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The Working Class Movement Library, Salford

The Working Class Movement Library, Salford

I’ve been spending a lot of this week at the Working Class Movement Library on Salford Crescent. There are buses and trains, but I generally get the 192 to Piccadilly and walk it the rest of the way. This takes you through the bustling sensory overload of Piccadilly and Market Street, out the other side and over the bridge into Salford, past the rise of development and regeneration on Chapel Street and Salford Crescent. While the sight of yet another block of yuppie flats being built within screaming distance of Manchester city centre does depress me, the idea of them becoming the ‘Vimto flats’ does amuse me and take the edge off the depression somewhat.

Anyway, to the WCML. I can’t think of another library or museum where you would encounter the Manchester post punk fanzine City Fun, trade union history and Oliver Postgate. I am re-reading Oliver Postgate’s memoir at the moment, so was particularly pleased to encounter the Postgate exhibtion in the entrance hall in its display case. Like Postgate and Firmin’s films, it is small but perfectly formed. Bagpuss sits in the middle and, amongst other things, it is revealed that the folk singer Sandra Kerr provided the voice of Madeleine the rag doll and that Professor Yaffle was based on Bertrand Russell.

I originally started trawling through the collection of City Fun about two or three years ago when I’d first decided to develop the punk women series I wrote for The F-Word into a book, and I’ve been meaning to finish the trawl ever since. Like a lot of fanzines that went on for a long time, City Fun clearly started to believe their own hype after a bit, and to develop their own personal shorthand/language. But I think that they were very quick to spot when they were disappearing up their own arses, and to take steps to correct that. I think that showed a good dose of self awareness and maturity on their part.

City Fun, which (amongst others) featured writing, artwork and input from Martin X, Andy Zero, Liz Naylor, Cath Carroll, Bob Dickinson, Linder Sterling and a certain Stephan Patrick Morrissey, has, over time, proved itself to be a really good social document of the 1979-1982 period, particularly from a punk/post punk and mancunian history point of view. It’s also been digitised now, a sure sign of its historical and cultural importance.

Last night was film festival night at the WCML, so I stayed until 7pm in order to watch the Lindsey Anderson/Shelagh Delaney project The White Bus from 1967. It’s described as being “A prelude” to If, and revolves around a series of small adventurous journeys undertaken by an anonymous young woman around Manchester and Salford. At one point she is on a civic bus tour on the aforementioned white bus, which is dominated by the excessively forthright and jolly Mayor, played with gusto by Arthur Lowe. I liked the bits in Central Library: “You have some filthy books in here!” and the sly double meaning inferred by the juxtaposition of the new towerblocks in Salford, and the march of progress they represented, with the rather more picturesque houses of the famous and wealthy in the suburbs. It’s an odd film, but an interesting and enjoyable one.

Anderson, while probably most famous for If, also directed the video to Carmel’s ‘More, more, more’ in 1984. It was also filmed around Manchester.

The film festival continues tonight with Luke Fowler’s The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott. Which mixes archive footage and newly shot material

“in an evocative video essay that reflects on the life and times of critic, historian and activist EP Thompson. It captures a moment of optimism, in which Thompson’s ideas for progressive education came together with political resistance and activism.”

There’s also a benefit in aid of the WCML, which has been hard hit by cuts to Salford Council, on 9th June at Islington Mill, at 3pm.

Photo of the Working Class Movement Library by pandrcutts. Used thanks to a flickr creative commons licence

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Yesterday David and I made a pilgrimage to Rochdale in order to watch our friend Natalie Bradbury contribute a guest lecture to a series of talks at the Rochdale Pioneers Museum.

I had suggested we get the bus, but Transport For Greater Manchester’s journey planner was sulking when I tried to look the buses up, and Trainline revealed fares for under £10 so we got the train from Victoria instead.

Rochdale came as a bit of a shock to us upon our arrival. The powers that be are in the process of installing tramlines for the Metrolink, so a lot of the roads from the train station (and neighbouring metrolink station) through the town centre are barricaded up while the lines are layed, making an already slightly daunting prospect of finding our way over to the museum somewhat more difficult. It was also colder than it had  been in Manchester, and it’s not often we get to say that…

After a somewhat bleak and vaguely surreal trek through the town centre and out the other side to Toad Lane, where the museum is, we grabbed a much needed cup of tea before sitting down to hear Natalie’s talk.

