Before Storms
In the calm before Ciara, Dennis and Jorge, I managed to get out for walks around the edges of Manchester city centre and take a few photos. Click on the photo for the full gallery.
Salford
A couple of walks on the fringes
I started the month with a walk around the area close to Mayfield Depot, on what I think of as the Ancoats/Ardwick border. Lots of interesting stuff, and I finally found the location of Dirt Factory, where I plan to throw bikes around some day soon.
My next wander was closer to home, and more of a hunt for something specific. I watched a couple of episodes of car customising programme Goblin Works Garage, and kept seeing the Beetham Tower in exterior shots. So I went for an explore in street view, but couldn’t find the exact location of their workshop. Until one of the shots showed ‘Pendleton Cooperative Industrial Society’ carved into the bricks of their neighbours. The building was less than a kilometre from where I live, so I went and visited at lunch time, and got some shots of the neighbourhood.
Vote me!
I’m standing for council in May’s elections. Today, I collected the necessary signatures to register. Then Wendy and I stopped to make short videos. Here’s the first of them.
The Death of Ye Olde Nelson
Ye Olde Nelson closed before I moved to Salford, and was already in a poor state when I started walking past it on the way to work. Now, it’s being pulled down, and I’m taking pictures every time I go past, a sort of disjointed timelapse of its disappearance.
They’re knocking down my walk to work
It was confirmed last week that the Black Horse would be demolished to make way for expensive flats, and now it’s certain that Ye Olde Nelson is going as well.
I moved to Salford just over two and a half years ago, around the same time as work on the Chapel Street renovation started. My walk to work takes me along the Crescent and Chapel Street, and I’ve seen various buildings disappear. Some of them were nondescript seventies boxes, but others were more characterful. Now two of the more interesting remaining buildings are set to be pulled down. Shame.
Source: SALFORD LISTED YE OLDE NELSON PUB NEXT FOR DEMOLITION – Salford Star – with attitude & love xxx
More planning shenanigans in Salford
The Salford Star is doing good work digging the dirt on suspect planning decisions coming out of Salford Council. It seems that one man is arbitrarily giving the nod to applications and waving them through with minimal charges.
The developers should be paying the council for the extra costs of traffic and infrastructure requirements arising from their buildings. But they’re having them waived or seriously reduced by claiming these payments would make their plans financially unviable. It seems to me that we Council Tax payers are subsidising their money making schemes, taking money away from the services we should be getting.
Source: PLANNING DEMOCRACY DIES IN SALFORD – Salford Star – with attitude & love xxx
Bye bye Black Horse?
I walk past the Black Horse every time I head into Manchester. It’s not in a good state, and really needs and deserves refurbishment.
What it doesn’t deserve is to be knocked down for bland, expensive flats, which is what could be happening.
Vote (and fund) Wendy Olsen for Salford mayor
I did the titles and some other bits of work on this. It’s not bad for something shot on a phone. Future videos will be flashier still, as I learn new tricks.
The crowdfunder for Wendy’s campaign is at www.crowdfunder.co.uk/salford-green-party-mayoral-candidate.
A wander around post-flood Salford
Two days after the Boxing Day floods, I decided to take a quick look at the aftermath along a short stretch of the Irwell.
I started out in Peel Park, which is now Peel Pond.
The geese were enjoying the children’s play ground.
You’ve got to wonder what the flood has done to the asking price of these new builds.
Debris caught in the railings gives an indication of how high the water got.
An even bigger piece of debris still hooked onto the bridge.
Gunky silt coats the road where the water topped the bank.
Positive thoughts. Though this was on a building a way uphill from where the river had overflowed.
RIP The Mark Addy? It’s hard to see from this angle, but the silt/sand was piled up quite deep.
Water level at points along the Irwell were reported as the highest since monitoring began in the 1930s. I’d like to know if this December has been a record breaker for rainfall, or if some other factors contributed to the floods. There are still a few more months of winter to go, as well, so we might be seeing more flood damage yet.
The collapse of the Biospheric Foundation
I visited the Biospheric Foundation a couple of times during the 2013 Manchester International Festival. It was an interesting project, taking first steps towards a self contained urban farm.
Sadly, it has gone bust, with over £100,000 in debts and tales of bad behaviour and rotten business practices from people who worked with it.
