Beneath the Arches: Re-appropriating the Spaces of Infrastructure in Manchester (Ph.D. Thesis, 2014) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Area, 2010
The built heritage of most cities is heterogeneous, hybrid and multiple. However, certain heritage objects and meanings are invariably privileged over others in place-making strategies. In this paper we are interested in the production of local heritage and design discourses and their impact on the regulation of conservation and change in the built environment. Using the example of the legacy of post-war (i.e. 1950s and 1960s) modernist development in Manchester, England, the paper explores the performative work of place narratives in conservation policy. The contested heritage value of post-war modernist development in the UK is particularly relevant, given the difficulties posed by aspects of 1950s and 1960s design set against increased pressures for conservation. Accordingly, the conservation of aspects of 1950s/1960s urbanism can be fiercely resisted by urban leaders. Empirically, we examine the ways in which post-war heritage has been selectively incorporated into the dominant design and heritage narratives of the city of Manchester. Looking beyond Manchester, the paper contributes to conceptual debates about the situated politics of heritage and the institutional work performed by heritage discourse.
London’s skyline is changing significantly with a new generation of iconic buildings, of which the Swiss-Re Tower is the most well known. Despite the fact that many of these buildings are located in the City (London’s financial heart), little attention has been paid to the relationship between the transformation of London’s skyline and the recent institutional reconfiguration of the Corporation of London, the authority that runs the City. Focusing empirically on the City’s iconic architecture, and foregrounding a period of institutional crisis for the Corporation (1970–1990), the paper: first, departs from the standard analysis of iconic buildings as signifiers of economic success, and sketches a framework for examining the role of iconic architecture during moments of crisis and, second, offers a new approach to understanding the City’s iconic commissions: not as signifiers of London’s international economic power, but as symptoms of changes in the institutions and élites that promote the City’s new urbanity. The article details how the internationalisation of London’s economy after the 1970s challenged the Corporation’s insular character. The Corporation’s resistance to the ‘invasion’ of foreign companies, people and architectural styles in the City in the midst of a rapid expansion of London’s economy and growing inter-urban competition, led to open threats from the government for the abolition of the Corporation. Responding to these threats, the Corporation reinvented itself with an institutional reform and re-branded its identity in the early 2000s as an outward-looking institution, open to London’s new transnational élites. The 2002 Unitary Development Plan that introduced a new architectural language in the City corresponds to the same need to construct a new imaginary identity for a re-branded Corporation. Towering over the City’s traditional signifiers, the City’s new buildings constitute an ode to the Corporation’s new identity and a visual coup d’état against its time-old heritage-oriented planning.
Wrecking London’s Skyline? A political critique of how the city is viewed
City, 2017
How can we develop a political critique of urban form at the time of a tall building boom? Pointing to limitations of interpreting towers as representations of finance and power, I introduce an understanding of skylines as phantasmagoria of capitalist culture: a dazzling image that abstracts from the commodified urban landscape by promoting its further commodification. I show that both professionals who argue for and those who argue against the construction of tall office buildings in London approach the city’s ‘new skyline’ as an easily marketable visual reproduction that is defined as a compositional whole: a bounded composition with St Paul’s Cathedral at its centre. I claim that this approach and the widespread idea that commercial skyscrapers ‘destroy’ the historic cityscape assume an element of integrity that is ideological and which itself must be ‘ruined’. My argument for a shift of the ways in which cityscapes are viewed draws on Walter Benjamin’s critical montages and allegories. I explore his reading of ruins as emblems of the fragility and destructiveness of capitalist culture and his understanding of ruination as a form of critique. My argument for ruining the cityscape’s ‘beautiful appearance’ focuses on compositional wholeness and symbolic coherence. In so doing, I provide an interpretation of skylines that sheds light to the ways in which financial capitalism is justified by a specific way of viewing the city and the ways in which it is embedded in texts that are deemed to be socially meaningful.
Doctoral thesis, 2020
Built in 1830, Liverpool Road Station is the oldest extant passenger railway station in the world. For this reason, the Station was preserved and transformed into a science and industry museum in the early 1980s. Yet, the ‘oldest station’ story, perpetuated in the collective memories of local and national interest groups, has led to the neglect of other significant stories of this space of industrial heritage. The passenger service only operated for fourteen years, whilst the Station transported freight continuously for 145 years. Although strikingly visible in physical scale, freight infrastructure has been consistently invisible in responses to the Station across its history and in research, despite ultimately providing most of today’s museum spaces. Inspired by Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux des mémoires, I consider the 1830 portion of the Station as a site of memory, where a break with the past has fixed a narrow set of memories to this place. I demonstrate how commemoration embedded at industrial heritage sites can limit our understanding of their past. Popular narratives of place are essential in galvanising preservation, yet, their persistence disguises layers of urban memory. Treatment of the freight structures in museum interpretation is inconsistent, from the oldest, 1830 Warehouse, presented so that galleries bear some relation to its history to the 1882 New Warehouse, treated as merely accommodation for galleries. A focus for explanation is how and why the museum developed as a traditional science museum with science centre elements, despite occupying a site with the hallmarks of a living history or transport museum. I particularly highlight the intellectual influence of the original iteration of the museum, the North Western Museum of Science and Industry. Firstly, I establish how the Manchester terminus was memorialised between the nineteenth century and 1930s, showing commemoration was initially focused on the individual, George Stephenson, then locomotives and passenger railway ‘relics’, and only gradually associated with the Station itself. I suggest the Station can be considered materially a site of memory by the 1930 Liverpool and Manchester Railway Centenary. I then demonstrate what can be gained from researching the freight period, from tracing forgotten innovations and uncovering more typical aspects of the Station to its role in Campfield, a neighbourhood with diverse working class culture characterised by the civic elite as prone to ‘nuisance’. This provides fresh perspectives on Manchester’s urban history, such as the Railway’s role in the municipalisation of Campfield. Finally, drawing on previous findings on commemoration and freight uses, I show how the museum came to develop its complex site narrative as visions for North Western industrial heritage and science galleries were awkwardly combined with railway priorities. As a collaborative doctoral student, I advised the current Museum, therefore interpretation proposals appear in Appendix A, aimed at remedying the longstanding disconnect between historic buildings and gallery spaces.
Preston Bus Station: heritage, regeneration, and resistance.
Since 2000 Preston Bus Station has twice been threatened with demolition as part of proposed regeneration schemes in the city. Both times there has been sustained public resistance against its destruction. Based on interviews and participant observation, the research on which this paper draws asked why a formerly unloved and unprotected example of Brutalist 1960s architecture has become a public icon. The paper identifies and explores the diverse range and significance of peoples’ articulations and actions — ranging from the local to global; from economic argument to affective and embodied interventions. These articulations are often non-expert, diffuse, expressed within social networks, as well as in inventive performative actions. Such activity has tacitly and productively blurred together forming an assemblage of disparate agents and agency which represents a fresh public re-evaluation and democratisation of the building’s value, in addition to rejecting the building’s planned demise. More broadly we suggest that this ‘non-‘ or ‘tacit’ campaign also contests prevalent investment-driven urban regeneration and articulates different possibilities for public interventions in urban space and processes of redevelopment.