Titled ‘Woman’s Outlook: 1919 – 1967: A surprisingly modern magazine?’, Natalie’s talk was unusual in structure in that she doesn’t get on with Powerpoint and, what with being a trained journalist, she instead made a magazine, provided paper copies of it to the audience, and used a digital version of the magazine instead of Powerpoint to structure her talk.

Woman’s Outlook was a magazine for co-operative women, published by the Co-Operative Press. Natalie describes it as having “mixed the political and the domestic”

As Natalie says in her summary, the magazine took “an often daring political stance on hot topics of the day” and appeared “ahead of its time on issues such as abortion, equal pay and divorce law” but “many of the subjects covered by Outlook would not appear out of place in a women’s magazine today.”

As Natalie explained in her talk, she grew up reading the music press, then newspapers, so she never read the girls and womens press while she was growing up. The only women’s magazine she reads now is Stylist “because it’s free” and it was interesting, and very revealing, so see a comparison of stories in Woman’s Outlook and Stylist: There are more similarities in subject matter than you might think.

Natalie took the audience on a journey from the magazine’s beginnings in the ‘Women’s Corner’ in the Co-operative News in the late nineteenth century to the founding of the Co-operative Women’s Guild, to the founding of Woman’s Outlook at the end of the First World War.

Natalie talked of some of those involved with the paper, including notable editors, columnists and contributers, and discussed the prejudice they faced. Editor Mary Stott had wanted to cover ‘hard news’ in her journalistic career, but instead found herself consigned to ‘women’s issues’, which were taken less seriously. Her 1973 memoir Forgetting’s No Excuse was a touchstone for Natalie in her research, as were interviews she conducted with some of the surviving members of the Co-operative Women’s Guild, Pat Williams and Margaret Tillotson.

Natalie is an enthusiastic speaker, and her interest in the subject and her research really came across as she spoke. It made me want to find out more about the Co-operative Women’s Guild and Woman’s Outlook.

After the talk, David and I headed back to the train station as it was getting a bit late and we needed to find some food.

As we wearily tried to remember our way back through the dark, empty barricaded streets we spotted a sign that stated encouragingly ‘Rochdale: Open as usual’ but even that didn’t console us much in the misery of the cold. David remarked that he hadn’t felt this cold since he visited his ex boyfriend in Berlin a few winters back, whereas I fervently wished I’d put more layers on. We both felt flasks of soup and sandwiches would be a good idea next time. Either that, or we will have to wait until the mythical summer arrives before venturing this way again.

It wasn’t much better once we got back to Manchester, as the storm was drawing in, but it still felt a couple of degrees warmer at least. On our way back to Piccadilly to catch our buses home we walked past the old Co-Operative building, providing a neat ending to the evenings adventure.

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At the end of January I went to see a colleague of mine at the John Rylands Library on Deansgate. I’d been meaning to for a while, but it’s too far away from where I work to be doable in a lunch hour so I waited until I had a week off instead.

I got the bus into Piccadilly and felt rather depressed as the bus turned off down Whitworth Street and went past Legends, now boarded up and poised for either demolition or partial restructure. Then I walked through Piccadilly Gardens to Mosley Street (honoured by John Cooper Clarke in one of his more lugubrious works) towards Saint Peter’s Square. I feel quite bleak about the redevelopment going on there too – the Library, Library Theatre, Peace Gardens, Metrolink…

Library Walk by cantwont used via a flickr creative commons licence.

Library Walk by cantwont used via a flickr creative commons licence.

When it’s redone the council are glassing over Library Walk, one of the most architecturally beautiful walkways in Manchester. Not only do the architect’s and the council appear to be deliberately blighting a really nice bit of Victorian architecture, but the council also intend to put a new Peterloo memorial plaque on the gate. It will be the 200 year anniversary of Peterloo in August 2019, and to mark this event with a plaque honouring the death of 17 people and the severe injury of 700 more for demanding the right to vote, on a gate obstructing a public right of way adds insult to injury. Not only have Manchester City Council for years had an extremely euphemistic blue plaque marking the massacre, they’re also now revealing a massive irony deficit.

