1832 was the year which the asiatic cholera pandemic, at the time simply the second pandemic, reached the uk. the disease swept through cities indiscriminately, decimating east london, manchester, swathes of nottingham and sheffield to focus on but a few. around 22,000 died across the country, of whom 402 were buried in the cholera pit in the norfolk park area of sheffield, just off from park hill. the disease reached the city in july of 1832, and was considered somewhat under control by november; reportedly the dispensery at sheffield university issued over 3500 leeches that year, against a normal figure of around 100.

by 1834 construction had begun on this monument to the dead, financed in part by sales of models of the sculpture, and also with the support of the duke of norfolk. the monument itself was completed in 1835, with the gardens around it following in 1850. by 1930 the norfolk estate had handed the grounds over to the city, and the monument has since been struck by lightning, seen its top scattered around the gardens by the weather, been rebuilt and grade II listed, alongside a green flag for the park.

this was my first walk up to this area of the city, looking out across sheffield from a brand new perspective. this is going to keep happening, as i discover new ways of viewing a city which i now call home. coming down through the city i crossed the train station bridge, which is under threat as a public access route thanks to the lovely folks at east midlands trains, and came out at the base of the steel steps which rise up to park hill.  carrying on up and to the right, you follow signs for the memorial, and after a brief wrong turn reach a real haven on tranquility within five minutes of the city centre.

this is the kind of place that i always bemoaned the lack of in manchester city centre, an area of green, quiet, contemplation, and no sign at all of offices, fast food, pedestrian crossings or chuggers. the memorial grounds lead off a quiet residential street, which by the bye has some beautiful tudor style villas on it, and once through the gate you are drawn straight through the park towards the monument. the die straight path, and trees on either side, work brilliantly to accentuate the monument, which appears to be rising up from just below the level of the path – a really nice piece of planning from those who put the grounds together nearly 200 years ago.

the pevsner guide to sheffield sums the monument up as ‘an earth-bound gothic pinnacle or spire,’ with the man himself suggesting it as a gothicist’s obelisk. in fact, there are probably a few links that can be drawn between the cholera monument and darwen tower, the rocket-esque beacon that looks over east lancashire. much as darwen tower is currently lacking it’s nose-cone (nb – it was actually replaced only two days ago!), the cholera monument was only restored to past/current glories in 2005.

alongside the great views of the monument itself, this spot is a fantastic spot to take in the geography of sheffield city centre, and acknowledge just how dominated by the hills around it the city really is. in every direction from here you can see the land rising above the city, and on a crisp cold january afternoon it looked stunning. with just the sound of birdsong, and the odd rumble of a tram, this was as far from life in a city centre as i’ve found thus far in sheffield, and way more than anything i ever found in manchester. the city of hills is starting to show her cards a bit…

yet recently i have started to explore what it is about fiction writing i did/do still enjoy. my little brown moleskin of writing has seen a few fleeting glimpse of events or situations hitting the page which have come mainly from my head. last week i sat down, and it happened; for three or four days preceding this i couldn’t get the first few lines out of my head, so i wanted to commit them to paper, but i certainly didn’t expect what happened next. the words kept coming, all of a sudden the situation had an atmosphere, and then there was movement – a story was starting to emerge on the page.

reading it back i realised that the story i had produced was looking a lot like the photographs which i tend to take. i’ve never been one for capturing people and/or places in my photos, and more likely than not they will contain a vast expanse of sky. here are a few examples which have been on this blog before as proof…

on reading back ‘the dam,’ the piece which i had produced, i found that it was full of sky. even at this stage i’m not really sure how many characters there are in the story, but it is quite clear that a moment, an event, has been captured. i’ve found that on my return to fiction writing i have done more to create a sense of place and atmosphere than build personnel, probably not that much of a surprise given the characters who forced this pen down in the first place.

an interesting start to the year, and possibly the start to a new adventure. alongside starting to re-wander down this path, i have been speaking to some other creative types whose work i really admire about their process, so hopefully this recently discovered vein of inspiration will continue to bring forth the goods.

rachel goodyear, yorkshire sculpture park

wanderers - rachel goodyear

this is easily one of the most beautiful things i have seen this year. goodyear’s drawings are somewhere between mundane and macabre, creating a world inhabited by mostly animalistic characters living lives somewhere between love, death and pain. her simple-looking drawings contain such a sense of atmosphere, which is heightened even more by the small sculptural pieces which see her drawings sliding off the page and into the three dimensional world. i can’t put into words how much i enjoyed this exhibition, which you can still see until the third of january.

