Salford Quays

Snow showers and driving sleet.  Thin ice on the water of the dock.  A post-industrial bridge, vast, derelict, repainted, a web or a bird's nest of red girders in a grey sky - snow driving through it, redundant Cold War architecture, a bridge left behind by history; as if time has swept round it.  'My very own Tyne bridge,' said Paul.  

Echoes of Amsterdam in a side canal.  Sculpted trees and a cold grey light, a silver quality to the air, the black water.  An open expanse of softened, uneasy water.  Canoeists, geese, swans, coots.  Giant, distant hulk of Manchester United, the bright red of the nameboard the only colour in a drab waterscape.  Water dominates this space;   the buildings lower, the water wider.  

A war memorial to sailors lost from these walls, this cold water.  A ruffle of red poppies.  

An expected tide of old-time dock waste; dead plastic, tar-stained, saturated woods, oil-soaked, splintered; haunted by a pied wagtail, cold and sifting, a rag-picker bird.  

A rhythm of trees, the rattle of dry leaves, a syncopation of landscaping like a drum roll around the Lowry Outlet.  A charm of goldfinches clattering the trees, a rare warmth of birds, a richness of bird life.  

A giant stretch of white girder bridge, a tubular arm reaching through snow across cold water.  The vast Lowry plaza, full of Spanish mums and tottering Japanese tourists.  A silence of snow, gigantic folded buildings, a reminder of East European cold; the idea of cold itself.  Snow in the wind, a thickening like an ingredient in the sky, the cold, the afternoon.  A woman waving from a balcony of coloured lights, the day darkening, failing, the promise of tea.

And with the dark ('the fading' too English, too soft, too chiaroscuro) a different landscape emerges; a light-scape, a view of reflected lights and gleams on icy roads.  A landscape of reflection and warmth - a Bladerunner world of soft music, big glasses, slow moving cars, the illusion of bullet-proof; and ice, ice in the wind, silence and cold and balcony candle light.

with thanks to Paul and Ali 

Fron Bache

Llangollen in cool rain; a stone and red brick town, squeezed by steep wooded hills, so that the houses seem pushed to the river and the famous bridge seems like an arm from either side stretched across to stabilise the houses. The drizzle of water on old stone.

The first time I have driven here, the steep pull up out of the town to the graveyard at the top of the hill, yet a route familiar, brain-etched from a hundred visits; the English names fading as we turn from the guest houses lining the road to Plas Newydd onto the tiny road of Fron Bache, a sunny silent place of 1930s respectability, pebble-dashing and bay windows, the feeling of an endless afternoon. Dorothy and Gwynneth used to walk up here with the Llangollen family, Auntie Bessie and the boys, Arthur and Ernest and Glynne. The road is rough and feels more like a farm road, a hill-road, a rough Welsh hill man in town for the market; but now the modern houses are creeping up the side, Llangollen’s anywhere suburbs, modern raw houses on what was a shaggy, gloomy playing field, hill-fields, openness; as they were when Dorothy first walked up this lane, this slow spread of the town, a rural speed of encroachment; new houses have even swallowed the kink in the road where the family used to rest on the bench with the view back down the hill, the road lined with poppies and escaped garden flowers.

The cemetery on Fron Bache is on the hillside, the fron bache, corrupted, fading Welsh, next to an allotment, with a tumble of town roofs below it, the pinned curve of the permanent Eisteddfod stage, a harsh redbrick row of houses slammed unsympathetically into the hillside. And a wary ring of more new houses, pebble-dashed and hanging-basketed, a riot of Georgian lamps and security lights; but it is still a place of yews and damp grass, wild flowers and benign neglect. Ilid and Bessie’s gravestone has fallen over or been laid to rest, lead letters scattered, dates difficult to make out. Lost afternoons in the 1960s, family events, funerals, weddings, small parties; why was I here, asks Reg, did I come to… As if the dates only existed to support a funeral, a party, a birth.