Despite its reputation and Victorian gothic splendour, the only time I’ve previously visited the Rylands was for a staff meeting about three years ago. Though, as I discovered when I was making my way there, I’ve a pretty good idea of how to find it because it’s been on at least one of the protest march routes I went on in 2011.

The Rylands Library has the misfortune to be situated next to Emporio Armani, which is itself next to RBS. Old meets new… They have  a combination of old and new within the Rylands itself, but they’ve preserved as much of it as possible so there’s lots of old glass and a lot of the old gothic building. I really enjoyed my visit, and I take my hat off to Enriqueta Rylands for founding such a long lasting legacy both to her husband, John, and for the people of Manchester.

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With thanks to Manchester Histories Festival:

“The historic Whitworth Street building that is home to The Twisted Wheel night club, often dubbed ‘the Birthplace of Northern Soul’, is earmarked for demolition in the New Year. On 9 December, a mods farewell ride past provided the opportunity to pay tribute to the legendary venue, and to say a fitting goodbye.”

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The Shrieking Violet

The Shrieking Violet is a perfect example of everything that is good about Manchester. So it was with a great deal of sadness that I heard that editor Natalie Bradbury might not be continuing her zine for much longer.

Natalie recently contributed an article on the history of the little known white poppy, the pacifist alternative to the more well known red poppy, to the Working Class Movement Library’s blog. You can read her article  here.

In the light of these recent developments, I decided that an invitation to interview Natalie was long overdue.

When did you start the Shrieking Violet and why?

 The Shrieking Violet started in summer 2009 – the first issue came out on August 1 of that year. At the time I had been unemployed for several months after finishing an NCTJ course in newspaper journalism, and I was struggling to even get work experience at local newspapers as there were widespread redundancies at that time – it was a very bad time to try and get into newspaper journalism! I was becoming increasingly frustrated and disillusioned, but decided to put some of the skills I’d learnt during my course, such as page layout, to good use, and to turn being unemployed to my advantage and use that time to do something productive.

 I was also doing a lot of writing on my blog, also called the Shrieking Violet, at the time. When I started it I never thought that anyone might read it, but as more people started reading it I became frustrated by the limitations of the blog format and wanted to make a finished product that came off the screen and involved more people, and could be picked up physically by different people who might not necessarily know about my blog.

Why did you choose to do both an online version and a paper version? How was the paper copy distributed?

I’ve always been too lazy to lay out my zine by hand and cut and paste text and pictures in the traditional way. From the start I designed Shrieking Violet digitally using a design package, then created a PDF which I printed and took to a 2p photocopier shop to reproduce. As I had already made a PDF, it seemed logical to put it online for people to download and print themselves at home if they wished (or just read it on the screen if they preferred). A friend later told me about the PDF hosting site Issuu, which enablea readers to flick though the pages of a PDF online as they would a magazine. 

I made between 50 and 70 free paper copies of each issue, which is a tiny number really – especially when you consider that online views on Issuu stand at around 2,000 for each edition! Nevertheless, I think it’s important that there is a choice of either reading online or on paper. I advertise each issue on my blog, with links to both the download version and a list of places where a paper copy can be picked up; typically cafes, bars and other creative and social spaces around Manchester city centre. On my blog, I also invite people to email me if they want me to send them a copy in the post.

Are fanzines about places more common these days do you think? (as opposed to fanzines about music, or football) 

There are a lot of magazines and fanzines which seem concerned with urbanism, architecture and cities these days, and topics related to these such as regeneration and the creative economy, whether they are based in Sheffield or Liverpool, Manchester or London. Something I have noticed is that there are a lot of zines made by collectives – for example, people on the same course at university, or a group of graduates who have studied together and have that geographical location in common. Naturally, they look to what’s around them for inspiration. There are still a lot of music zines/self-published music magazines around. Football zines I know less about – although I have read FC United of Manchester’s fanzine, which is quite political and is not actually that football (or even Manchester)-orientated!
 

A collage of Shrieking Violet’s

What inspired the Zinefests at Victoria Baths?

The first zine fair I ever want to was at Urbis in Manchester in August 2008. As well as having stalls, I remember that Bob Dickinson did a talk about making a radio documentary about zines, presented by Jarvis Cocker, and there was a ‘psychogeography’ walk around the area led by the Loiterers Resistance Movement.