dark matters, whitworth art gallery

hiroshima flowers - elin o'hara slavick

i have always enjoyed visiting the whitworth, so upon coming back to manchester for a weekend recently it was always high on my list of things to do. i’m really glad that i did get up early on a monday morning to see dark matters, an exhibition bringing together the work of ten artists dealing with themes of shadow, darkness and wonder. i was particularly taken by how well the different media of this display fitted together, from daniel rozin’s interactive pieces through two stunning videos from r. luke dubois and hiraki sawa. for me the most impact came from elin o’hara slavick’s series of cyanotopes featuring objects left over from the debris of hiroshima – a powerful sense of what shadow can mean. once again, you can catch this at the start of 2012, it is still on until 15th january.

adolphe valette: a pioneer of impressionism in manchester, the lowry

manchester ship canal, adolphe valette

i love valette. i have done since the first time i saw his work in manchester art gallery the first time i went in there years ago. this exhibition brought together work from across his career, delving further than the usual ‘manchesterscapes’ which meant so much to me. this was a very well put together show, with a great flow to it around the gallery spaces. ok, so at points it made a bit too much of a point about valette being one of lowry’s art teachers, but you can hardly blame them. a fantastic collection of work from one of my favourite artists – must see. oh, and this one is still on next month too, till the end of january.

kid acne: kill your darlings, millennium gallery

stick to the plan, kid acne

i went to this expecting to enjoy it, but get that ‘ohimanindieboylookingaturbanartimabitoutofmydepthhere’ feeling. which i didn’t get at all. kid acne is sheffield’s foremost urban artist, and his work has a really dark edge which chimed perfectly for me. alongside photographs of his large scale outdoor work, this exhibition saw kid acne’s stabby women leap off the page and into film and installations in the gallery space. a small but perfectly captured show, and a fantastic introduction to my new city.

lucy crouch, westgate studios

lucy crouch

i’ve never really known any artists that well before, so this year is the first time that i’ve seen someone going through the process of putting their heart and soul into a collection of work for all to see. i’ve known enough musicians to understand the emotions folks go through, but seeing my good friend lucy putting this exhibition together felt different to that. it was a bloody brilliant show too. lucy’s work captures a real sense of trace, with fractured globes and memories of trees offering a story of a moment in time which may or may not lost to the ether. inspirational stuff for me, and i was really proud of her.

darrell viner: early work, henry moore institute

computer drawing, darrell viner

this was a real unexpected treat. i had never visited the henry moore institute before, so felt like i should give it a go. having been left a touch underwhelmed by the mario merz exhibition, i stumbled upon this display of viner’s experimental voyages into computer based art. as with crouch, viner creates a sense of trace which i really enjoyed. not an artist i knew anything about, but really glad to have discovered.

the hepworth wakefield

mother and child, barbara hepworth

and finally, the place that has seen me really developing my arty side. having been working at the hepworth since april, i have become quite used to spending the day with some of the most brilliant art around; sometimes you need a jolt to remind you of just how great this is. i got said jolt last week, watching the culture show’s end of year review that included the gallery as one of the highlights of the art world in 2011. the place that i work, every day, is one of the bbc’s highlights of the year. this kind of swept away the snowblindness a bit for me, and left me felling really proud. if you haven’t visited yet, i can’t recommend the hepworth enough. galleries 3 and 6 are so inspiring, and i can’t wait for our spring exhibitions which open in february, promising some post-apocalyptic views of the future – really exciting stuff.

for those who don’t know anything about the building, park hill was built over 1957-61, and replaced masses of sheffield’s inadequate social housing. the massive estate, designed by the city architects jack lynn and ivor smith, moved whole communities into its ‘streets in the sky’ – walkways in front of flats that were famously big enough to drive a milk float down. here was the epitomy of brutalist architecture, with some incredible details such as the orientation of every one of the around a thousand flats planned to maximise sunlight. yet it wasn’t just architectural rhetoric, park hill had shops, pubs, a school – it had community. over time this, and parts of the building, appeared to crumble. yet unlike the crescents in hulme, park hill stood up defiantly, up to the point in 1998 when the concrete shell of the building was granted grade II* listed status, making it the largest listed building in europe.