Further down the hill, right at the last yew, the path uneven and overgrown, dotted with wildflowers, lie William Eyton Jones and his wife Janet, my grandparents, the Welsh grandfather I never knew; and his parents David and Ann, an English inscription despite their Welsh language, a fading of national identity behind a British mask. A peaceful quiet place, somewhere I have never seen another soul, a place of pheasants, silence, wild flowers, grasses, the distant steam whistle urgent from the railway.

Back in the town, a pattern of streets and awkward conversations with curious bystanders, an occupational hazard. Market Street and West Street, the undiscovered site of Cambrian Cottages; addresses for David Jones, my great-grandfather, this census migration through the town, a journey plotted at ten-yearly intervals. Decades walked through or past, addresses known and unknown; the history of streets, the shifts of buildings. Chapel Street in the 1870s, the tantalising possibility of ‘Oak Street’ in the 1840s; lunch in the Hand to take stock and curb our enthusiasm.

Llangollen Stories

The only certain address was 1 Berwyn Street, David Jones’ home and possibly his greengrocer’s shop. A family memory restored; this shop had been pointed out to Dorothy and Gwynneth long before by William Eyton, after the family had moved on, but the location had been forgotten. The recovery of story, even in some way possession. And still a shop, empty but refurbished, clean of association; impossible to imagine this Welsh family living and working here. Family history as less a journey of names and dates and more a search for houses, graves, commercial premises.

The only other certain address we did not revisit. Pen y Bedw, the house on Birch Street where Arthur Thomas used to live, my mother’s cousin. Even after retirement, Arthur used to cycle down from the house every morning at 4am to work in the newsagent’s shop snuggled into the belly of the Royal Hotel, where Nana Jones and Gwynneth used to stay. It is now a smart coffee shop with lightweight metal chairs outside, the illusion of Italy.

Saltney on the other hand was unknown territory, a land on no known map. A strange turn from a familiar roundabout near Chester and the road ran away with us, through suburbia of expected hotels and giant redbrick houses; but under the railway the land seemed to sink towards the unseen river, a place eternally curving towards the water. A place indeed born from the water, a place of reclaimed land, ground hard-won from marsh and water. A border town, a town not water and not land, a town bilingual in street name, unable to decide whether it was English or Welsh, land or water, or perhaps proud of being both. A poor town of straight roads and decades of Council building from the 1920s onwards, a town without focus, without heart, long streets of hard concrete buildings softened by occupation. Here we rejoined the Lewises, Joseph Lewis being born here in 1815; but there was nothing here from before the twentieth century, and we felt that above ground and in solid buildings the trail was cold.

Underground Walking: Bold Street Journey 2007

Rotting wall, broken glass foot-grill, Bold Street, 2007

An invitation to participate in FACT's Bold Street Project in 2007 resulted in a walk through the street's closed spaces with researcher Laura Yates.

Bold Street in warm sunshine and hard shadows. A piece of found text on my way to the railway station set the tone for the walk; WHAT WAS PAST IS NOW. A touchstone, a mantra, a remembered line for the exploration of dead bank vaults, a burned out church, the dressing rooms of a Georgian concert hall, the soft cellar of a car showroom long concreted into shopped oblivion. Gloomy capitals and refurbished shops, a parade of shops and changing tenants, the gentle subtleties of change over two centuries. I stood in the FACT reception space and looked at old slate roofs, higgledy-piggledy chimneys, windows into empty rooms and attic flats, cool spaces and dead spaces. The newness of street art, Metroscopes; civic furniture, in a new urban space, Ropewalks Square; the pomposity of explanation derided by SK8BD graffiti, club stickers, underground movements, pictures of a leering Tony Benn advertising a Socialist rally, a discussion of democracy or a club night stealing the clothes of revolution.