I volunteered at Victoria Baths for a while on the oral history stall. One day I was sitting in the cafe folding piles of copies of the Shrieking Violet and Alison Kershaw, the arts co-ordinator at Victoria Baths, suggested running a zine fair in the space; so the Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention was born. It’s a brilliant space to work in. I was keen that the event should be far more than just a market for buying and selling, and offer activities that anyone could get involved in. I loved being able to draw on the history of the building and the wealth of resources in the Victoria Baths archive, which encompasses pictures and objects relating to the building’s history as well as thousands of donated memories, to encourage people to make their own swimming-inspired zines on the day. On the day of the Fanzine Convention, Future Everything had a Maker faire in the main sports hall below, so Fanzine Convention stallholders spread out around the balcony of that space, looking over the technological contraptions at the fair below. Smaller rooms upstairs, comprising the flat where Victoria Baths’ superintendent used to live, just off the balcony space, were perfect for fanzine talks, film screenings and workshops.
 
Could you write a little about the Manchester Modernist Society and their heroines project?
 
The Manchester’s Modernist Heroines project was a collaboration between the Shrieking Violet, Manchester Modernist Society and the Loiterers Resistance Movement which took place in March 2011. It celebrated ten overlooked women in fields ranging from architecture to aviation via art, psychology, archaeology, family planning and journalism. We placed a call out for modern-day women to produce responses to each of the ten women, which formed the basis of a publication, compiled by myself, and walks around Manchester led by the Loiterers Resistance Movement. The responses were received in the form of articles, poetry, images and concepts for performances.

Manchester has a long history of feminist activism, but many of its key figures are now forgotten, who are your favourites and why?

It’s not specifically a Manchester organisation, as there were and continue to be branches all over the country, but I am really interested in the Co-operative Women’s Guild, a campaigning organisation which was founded in 1883 to provide education to its members, primarily working class women, and give them more of a voice both in co-operative societies and within society. Manchester has a long association with the co-operative movement, and I have been researching a co-operative women’s journal called Woman’s Outlook which was published by the Manchester-based Co-operative Press between 1919 and 1967. Outlook was a curious mixture of the domestic and the political, recognising the importance of both to women’s lives; it urged its readers to get involved in political campaigns, for example for women’s representation in parliament, equal pay and peace and disarmament, but also provided practical advice such as recipes, dress-making patterns and child-rearing tips. I will be doing a talk at the Rochdale Pioneers Museum on Thursday 21 March 2013 entitled ‘Woman’s Outlook: a surprisingly modern magazine?’.

As a journalist, one of my favourite women in Manchester’s history is Mary Stott (one of our Modernist Heroines). She edited several co-operative publications over the years, including Woman’s Outlook, before she became editor of the Guardian’s woman page, for which she is best known. As editor of both Woman’s Outlook and the Guardian woman’s page, Stott really involved women in the publications, encouraging them to write in and share their stories. Whilst Stott was initially reluctant to solely focus on women’s issues, preferring to be taken seriously as a journalist who could tackle hard news just as well as men, she succeeded in creating a ‘community of readers’ and ensuring content reflected their lives and what was important to them. Stott’s autobiography, Forgetting’s No Excuse, is well worth a read.

Why do you think Manchester has such a historical culture of feminist activism?

Manchester is often called the ‘first modern city’, reflecting its rapid industralisation and expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries. This new way of living and working created rampant inequalities, with a huge gulf between the richest in society – those with power – and the rest, the working classes, who laboured in terrible conditions to make the few rich. A lot of the historic feminist activist figures I have come across were concerned with addressing some of these inequalities on a practical level by improving people’s living conditions, and empowering them by offering access to education. Women were already fired by with the injustice of what they saw around them, and also realised the powerlessness of their own situation in society – being unable to vote, to own property, to work, etc, and wanted to do something about it, to be able to make a difference. If you want to know more, I highly recommend making contact with Manchester historian Michael Herbert, and going on one of his Women’s History walks around Manchester, which covers women active in the suffrage, socialist, trade union and co-operative movements. He has also just written a book called Up Then, Brave Women.

What do you think the legacy of that activism is?