so here we are. i went to a talk at park hill tonight by the chap who has been project manager of the refurb for urban splash since they started to put ideas together six years ago. it was the first time that i had been up close to the estate, and was really taken aback by the sheer scale of the place. i’ve read loads about it, and have seen it from afar, but nothing quite prepares you for both the height and length of the place. which reminds me, i’ve not waxed lyrical about the different heights of the block. at one end park hill is a 13 story building, but a the other end it is just 4, yet if you look at the building the roofline is absoloutely flat right the way across. i tested this theory by trying to balance my phone across the top of it when looking across the whole estate, and it worked. an absolutely stunning architectural achievement.

back to the talk. urban splash seem to have put a lot of thought into what they see park hill as, and where they see it being positioned. as anyone who knows the style of project which they work on in manchester will know, urban splash quite often talk a good talk about social housing, but are very very good at selling fancy apartments to young professionals. which is exactly what they are doing here. one of the finest pieces of social housing design in the country is being converted into aspirational flats which the likes of me are supposed to be snapping up. indeed, they are being snapped up – they shifted five on the first day of opening to the public on saturday.

with the approval of english heritage, the developers have knocked down all but the concrete struts of the first phase of their refurbishment, and replaced the old flats with new apartments which match the needs of a ‘new set of social dynamics.’ gone are the original three levels of brick which signified the different levels of homes between the ‘streets’; in are bigger windows (a massive positive) and some fucking horrific day glow panels (a massive negative). the streets in the sky, which were always open to public access, are now there for residents only, as part of a new access control to the building. the decks had been seen as one of the main negatives of 1980s park hill, as clear escape routes for criminals; yet no-one has tried to close roads in any other part of the world – surely they are the clearest escape route for those on the rob?

what about the flats themselves? i got to have a poke around the showflats, and was impressed by the building, underwhelmed by the apartments. the views out across sheffield from one side, and the rest of park hill on the other, are simply stunning. as a man with problems with heights i was a bit shocked at quite how much i was dashing out onto the balconies to stare out across my new homeland. so, views good. i also really liked the touch of leaving bare concrete on show in all of the apartments, with the integrity of the building shouting out against the newness of other bits. yet seeing the concrete on show did make me feel a bit like i was in a park hill theme park, as that surely wasn’t/isn’t the case in the original flats? we’ll say that the concrete is good though.

what about the negatives? well, all three of the different designs i looked round felt a bit pokey. the use of the orignal park hill idea of split level ‘flats’ still worked, yet there was barely any room for things. all the rooms felt like they would be fine as they were, but there was no storage. anywhere. are urban splash looking to market park hill specifically at people who don’t own books, or records, or clothes, or just stuff in general. oh, and don’t even get me started on the marketing. in one of the showflats was a clothes rail with aspirational tshirts (yes, aspirational tshirts), whilst the twisting of a piece of graffiti which resulted in a woman turning a man down is now being used as a bullshit rhetoric about how if sheffield loves park hill then park hill will love it back. at least someone in the urban splash team has a sarcastic bone in their body, a copy of owen hatherley’s new ruins was out in one of the show flats…

so i left park hill feeling pretty similar to how i entered. i love the building. it is an absolutely stunning piece of design and engineering (even if a certain sheffield band once called into question the integrity of the building in the face of a thousand orgasms), dealing with the topography of its location and makes the most of it. i’m still undecided about the refurb. park hill was in need of some tlc, well in fact a lot of tlc. urban splash-ing the place means that it is gaining a new life, and that people are going to go on living in it. this is obviously a good thing, as a building as impressive and important as park hill should still be in use.

yet surely it should still be in use as social housing, rather than pushing out council tenants and communities in favour of young professional types. i can’t claim to be anywhere near an expert on this, but it just still seems to be going against the reason that park hill was built in the first place. i know that urban splash are making an effort to include social housing, 26 of the flats in the first phase of 78 are available for part-ownership. i think this one is going to rumble on in my head. the one thing that i am certain of is that park hill is really impressive.

further reading

guardian report on re-opening
observer review of the new park hill
owen hatherley on the social housing repercussions of the new park hill 

this was the first weekend i’ve had off from doing anything since moving to sheffield, no thoughts about work to do on the house or anything like that. so, following a quick trip to a popular high street book seller to pick up the ordance survey map that covers the bit of the peaks not included on the one used for getting around edale, it was time to jump on the train from sheffield to grindleford. whereas manchester to edale takes 40 minutes at the other end of this train line, sheffield to grindleford is a short hop of 15 minutes via the totley tunnel, which is the second longest inland railway tunnel in the uk.