The journey was to be from top to bottom or bottom to top. The buildings that would give us access to their hidden spaces and unknown floors visited in series as if on a journey, as if paralleling the street we would smash our way from one building to the next through a hundred first floor rooms; empty store room, office, unexpected bedroom, night club, bar, clothes shop, bathroom, brothel, concert room, classroom, hairdressers’; to emerge panting on Berry Street in a cloud of dust and falling brick, still twenty feet above the ground. Walking, the reality is always different. We saw more pigeon-spattered smokers’ haunts than I had expected. Met more people with stories, stoked more interest in unexpected people, broke the work crust to find interest and warmth beneath.

We began in the massive banking hall and redundant vaults of a dead bank that still gets customers; fine wooden doors, rich tiling, high plaster coving. Edwardian dignity broken now into cubicles, workstations, seating areas. Sunlight through dusty glass impossible to clean behind grilles, bars, mesh, the abandoned security apparatus of a building that stored gold bullion. The vaults were heavy, old fashioned, solid solid. Impossibly heavy doors that swung at a finger’s touch and had bolts the thickness of a man’s arm, open now and used for storing files. And behind the vaults, a second skin, brick walls and exposed pipework grimly suggestive of gas chambers. Walls that seemed to grow and shift in their subterranean darkness. They left grey corridors narrowing to nothingness, swallowed brick staircases, made spaces too small for live people and created overlooked rooms full of 1950s accounts, trade descriptions and arrangements with newly free African states; this on a street named after the slave-trading family that owned the land. (Distant earth-memories in damp and gloom, earth-memories of fields and trees and hedge-boundaries, rope walks and country lanes on the edge of the town.) Pale brickwork grey with moss, like a man-made world at the bottom of the sea, a place of endless darkness and soft strange creatures. The first of our ghost stories, a myth sprung to scare the young female office clerks, an erotic frisson connected to darkness and unexpected presence. Or the need to familiarise and populate that dead darkness, those indifferent shifting walls.

Underground Walking 2

Staircase squashed by underground rooms

And then chance intervened, or the street decided we should see what we came to see. We took a chance and dived into Bar L1, that used to be Edward’s, that used to be Waterstone’s the bookshop, that used to be Macmillan’s nightclub, that used to be an exclusive clothes shop and a concert room. It was built from the 1770s, the earliest incarnation of the street, and sits on three sides of Bold Street, Concert Street (an unrelated echo of performance, this one commemorating outdoor music for the urban poor) and Wood Street. An iced wedding cake of a building, solid, square, punched windows crusted with sooty plasterwork. I was last in there when it was a bookshop, a quiet set of cream rooms lined with bookcases and collections of chairs, thoughtful emaciated readers and chubby girls in frayed jeans behind the counters. Today it is decorated like a jazzy gentleman’s club, a cross between deep leather elegance and glitter, a long sticky bar of granite resin. Upstairs the second floor of books had tall windows and was flooded with light like a piano nobile, a slower place than the ground floor, a place of reference books and classical music. It has become a 1980s club, a vivid swirl of a nightmare of epileptic glitter balls, electro-posters, drinks promotions, a giant’s causeway of platforms and raised dance floors under massive black walls. It felt as though, with difficulty, I had broken in to something that had slipped away through time, reclaimed a room that was no longer a part of my world, like revisiting the first house I lived in. But the elegant plaster ceiling has survived, painted a deep matt black, and the magnificent sweep of the staircase still takes dancers from the ground floor to the dance floor, as it always has. The tall windows are still there behind thick curtains, and the huge staircase windows, richly-painted rococo gold and orange swirls on great sweeps of leaded glass, have also survived; perhaps as garish to some as the glitter balls and 80s tat is to me. We were guided through a maze of rooms and staircases and corridors, bunches of keys and members of staff coming in the opposite direction. The last of our ghost stories, a woman called Mary alleged to haunt the upper floors; another myth of the upper floors occupied by prostitutes. Upstairs again to a tiny roof space, more pigeons and air-conditioning, and gazed up at walls towering another two floors above us. Hidden windows and unused roofs.