Feminism is, of course, still highly relevant today, and there are still battles to be fought not just over women’s status and their value in society but how women are perceived socially and culturally. I’m inspired by the ongoing work of a new generation of feminists in Manchester, from groups like the Riveters at Manchester University who work to raise awareness of issues affecting women within the university, the city and in society in creative, inclusive and engaging ways, to other collectives such as Manchester Women’s Design Group, who do interesting work around women and the city, for example by exploring women’s emotional relationships with different public spaces in Manchester.

How would you describe the relationship between Manchester and Salford?

Manchester and Salford are two neighbouring cities, separated by the River Irwell. To me they are quite different in that, whilst Manchester is quite compact as a city and has a clearly defined centre with all the facilities and attractions you’d expect, I think of Salford as being more as a collection of smaller towns and villages (each with their own attractions – see the awe-inspiring Manchester Ship Canal and Barton Aqueduct, canal-side folly Monton lighthouse, Eccles Wurlitzer museum, the bright orange Bridgewater Canal at Worsley, Clifton Country Park, etc!) than a city in itself, as it has no real focal point. There are several really great places just over the Salford border, within easy walking distance of Manchester city centre – alternative arts and music complex Islington Mill, Salford Art Gallery/Peel Park, the amazing social/people’s history resources in the Working Class Movement Library, Salford University and the Medieval magnificence of Ordsall Hall – but as a whole I think it’s a bit underexplored by Mancunians. Salford Quays, now home to BBC North as well as the Lowry theatre and arts centre and Imperial War Museum North, is a bit further out, but within reach of Manchester by tram and bus. The Quays is also doing its bit to attract people into Salford, but I very rarely go there as to me it feels like a bit of an island with a strange atmosphere, detached from the rest of the city – it is, let’s face it, perfectly possible to get the tram in and out of Salford Quays without registering that it is surrounded by some of Britain’s most deprived communities.
 
What are you planning to do next?

I’m going back to university in the New Year, so I’ll be a student again, which is both exciting and scary so I’ll have to see what that new challenges and experiences that throws up … !

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I didn’t get back from Manchester until midnight last night/this morning, and seeing as how I’d gone out at 9:30, that’s a long day.

This weekend has been the tail end of Manchester Histories Festival, a largely free and very diverse event. I found out about it quite late, so decided to cram as much into Saturday as possible.

Manchester Histories Festival events for Saturday 3rd March 2012

The weather looked distinctly unpromising when I headed out at 9:30, a fine mancunian drizzle and grey skies suggested a damp day best spent indoors.

On my way down Mosley Street I was very aggressively (though I soon decided ‘desperately’ would be the better word) asked for money by a homeless guy I’ve given money to before. Everytime I’ve given him money it’s been the same story: He’s been kicked out of the house by his stepfather. I don’t know if he keeps going back or what, and it’s not up to me to make value judgements about vulnerable people, so I won’t.

This time he was very agitated, very desperate, and practically in tears because he’d been asking people for money for 12 hours and all he’d got was 20p. He wanted notes, but I wouldn’t give him any as it felt too much like being mugged. Also, whenever I have given him money in the past, it clearly hasn’t helped him any, and it became apparent after the first couple of occasions that I wasn’t doing him any favours in the long term. Of course, the agencies who might be able to help him – hostels, The Big Issue, Shelter, other housing charities, the council and social services – are all under the cosh of the recession.

There definitely seems to be more homeless people on the streets of Manchester than there was even a year ago, and what with rent increases, diminishing wages, negative equity/mortgage defaults, unemployment, cuts to benefits, anti squatting legislation and a lack of affordable housing, it will only get worse in the next few years.

Desperation really is in the air. You can see the signs more and more since the riots last year: people picking up dog ends of other peoples cigarettes from the pavement because they can’t afford to buy their own, metal thefts, the Co-Op being ram raided last month. Last week I encountered two young northern Irish lads with back packs asking for hostel locations.

To get back onto the festival, the first three events were at the Friends Meeting House on Mount Street near the Town Hall.

The first talk was by Alison Ronan, a historian at MMU who talked about Margaret Ashton, a suffragist and pacifist who was the first woman to be made a councillor for Manchester City Council. The title of the talk was The hanging of a pacifist: the story of the lost portrait of Margaret Ashton, Manchester’s first woman councillor.

