of Edmund and Ruth Frow's Working Class Movement Library on the Crescent and drive in convoy to Brown Brothers. Perhaps I'll have time to fill in the full history before long. But for now it's good enough to know that this started life as a Brewery in a Chapel Street, Trinity and Irwell Bank Brewery Land which included a cluster of others including Threlfalls, later Chesters, and Boddingtons itself.
"Brewer" rubbed shoulders with "Lawyer" and "Churchman" in the dominant historic professions of Chapel Street. Beer was later replaced with Jam, and later the Brown Brothers car parts business. Plans for a rag trade department store stalled and I bought the building for IDEA late in 1999 - sure a goodly grant would be along soon.
More than five years on the financial package is all but complete. There will be 21 luxury apartments in the tower and rising above the main roof. But inside will be a hive of Creativity and Technology as IDEAs become reality. Creche, gallery, cafe, and training space. But most of all a much needed jump start for creative businesses and training and work for local people.
We go in. Smell the sweet smell of a sequence of small fires. Kids torching artworks belonging to the Mekons' OOOH show (that's Out Of Our Heads), waves of rough sleepers keeping warm, and so on and so forth. A history of burning layered in the air.
Up to the roof. I take the white collar role of ideas and facilitation as Peter and Steve in blue collar clamber over the scaffolding and a particularly hairy fire escape to hang the Labour markers at one of the main junctions in the regional centre.
Six on the front in three columns and two neat rows - Peter is a painter and decorator as well as being a Labour NEC member and Amicus Official. Steve is usefully a Health and Safety expert.
The job done we head off in different directions for an evening on the knocker, finalising leaflet copy, rounding up volunteers.
We collect seven enormous Vote Labour boards from the meeting room at the back of Edmund and Ruth Frow's Working Class Movement Library on the Crescent and drive in convoy to Brown Brothers. Perhaps I'll have time to fill in the full history before long. But for now it's good enough to know that this started life as a Brewery in a Chapel Street, Trinity and Irwell Bank Brewery Land which included a cluster of others including Threlfalls, later Chesters, and Boddingtons itself.
"Brewer" rubbed shoulders with "Lawyer" and "Churchman" in the dominant historic professions of Chapel Street. Beer was later replaced with Jam, and later the Brown Brothers car parts business. Plans for a rag trade department store stalled and I bought the building for IDEA late in 1999 - sure a goodly grant would be along soon.
More than five years on the financial package is all but complete. There will be 21 luxury apartments in the tower and rising above the main roof. But inside will be a hive of Creativity and Technology as IDEAs become reality. Creche, gallery, cafe, and training space. But most of all a much needed jump start for creative businesses and training and work for local people.
We go in. Smell the sweet smell of a sequence of small fires. Kids torching artworks belonging to the Mekons' OOOH show (that's Out Of Our Heads), waves of rough sleepers keeping warm, and so on and so forth. A history of burning layered in the air.
Up to the roof. I take the white collar role of ideas and facilitation as Peter and Steve in blue collar clamber over the scaffolding and a particularly hairy fire escape to hang the Labour markers at one of the main junctions in the regional centre.
Six on the front in three columns and two neat rows - Peter is a painter and decorator as well as being a Labour NEC member and Amicus Official. Steve is usefully a Health and Safety expert.
The job done we head off in different directions for an evening on the knocker, finalising leaflet copy, rounding up volunteers.
posted by Chris Paul at 6:19 PM
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