enough of the train ride. from the sleepy railway platform, the map led us up the hill, through an amazing old forest. the trees had this wistful air of longevity to them, and as if to prove that they were somehow better than me one of the oak trees lobbed an acorn at my head. there were some lovely bits of stonework, which i honestly couldn’t tell you whether they were natural or man made. the path for example, not the faintest idea how long it had been there, or indeed if the rocks were there first and a path second. needless to say, the national trust appeared to be doing a cracking job of looking after padley gorge.

once out of the forest, we hit what appeared to be picnic point. families chucking around flyaways, hipsters in their toms, the works. it was dead nice, but not where we were planning on stopping for our lunch. no, more hard work required first. more good nt work was seen at the longshaw estate, from where the map continued taking us up the hill towards wooden pole. which was a wooden pole, quite a good name actually…

from wooden pole, with it’s ominous looking crow (which flew away from atop the pole as i got my camera out) and confused looking sheep, it was off to totley moor, and a walk over the top of a ridge which pretty much followed the route of the afore mentioned railway tunnel. this moor offered the kind of desolation that reminded me a fair bit of hiking in peru (which at the time i did comment on the fact it looked a lot like yorkshire). a quick lunch stop, accompanied by an inquisitive/confused sheep wandering around in the background, offered a view down the city of sheffield in the distance. this was the first time that i could really quantify just how close to home i actually was, whilst being in the middle of nowhere. i get the feeling that this access to the countryside is going to more and more become one of my favourite things about moving to sheffield.

onwards and downwards, after lunch there was only one aim. well two in fact, given that i’d already decided that the pint of shandy would definitely need a pint of ale to back it up pretty swiftly. an hour or so later we came out at the cricket inn in totley, which was the perfect place to be on a late summer’s afternoon. in fact, so good was the experience here that i was back in the pub for lunch this afternoon – they have amazing food to go with the excellent selection of thornbridge ales. of particular note beer-wise was the thornbridge brown rabbit, which was surprisingly crisp for an autumnal beer. pretty apt actually, given the weather.

that said, i’m really quite happy with the piece i’ve written, in pursuit of space… i feel like i have introduced a lot of ideas that i’ve been trying to get to grips with for a while to do with notions of space and energy, and placed them into cultural contexts that haven’t come up that often in anything i’ve been reading recently. it has also helped that some of the people i am exhibiting with have been nothing short of amazing, and made me feel like what i’m doing does fit into this show, for which i am hugely grateful.

whilst i’m at home in an art gallery, which i bloody well should be by now as i’m working in one day in day out, being the one whose work people are going there to see is a whole new concept to me. i guess with writing it has always been that i produce a zine or a blog, then it goes out into the world and lives a life. with this i feel very aware that it has my name slapped on it.

anyhow, if you haven’t been over to the hepworth wakefield, the gallery that i’m working at these days, then i suggest you do so over the next 5 days. come to see the gallery, then head one minute round the corner to navigation warehouse for the interior lightning exhibition. it is a real pleasure, and indeed honour, to be involved in this show, and to have my work alongside some of the fantastic pieces which are on display.

this post is in some ways a little premature, as world book night isn’t until april. the basic premiss of the event is that enthusiastic readers can nominate their favourite books, and on world book night some of them get sent a box of specially printed up editions of one of their favourites to ‘distribute.’ they gave away 40,000 books this year, and seem to be upping their coverage to 1 million books for 2012. i was working at cornerhouse on the night earlier this year, and one of the people in manchester was just working their way around their favourite places and hiding copies, dropping them off for strangers to pick up and share in the joy of a book they cared enough about to nominate.

well, the nominations for this year’s event close at the end of august. i think i’ve just finalised my top ten books which i think should be on everyone’s reading lists. there are some in there which i’m pretty sure most people will already know, and a couple which i feel are really unappreciated by a lot of people. i would heartily recommend that you take a few moments over the next couple of days and log onto the site and nominate your favourites.

twitter – @worldbooknight

if anything was going to force me to start thinking again it was always going to be manchester international festival. i love mif. for a few weeks over the summer manchester becomes the most important arts destination in the world, and mif2011 has upped the game onces again. thus far i have seen damon albarn’s new opera dr.dee, bjork’s stunning multi sensory show biophilia, artangel’s projections exhitbition, lavinia greenlaw’s audio obscura and john gerrard’s infinite freedom exercise. i will also be heading to mediacity to run around like a kid at crash of the elysium, calm down (well, maybe not actually) with wagner’s die walkure and swoon over paul heaton’s poetic popsong the 8th. plus loads of other stuff. oh, and i’m djing at the festival pavilion too (*cough* monday 11th july, come say hello *cough*).