She opened by discussing the portrait in question, and went on to fill in a lot of detail about the largely unknown Ashton’s life and character, her politics, associations and friends and allies. The portrait of Ashton was painted in 1925, and the council refused to hang it in the Town Hall. The pacifist stance she took during World War I being part of the reason. The painting was eventually hung in 2006 following a campaign.

I liked this talk but I found the atmosphere a little exclusive in that it quickly became apparent that the speaker knew half the audience. It was still an interesting talk about a hidden aspect of Mancunian and women’s history though.

The talk after that was given by Robert Poole, a historian from the University of Cumbria, about the Peterloo Massacre. He has a project going on at the moment in which a group of volunteers have been transcribing previously unseen written eyewitness accounts of the 1819 massacre.

The talk was an opportunity to share those freshly transcribed accounts, and he concentrated initially on eyewitness accounts from the authorities, all of which had a series of interesting inconsistencies. For example, a flip flopping in describing the marchers and crowd as both ‘A mob’ (suggesting mindless and disorganised behaviour) and military like (suggesting lots of organisation).

The eyewitness accounts of those in the crowd, or independent witnesses, made for much more consistent reading. There were some interesting details that emerged that I hadn’t previously been aware of, for example that Special Constables had been amongst those injured by the yeomanry and the cavalry. It was a very interesting and engaging talk, which I enjoyed a lot.

Also mentioned were the new plaque, which is red, not blue, and which was unveiled by the council in late 2007, and the symbolic re-enactments, the veterans stories that emerged years after Peterloo, and the march home by the Middleton contingent from the massacre, with the shocked and wounded survivors swearing they’d go armed to any protest they attended from then on.

The event after Peterloo was Dave Haslem and his Brief introduction to Manchester’s alternative music magazines. David arrived at this point, and we sat enthralled as Haslem spun us tales of Mole Express and City Fun. I didn’t feel that he covered the ’90s that well, but I think that this was because he was taking an evolutionary approach musically and so concentrating on dance fanzines, of which there weren’t that many.

There was time to kill after this event so we went to Cafe Nero with a lecturer from MMU who David knows, blogger Greg Thorpe, and Dave Haslem. This felt a bit weird as I’m not used to such exulted company, so I mainly kept quiet.

Afterwards David and I got some cake (and the best veggie sausage rolls ever) from Earth Café and mooched about the city centre for a bit, making our way down Market Street and observing the huge crowd watching the gaggle of children breakdancing. The dancing puppets man was also present, with his puppets I mean, not watching the breakdancing children.

Haslem had talked earlier about a history based workshop he had done with a group of young fanzine makers in the city in the weeks previous, including the makers of Things Happen. Five fanzines were produced from this, and were sold at the

Five fanzines, fresh as morning dew

The panel at the final event, Fanzines, was made up of a guy from Mole Express, Bob Dickinson, Liz Naylor and Dan Russell, who is part of the Things Happen ollective.

The guy from Mole Express seemed either reluctant or hazy, but did slowly start to warm up a bit. Dickinson, Haslem and Naylor discussed City Fun in the main. Dan was pretty quiet.

I hadn’t met any of the Things Happen people before, though I had heard of them. After the panel discussion we talked to Dan and the other people involved with the fanzine workshop and Things Happen, also Natalie Bradbury who writes the excellent Shrieking Violets, and is organising another fanzine convention at Victoria Baths.

We headed over to Hotspur House afterwards, which is an abandoned and derelict printing mill behind Oxford Road train station. The Things Happen people have a studio space there where they create design work, including their fanzines. They are also engaged in the process of clearing up and fixing up the mill, and developing spaces for other artists to move into.

Stuff Happens

The relationship with the council appears to be edgy but productive so far. Hotspur House is a derelict Victorian mill surrounded by hideous steel and glass yuppie developments though, and that makes it very vulnerable. You suspect that it’s the recession that has saved it so far, not any preservation interest by the council or the developers.

The space the group have is good, and they’ve fixed it up as well as they can with the resources they’ve got. Manchester Mule have an office on the floor downstairs, and other designers work in the building as well. I hope it works out for them, they seem a nice lot. Very focused as well, and idealistic in the nicest sense.

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