Like most people I think that I walk a lot. The reality is that is the little I do is mostly functional; from door to car and car to door, from desk to shop floor and shop floor to desk or down to the shops and back. Walking for pleasure has been a little lost on me. I’ve have been up to Edale but it was with a cool bag for a picnic rather than a backpack for a days hike and I’d seriously consider taking golf up again rather than paying for a guided city walk – a two hour moving lecture by a self appointed expert.
But, there is
another way. A way that doesn’t involve
the banalities of a blue badge guide, a bag of clubs or muddy boots and
Gore-Tex (actually, being Manchester,
the Gore-Tex would actually be a reasonable idea). The Cornerhouse (the Arts / Film / Books
establishment on Oxford Road) commissioned a series of walks curated by the LRM
(Loiterer’s Resistance Movement) a “Manchester based collective of artists and
activists interested in psychogeography, public space and the hidden stories of
the city”. It seemed to offer an urban
ramble with play – an ideal way to spend a weekend afternoon.
There were three
walks: The Sensual City, “a guided tour which utilises
all your senses and explores Manchester through touching, tasting, looking,
listening and feeling”; The All Seeing City, a walk that “examines the
architecture of fear in the city and how we can banish it” and The Heart of the
City where “Explorers will search for the heart of the city and produce a
collaborative map of their findings”.
All
started with an introduction in the Annexe of the Cornerhouse; a lovely light
and airy room all bare wood and white walls which is, in fact, the only part of
the building that I like. Many love it’s
design; full length windows on Oxford Road that allow you to sit and watch the
world while drinking something for its overpriced bar but, to me, it is as much
about being seen rather than seeing. The
introduction was a brief history of psychogeography (it started in France with The Situationists
Internationale and finished when Ian Sinclair had made
enough money out of it) and went on to describe what would be happening that
afternoon. All was achieved in twenty
minutes and three slides.
The
dozen of so of us took to the streets to open up our senses. We walked towards the city centre along Oxford Road but
quickly diverted down past Felini’s restaurant onto the Rochdale
canal and back under Oxford Road. Here you could hear the roar of the water
running through a lock gate, feel the drop in temperature as you are shielded
from the sun and imagine how different this would feel underfoot if it where
not such a beautiful sunny day. We
turned around and walked along the canal in silence listening to a goose
landing on the water, the sound of a tram and the hubbub of people enjoying a
drink in the garden of the Rain Bar where we crossed over it went under Great
Bridgewater Street and up the steps to Bridgewater Hall to the touchstone.
We
stopped to reflect on smell and how it is linked to taste (think backs of
restaurants) and how the city is continually trying control it. As we approached the touchstone there was a
little girl sliding on it. Her dad told
us her mantra was “If it slides, it works” – not a bad one to have. The Italian Cararra marble stone is scratched
and marked despite being covered in an anti graffiti solution. If left long enough the city will always take
hold and make its mark.
We
wandered towards the new council building at 1 First Street, debating how welcoming it
was or wasn’t. With a walk such as this
your eyes refocus in ways you would not expect as buildings take on a new
perspective and you question why roads go a certain way. On the way back to the Cornerhouse we
stopped outside the Sailsbury pub underneath a ‘No Loitering’ sign. Too late, that’s what had been doing for the
past hour.
Back
in the Cornerhouse there were two tables laid out with bottles, and phials,
and pots full of a strange assortment of powders and liquids. It was all edible and the group of people
around one of tables tasted and smelt every thing (rosewater was not the
favourite. The table also contained
balls of play dough in a variety of bright colours and the instruction to mould
what ever took your fancy. It was the
other table, weighed down with similar wares that took the construction to
heart. There were bees, planes, canals
and buildings. It struck me as strange
that one group went straight for taste and the other for touch.
The
next walk took a similar route. We started
the same way but detoured onto Whitworth
Street via an alley that had a remarkable number
of CCTV cameras and we stopped at First
Street. We
were asked to imagine what the space would be like at night and how it would
make us feel. Would we be scared to walk here after dark? Is the lighting
sufficient? Are there shadows in which a predator could lurk? Does the presence
of CCTV make us feel safer? Does the absence of CCTV make us feel
vunerable? I was not expecting
this. I imagined a fear walk to be along
the lines of one of the Jack The Ripper walks you get in London’s
East End or the ghost walks in Edinburgh
but this was fear of the present, of the now and if measures to allay those
fears are counter productive and re-enforce them.
At
First Street
we split into small groups to play CCTV Bingo.
We were given a bingo card that, instead of numbers, had different types
of camera in the boxes. Some the types
were ‘a camera on a pole’, ‘three cameras facing the same way’ and ‘a camera
that looks like a space ship’. When you
spot your first camera you mark it on your card and walk in the direction the
camera is facing and stop when you reach the next one. This should be continued until the board is
complete. To date, no one has completed
it. This is not due to lack of cameras,
it is just that some of them are rarer than others. Three facing the same way
was the most popular in the part of town we found ourselves in (a collection of
new buildings opposite the council).
When we returned to the Cornerhouse there was a discussion on what made
you fearful (drunk people topped the list) write is down and banish them in a
bucket of fire. Unsurprisingly, the Cornerhouse were not too keen about having buckets of fire in there place so
we made do with a couple of smoke bombs and a cap gun on the balcony.
The
final walk was ‘The Heart Of The City’ and the temptation to sing the
Whitesnake song was great but, thankfully for all around me, one that I
resisted. There was no guided element to
this walk (maybe we could be trusted now to go out unsupervised) but we did
have to follow a map; a map with a heart drawn on it. Obviously there was a little licence involved
here; I mean you couldn’t go straight through a building could you? Well, the building happened to be a pub with
an entrance on two streets (like the Old Nags Head and Rising Sun) you could. There are an awful lot of alleys, passages
and back streets in Manchester
that also made keeping to the heart outline easier than I first thought would
be possible.
Ultimately
getting round the heart in the allotted time proved beyond us (and no, we didn’t
stop in any of the pubs). There were too
many interesting things, open doors and broken windows to look in, courses of
brickwork at strange heights you know the normal things you look for when out
for a city walk. We made it half way
around before having to head back to the Cornerhouse for a chat about where we
each felt the heart of the city was. We
were given a hand knitted heart with a label and a request to take it to your
favourite part of the city and photograph it.
As
I do not live in Manchester
and am only a frequent visitor, my view of the city is different to most others
(although, really, everybody’s view is different). It lies in place already gone, café Pop where
I first ate but also in the pubs were I have made many new friends and now the
streets as know that they are not just a means to travel to pre-determined
route but are places to explore and play