It’s a terrible shame, and it’s likely to put people off funding similar projects, which just makes it worse.
Photos from October 2015
I’ve not been keeping on top of the photos I’ve taken this month, so here’s a bunch of them, almost all taken on my phone whilst I was out and about.
Disrupt
When I’m earning enough (buy my books!) I’m going to donate to causes like Reclaim. Its Disruptive Leaders initiative is playing the long game against the corruption of wealth and patronage that gave us the current bunch of immoral idiots ruining the country. It’ll take a lot of years to have an effect, so it’s good they’ve started already.
A wheeled wander past some Solstice locations
2015 isn’t likely to give us many more days as nice as today. So I got on the bike and went for a little ride- something I’ve consistently failed to do this year.
I followed a route I took several times last year- down to the Irwell, then upstream a way, freestyling the exact route on the many tracks available. If you’ve read Solstice, the weir above is the spot where the first body is found. In the story, it’s June, and the river is lower than this.
(If you haven’t read Solstice, you can get it from Amazon, Smashwords and several other online shops.)
This rather lovely location is just over two and a half miles from where I live. Two and a half miles in the other direction is Manchester city centre.
At one point, the track got a little crazy. Lacking Boudicca style scythes on the bike, I worked a little way back and crossed the river on an old canal bridge nerby.
Having taken a photo of the weir where the body was found, I had to make it far enough upstream to get a shot of the location of the first murder, and opening scene, of Solstice. This track runs under the M60. I turned around and headed back along trails I didn’t discover last year. The ride was just under ten miles long. I did much longer ones last year when I was in the habit of heading out for a random ride most weeks. I need to get on my bike more often.
Buile Hill Park hothouse
Earlier this year, I shared a few photos from a wander around my council ward- Langworthy.
Amongst the buildings I took photos of was the skeleton of a large, wood framed greenhouse. I vowed to go back and try to get closer to take more photos, but haven’t managed to do so yet.
While filming an archeological dig, SalfordOnline.com was shocked to discover the skeletal remains of the once-grand Buile Hill Park hothouse in Salford.
Source: Watch: Salford’s Buile Hill Park hothouse abandoned to the elements – SalfordOnline.com
Broardwalk?
“Is it Boardwalk or Broadwalk?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Let’s hedge our bets….”
Manchester Airshow – 5th July 2015
A date for the diary. It’s going to be at Barton Aerodrome (or City Airport, as it likes to be known), which is only a few miles down the road from me.
May Day Parade
I joined other Greens, union members and left wing types for a little march from Salford to Piccadilly Gardens yesterday to mark May Day.
An architectural wander around Langworthy 1
I went for a wander around the local area this afternoon to chat with some Green Party supporters. On the way, I found some interesting little corners of the ward.
Chaseley Road has this rather impressive gate at one end, which is a neat way to control traffic flow. I didn’t see if there was a matching one at the other end of the street, because I wandered down a little path towards some green space.
Where I found this. It’s the Salford Astronomical Societies Observatory. Not quite as cool as the observatory on top of the UMIST main building, but still quite a neat find.
Down the hill some more, I came to Buile Hill Park. When I worked in Irlams O’ The Heights, I’d cycle past the park on my commute, but never bothered going in. There was Buile Hill Hall itself, which I’ll have to go back and get photos of one day, and this impressive skeleton of a wood framed greenhouse.
It’s part of the Buile Hill Park Training and Garden Centre, and I think I can get closer shots if I visit some day when the centre is open, so that’s another reason to head back soonish.
Not from today’s wander, but I found this little bit of art adjustment in Chimney Pot Park on a similar jaunt on Friday.
She loves me, she loves me not
This is the most complete flower head of a number on railings along the Crescent by the University. Generations of students taking metal petals as mementos, perhaps.
Signs of the times
Thorn court, which is on my walk to work, is getting a major refurbishment. The hoardings have gone up and the scaffolding is rising. To make it a bit less imposing, there’s some decoration been added to the hoardings, in the shape of faux posters for the theatre that used to stand on the spot, stencil cut graffiti of famous Salfordians (I can only recognise three of them, any hints who they all are) and some wonderfully silly warning signs. I’m not sure about the signs, but the posters and mug shots look like they were commissioned by the developers. Better than the sexist billboard outside the Malmaison, for certain. The full gallery is below.