Underground Walking 3

Bank vault by flash, Bold Street

The street seems different once you start seeing its secret places; it feels tilted, insubstantial. Back on Bold Street we found a narrow Georgian corridor, surviving plasterwork and heavily repainted doorframes; a tilt to the building as if the ground had shifted, unsettling staircases and joints, realigning floorboards. A hairdresser’s shop above the street, a great invisible dome of glass leaping out into space above the pedestrians, a woman full of stories and untold ghosts. Yet more support and interest, yet more unexpected enthusiasm. And yet stopping to stare you become an object of curiosity, an oddity. Who stops and stares on city streets? Who examines kerbstones and metal grilles, flagstones and drainpipes? Mad men and poets, thieves, drunks, charlatans. Who stops and stares at those already stopped? Bored secretaries, office staff, lonely men in dark flats, invisible yet aware of our presence, our analysis, our disruption of the street’s lack of self-knowledge or awareness.

The magnificence of the Oxfam building, built as a car showroom with a gigantic lift that took cars from ground floor to basement and back up to showroom. The slow soft bounce of rubber on smooth concrete, the smell of upholstery and leather, walnut and teak, the gentle purr of gigantic engines. An incarnation of the street as a place of commerce, a place to sell; in this instance luxury cars. Impossible to imagine the gleam of Armstrong-Siddeleys and Bentleys and Rolls-Royces in these tight, functional underground rooms, cluttered with boxes of books and rails of clothes. Only the brightness and sense of purpose survive, the hard work, the invisible energies. And yet the new electricity substation, installed this year by hacking a hole in the floor above – how useful the old lift would have been – is one of a series on the street whose smooth energy flow seems constantly disrupted, by power cuts, unexpected fusings, the sudden plunge into darkness. Stories of hidden rivers, lost power sources, perhaps of the street’s energy lines, the pull from top to bottom. As if the installation of underground boxes to channel electricity had jolted older power lines out of synchronicity, out of balance, and the power cuts were a result of this; or even as if the street itself, woken Quatermass-like by the digging, resented the intrusion. But these bright functional cellars held no stories, no mystery.

Underground Walking 4

Bank vaults, Bold Street, Liverpool

The street after such encounters seemed bright, temporary and fragile, a plane between worlds; the reaching walls and the attics and the gloom beneath the flags, the hopeless glass blocks, windows in the pavement, to allow some light into vault and cellar, as if they could stem the darkness, civilise the sheer underneathness. Another bank, large windows and tall iron columns hammered into a showroom for cheap furniture; stern glances and the lemon faces – Laura’s phrase – of disapproval. The street seemed warmer after that chilly room.

The unexpected pleasure of St Luke’s church, the crowning glory of Bold Street, visible the entire length. I have written about the church and explored its history but have never been inside. On this sunny day it was opened to the public by an alternative dance and workshop group, who had researched old photographs and commissioned new artwork. These stood at the base of the walls like abandoned placards from a demonstration. The open space, once aisle and chancel and organ loft, dominated still by the soaring reach of the Gothic tower. The walls were tall, proud, naked; amalgams of brick and stone and charred wood, the occasional tablet still smoke-blackened after fifty years of city rain, the occasional piece of stained glass that survived the bombing, as if the only glass to survive had been that which crept into the smallest niches. And an angel, a rare clear image, a face unaware of the incendiary device, a face still singing praises to God, a face alone in the walls of glass and colour; perhaps the second of our ghosts. A strangely unLiverpool experience, the inside of the bombed-out church. More European, or a London thing; in either it would have been celebrated many years ago, opened to the public, planted as a garden, a celebration of peace; here it has been shut away for half a century as if we are ashamed of this event, this scar on our history, shut away like the mad child in the attic. On this mild and sunny day the ground was covered with slow wild flowers and creeping plants but the crunch of glass and dust beneath, the iron window frames kicked up easily by our boots, they seemed to suggest that the building was only just safe to revisit, safe to walk in again, that the ground had only just cooled and that the charred wood was still dangerous, that walls might still fall.