i have decided to keep a sketch book of my mif movements this year. inspired by the creative environment i am now working in, and by a spongelike acquisition of some kind of drawing confidence due to working with people who really can do it, i have tasked myself with keeping a visual rather than written diary. this is a step into the unknown for me. i’m a writer, not an artists. i’ve never been able to draw. my mum has always made fun of the fact that whenever i draw people they have one fat leg and one thin leg. we shall see what happens.

here is a link to the flickr set which i will be updating over the course of the festival. let me know what you think, and indeed what you have seen/done at mif this time round.

the thing is, all of this actually ignores the best park in the city centre. parsonage gardens is a little hidden gem in the city centre, and quite a lot of people either don’t know it exist, or have heard about it but never seen it. well, here it is, one street over from deansgate. the gardens have existed in roughly this form since 1897, though there are records of activity on this site just following the norman conquest in 1066. since 1985 the gardens have been part of a designated conservation area which reaches from deansgate down to the irwell.

the gardens themselves are a lovely space. i wandered down to parsonage gardens on thursday this week, the day that spring appeared to pop its head around the corner and check whether we were ready for it yet – and this little piece of calm in the city centre was certainly looking good for the bright blue sky overhead. nestled in between some fine pieces of victorian and edwardian architecture, the kite shaped gardens are in essence really simple – but that is part of the charm of them. tree lined, leading a central point, lots of grass, and the first burst of colour starting to make their way through.

i was a little surprised about the lack of activity in the gardens the afternoon i was there. arriving just after 1pm, i expected to find suits and sandwiches all over the place. there are loads of benches all around the gardens, a sign that the council acknowledge the role that parsonage gardens has to play as ‘an oasis of calm’ away from the bustle of the city, and the office. yet i was amongst about 10 people taking a break in the gardens. this seemed like a real shame to me; i guess as the days get warmer this number will shift up dramatically. however, as ever i worry about over saturation; the major plus point of parsonage gardens is that they have surprisingly clean air for the city centre. the road to the side isn’t a major thoroughfare, and the greenery leaves the area fresh. how fresh will it stay filled with hordes grabbing their lunchtime fag?

parsonage gardens was awarded green flag status in 2010, and it is well deserved. this is a beautifully maintained green space, and offers some great views around the gardens. being someone who enjoys taking photos with an expanse of blue sky in them (you’ve surely noticed this by now if you have read this blog more than once!) i love getting in amongst the tree branches, getting a shot of the seemingly dead wood offset against the spring skyline. you can also sneak the familiar sights of a manchester backdrop in their too – bold, big architecture.

it’s a shame that this place is one of so few spaces like this in the city. manchester was/is an industrial city, so green space was/is always going to be at a premium; why build a park when a building turning a profit can go there? can this change? i guess not, but at least places like parsonage gardens are protected, and appreciated by the council.

i’m not massively sure what this signifies, as it has been nigh on impossible to find any news relating to the build. have the developers finally given up on origin, or have they sold the site on? having been unveiled as a high end project some years ago, the developers west properties built an identity for the project that gave off the impression that if you weren’t patrick bateman then there was very little point in you even considering the prospect of being part of this.

here is the quite horrible website for the project, which is seemingly trying to sell people the idea that awful, vacant people with no love of life want to be ‘part’ of origin. origin-princessstreet.com

in may of 2009 the build was seemingly very much on track, with an early 2011 opening scheduled in. piles were driven, a pretty hefty slab put in place, and then… well, nothing. one can only presume that the money ran out, and that was it. like many of the big building projects around manchester that sprang up in the mid-00′s, work slowed, and then stopped. according to the developers “origin occupies one of the very last prime development sites in the city.” shame that it appears to have been an abject failure then.

rather than constructing the quite oddly designed buildings, the origin site is now just a very specific set of foundations, waiting for someone to either pick it up and complete the build, or rip it apart. rather than representing a fantastic space, slap bang between oxford road, piccadilly and canal street, this site is all but unusable. i do hope that someone finds a way to finish this project, but i believe that the ‘aspirational aims’ of the original plan will have to be ditched. opulent office, spa and lifestyle choices aren’t going to sell. personally, i’d like to see an effort to introduce a green space into this area, akin to sackville street gardens, though i acknowledge that this is totally unrealistic. we shall have to wait and see what happens next.