the heart of the city

Only three weeks into the residency and already behind with my blog! During week 2, I spent my time in the Local Studies Unit looking at archive documents, including the fascinating ‘Girls Clothes Book’ from the girls rescue home. It was an inventory of what the girls brought with them when they arrived and sometimes what they left with. I am quite suspicious when church writes about it’s own social projects. They are all made to sound wonderful, but what were they like for the people who used them? So it was reassuring that there seemed to be at least a material benefit to living in the girls rescue home. Lily Hargreaves arrived in 1914 ‘very poorly clad. Came as she stood. An old black hat. NO coat.’ She also had a frock, a pinafore, 2 petticoats, boots, stockings, a chemise and knickers. When she left in 1916 she took with her 38 items of clothing, her own bible, poetry book and satchel and a purse with 1 shilling and 4d.

I also looked at a ‘pictoral survey of the Manchester and Salford Mission’, from the early 1930’s, with addresses and photos of all the projects except the girls rescue home. It will allow me to identify the locations and see if the buildings still exist.

I began the third week feeling a bit blank. I’m finding it hard to get a momentum when I can only get to the studio two days a week, and not even consecutive days. I did some writing to get my negative thoughts out of the way and then started drawing from the photographs and doing some monoprints. It is very reassuring to get things up on the walls in the studio. It looks like a working space now.

The next day was entirely taken up with moving my bedsheets into the studio, ready to be installed in the cafe’s street-level shop window. Getting the sheets out of the storage unit was not so hard, but getting them into the studio was another thing entirely. Parking in a loading bay, we had to move 1500 sheets and 750 pillowcases, load by load, out of the van and into a disabled lift to get up the entrance stairs, then into another lift to the basement and through double doors across a foyer, manuevering round the cafe tables and customers, through two further doors, both of which involved a 90 degree turn. I borrowed a linen cage from a friendly laundrette, and managed to draft in my boyfriend, the cafe manager and the van driver to help but even so, it was 4 hours of backbreaking work.

It is a big relief to have done the move and to have them here, even though it has halved the size of my studio! I can’t wait to get them out again and install them! Plans for the exhibition are progressing well, and everyone is working hard. We open on 12th November.

My first week was great – I really got into my research and have already found a couple of avenues that might be fruitful.

I spent much of the time in the Local Studies Unit in Manchester’s Central Library. I cannot praise this resource highly enough. I have done a lot of research there over the last 4 years, and the staff are always helpful and knowledgable.

I’ve discovered that the original Methodist building was from 1781, but after splits in the church, the congregation had declined to such a level, that the church was demolished, and the current building opened on the old site in 1886. It was at the heart of a new kind of ministry, which took as it’s motto ‘need before creed’ and was a hub for a number of social projects which over the years included men’s and women’s night shelters, a labour project, a maternity hospital for unmarried mothers and a girls rescue home. Some operated from the Oldham St building and others had their own premises.

Some of these projects sound questionable to modern ears, but in the days before the welfare state, the only thing between poverty and starvation was the workhouse. Given what I know about the workhouse, I think that any alternatives would have been welcomed. I’m just amazed at the amount of work that was being done by one small church. How did they fund it all?

Next week I am going to look at archival material from some of the projects and see if I can get a flavour of them. I want to locate the original sites and do some drawing and photographs, see if anything grows out of that.

The main frustration is that 2 days feels so short, after being used to working every day at college. But on the other hand, it does give me time to think and reflect.

Other things this week: I got my application in for the CUBE open exhibition, finally! And good news, my paid job is being turned from casual work into a half time contract on a much better rate. That’s such a relief as I was wondering how I would survive on the hours I was doing since starting the residency. I’ve also started working on my mask for the publicity shots for the exhibition I’m curating in Nexus in the middle of my residency. It’s a wrinkly old lady face but I’m struggling with the eyes…